Abbas has stated that in final settlement talks he would not seek to remove Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, but that the new Palestinian state would not tolerate any permanent Jewish presence at the Western Wall, which is the holiest site for Jews. “We told the Israelis [at the Camp David summit] that we would not agree with their maintaining any presence at the Western Wall. In contrast, at the Wailing Wall [a small part of the Western Wall], you can conduct your [religious] ceremonies,” he said.
In addition to this threat to limit access by Jews to their holiest site was his outright rejection that there had ever been a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. “Anyone who wants to forget the past cannot come and claim that the [Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram,” Abbas said, referring to the Muslim shrine that was built more than 800 years after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans. “They demand that we forget what happened 50 years ago to the refugees – and I speak as a living, breathing refugee – while at the same time they claim that 2,000 years ago they had a temple. I challenge the claim that this is so.”
Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst who works on Middle East issues for the Congressional Research Service, believes that Abbas’s past involvement with terror and his Holocaust denial may be the least of the problems the Palestinian prime minister faces.
“I doubt that his political prospects are solid, because the most radical organizations in the Palestinian community don’t report to him and actively want him to fail,” he says.
An official with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee agrees: “What matters is not what he did 30 years ago, but what he does today. And he can?t do anything because of Arafat.”
Shoshana Bryen, of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, puts it bluntly: “The real Abu Mazen is the guy who financed the Munich massacre and is a Holocaust denier and in later years decided to try something else.”
