{Addressing the United Nations on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu hit back at Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who used the same podium last week to accuse Israel of a “new war of genocide” during its recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza.}
It was Hamas – Abbas’ unity government partner – which had committed war crimes during the fighting by using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Netanyahu charged, even as Israel sought in unprecedented ways to minimize civilian casualties as it targeted terrorists and their rocket launchers.
“Genocide?” he asked. “In what moral universe does genocide include warning the enemy’s civilian population to get out of harm’s way? Or ensuring that they receive tons, tons of humanitarian aid each day, even as thousands of rockets are being fired at us? Or setting up a field hospital to aid their wounded?”
“Well, I suppose it’s the same moral universe where a man who wrote a dissertation of lies about the Holocaust, and who insists on a Palestine free of Jews – Judenrein – can stand at this podium and shamelessly accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” he added.
Netanyahu was alluding to Abbas’ 1982 doctoral thesis at a Soviet college, which disputed what he called “the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed” by the Nazis during World War II.
Later published under the title “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” the dissertation imagined a collaborative partnership between the Nazis and Zionist leaders, in which the Nazis killed several hundred thousand Jews to provoke sympathy for the creation of the State of Israel.
Abbas more than once has declared that no Israelis would be allowed to live in a future independent Palestinian state, saying that even in the context of a hypothetical international peacekeeping or monitoring force, no Jewish members would be permitted.
The term used by Netanyahu, Judenrein, was a Holocaust-era German term describing an area cleansed of all Jews.
In his speech on Friday, Abbas accused the Israeli military of targeting civilians and committing war crimes during the seven-week war last summer.
He said Israeli “tanks and jets brutally assassinated lives and devastated the homes, schools and dreams of thousands of Palestinian children, women and men and in reality destroying the remaining hopes for peace.”
Netanyahu said Hamas had embedded its missile batteries in residential areas, deliberately locating hundreds of rocket launchers “where Palestinian children live and play,” and had ordered Palestinians to ignore Israel’s warnings to leave areas it planned to bomb.
“Israel was doing everything to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. Hamas was doing everything to maximize Israeli civilian casualties – and Palestinian civilian casualties,” he said.
“I say to President Abbas, these are the war crimes committed by your Hamas partners in the national unity government which you head and you are responsible for. And these are the real war crimes you should have investigated, or spoken out against from this podium last week.”
After Abbas’ speech on Friday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki criticized some of his comments, saying the speech “included offensive characterizations that were deeply disappointing and which we reject.”
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Sunday dismissed Psaki’s criticism, calling it “irresponsible, indecent and rejected.”
On Monday Psaki defended her earlier remarks.
“President Abbas is a friend of Secretary [of State John Kerry]. The Palestinian people are friends of the United States,” she said. “But we felt the speech warranted a strong response, in terms of some of the statements that were made.”
CNS Newss
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