Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has called on Christians to join the fight against Israel in a meeting in Ramallah with Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem. The comment was aired on official Palestinian TV News and shared by the NGO Palestinian Media Watch.
“We know that the prime Zionist goal is emptying this land of its Christians and Muslims,” Abbas said on January 17. “They [the Jews] don’t want anyone here other than themselves. The Christians before the Muslims, because the Christians were here on this land before the Muslims… The Christian is the brother of the Muslim. They celebrate together, suffer together, live together, work together and fight together against their enemy, because we have been the owners of this land since this land’s existence.
“We will remain in this land forever, while the attackers [the Jews] have no place in Jerusalem and no place here,” Abbas concluded.
The statements mirrored comments made early by the Palestinian Authority, which Palestinian Media Watch shared in a separate report on Fatah’s Waed magazine.
In Waed issue 37, it explains that Palestinian children are descendants of a “Palestinian-Arab-Canaanite” people who existed as much as 10,000 years ago, while in another issue (36) it states that Jews are “foreigners who did not know Palestine and did not live in it – neither them nor their fathers and forefathers.”