Mahmoud Abbas said some other outrageous things in his speech that have been ignored by the media.
Here's one of them:
By the way, it is written in the Divine Books and in the Torah that we [Palestinians] have been here in the land ever since even before our Master Ibrahim (i.e. Abraham), our presence has not been interrupted. We are not the [only] ones saying this, the Torah and history are saying this. We were not taken to some [other] country and we were not absent [from this land]; we stayed here all the time, and we are still here and we will remain here, and we will never leave our land. We will stay steadfast and patient until we will obtain for our people its independence.Abbas and other Palestinian leaders have previously made the claim that they were descendants of Canaanites.
Or Jebusites.
Or Philistines.
Never mind that they all contradict one another. All of them are lies anyway.
Palestinians are Arabs - they say so explicitly in all their official documents from the 1964 PLO Covenant to the 2003 "Constitution" - and the Arabs some from, surprise, the Arabian peninsula. The Arab tribes overran the Levant around the time of the spread of Islam.
Beyond that, as far as I can tell, every single prominent Palestinian family traces their origins to outside the land.
Even more outrageous, Abbas is saying that the Jews, by being forcibly exiled from the land for some brief periods, have no historic claim on their historic homeland. (He won't say the word "Jews" explicitly, because by admitting that Jews are a people, he would open up a can of worms.)
By pretending to use the Torah as a basis for Palestinian claims, Abbas is trying to use the very document that proves Jewish historic rights to the land against Jews.
It is not only disrespectful - it is fundamentally antisemitic.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)