Mahmoud Abbas taught me something about Oliver Cromwell, Proto-Zionist

Mahmoud Abbas made a very strange, bizarre, ahistoric speech to the Palestinian Central Council meeting on Sunday.

The New York Times summarizes part of his speech:

Testing his audience’s attention, Mr. Abbas also gave a lengthy history lecture reaching back to the 17th century, saying that Oliver Cromwell had first proposed shipping European Jews to the Holy Land, before tracing the beginning of Zionism to what he called the 19th-century journalist and activist Theodor Herzl’s efforts to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine.”
“This is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” Mr. Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land — call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

 I plan to fisk some of his more outrageous claims, but the Cromwell thing seems not too far off!

The source seems to be from The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891-1948 by Paul C. Merkley (1998), which says:

So while Cromwell seems to have been open to the idea of God bringing the Jews home (and everyone of course knew where the Jewish home was,) he didn't seem to be advocating helping the Jews move there.

But, the book goes on the say, John Locke hinted that Jews would go back to their homeland and Isaac Newton said that it could be foreign nations like England that would help them along!

Thanks, Abbas!

Tomorrow we'll look at your less-accurate claims.

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