A Palestinian who signed the anti-Abbas letter explains its real purpose

While Wattan.net has articles by people who oppose the open letter by mostly western academics condemning Mahmoud Abbas as an antisemite and defend Abbas' antisemitism, to their credit they are the only ones who bothered to find someone with a different viewpoint.

Khalil Al-Shaqaqi is the director of the Palestinian Center for Political and Survey Research in Ramallah. He is one of the very few, if not the only, Palestinian who does not live in the West who signed. 

Not only that, he appears to be the only Palestinian interviewed in a Palestinian newspaper in Arabic defending that letter. 

He quickly demolishes Abbas' main argument that Jews were targeted for their social position and usury: "Most major historians reject this statement, and it was clear that Nazism was very racist, not because of an issue of social behavior, but rather because of the theory of the Aryan race, the view of other races and the necessity of its domination of the world, and the view of other societies and races, and therefore it was clear that any other reasons given is just empty talk."

But then he reveals the real purpose of the letter: 

"The Holocaust is a European issue and the Palestinian people are the ones paying the price for it. The president increases the problems of the Palestinian people, with baseless statements based on the words of some marginal historians. Therefore, we issued the statement because we believe that what the president spoke is harmful to the Palestinian cause." 

It is an attempt to make Palestinians seem less antisemitic than they are. Al-Shaqaqi makes this even more explicit:

"There is respect and support for us in the world, and if the world feels and sees that the Palestinian people support what the president said, this will mean to them that the Palestinian people are racist, and this means to them that there is racist settler colonialism, and also racist Palestinians, and therefore they will put us and Israelis are in the same dark trench. If we go into the same crucible of racism and anti-Semitism, we will become no different from the occupier."

See? The Palestinians have spent decades pretending to be the victim of Israeli racism, and when the world sees that they are far more bigoted than Israel is - almost unanimously supporting Abbas' hate, and almost unanimously having negative opinions of Jews - that hurts their cause. never mind that it is true, but the narrative gets damaged, and the narrative is their greatest weapon against Israel.

This was the purpose of the letter - to create a pretense that Palestinians don't agree with Abbas. Given that most people aren't aware of polls proving Palestinian Jew-hatrred is endemic, the signatories' transparent ploy is likely to work - even when many of them are on the record of making antisemitic statements themselves. 

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