Palestine - cutting Abbas down to size

PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President – Mahmoud Abbas – continues to promote the deceptive and misleading claim that the areas lost by Jordan and Egypt to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War constituted 22% - not 5% - of historic Palestine.

His propagation of this dishonest fact was shamelessly repeated in the presence of world leaders at the United Nations last week:

The two-State solution, i.e. the State of Palestine coexisting alongside the State of Israel, represents the spirit and essence of the historic compromise embodied in the Oslo Declaration of Principles, the agreement signed 19 years ago between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Government of Israel under the auspices of the United States of America on the White House Lawn, a compromise by which the Palestinian people accepted to establish their State on only 22% of the territory of historic Palestine for the sake of making peace.

In fact – Israel comprises only 17% of former Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza 5%, and Jordan makes up the remaining 78%.

Abbas's spurious claim has been repeated on hundreds of Arab oriented web sites asserting that the Jews established the State of Israel on 78% of Palestine in the War of Independence in 1948 and subsequently conquered the remaining 22% - the West Bank and Gaza - in the Six Day War of 1967.

This propaganda has created the perception that Israel now occupies 100% of Palestine, the Arab residents of former Palestine have been deprived of a State of their own in Palestine, and that the only just solution to resolve Arab grievances is the creation of an Arab state in at least that 22% of Palestine captured by Israel from Jordan and Egypt in 1967.

Quarantining Jordan and Egypt from shouldering any responsibility in negotiating the resolution of a lasting two-state solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict has been the single most important factor leading to the failure of negotiations over the last 19 years designed to achieve the objectives of Oslo.

Instead the PLO has been seeking to create a "three state" solution in historic Palestine comprising two Arab states – Jordan and Palestine – and a third non- recognized Jewish state – Israel – 20% of whose population are currently of Palestinian Arab descent.

In addition the PLO is demanding that millions of other Arabs of similar descent be given the right to emigrate from their present countries of abode – not to the newly to be created state of Palestine or the existing state of Jordan - but to Israel.

Abbas has been acting in blatant contravention of the 1968 PLO Charter and 1971 Resolution of the Palestinian National Congress.

Article 2 of the PLO Charter states:

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.