Mahmoud Abbas Speaks with Forked Tongue

Mahmoud Abbas presents himself in the West as a “moderate,” someone who abhors terrorism, in sharp contrast to his political rival Hamas, and wants “peace” with Israel, and desires only for a small state of Palestine to be built side-by-side with Israel, with Jews and Arabs, as the well-worn and impossible phrase has it, “both living in peace and security” in their respective states. More on the forked-tongued Mahmoud Abbas can be found here: “Is Mahmoud Abbas’s bilingual diplomacy a key to peace, or the erasure of Israel? – opinion,” by David Ben-Basat, Jerusalem Post, October 25, 2025:

Some leaders speak two languages, not out of diplomatic courtesy, but for entirely different reasons. Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is a prime example. In English, from the podium of the UN, he presents himself as a moderate leader who believes in peace and justice. In Arabic, to his own people, he preaches the “return” to Haifa, Lod, and Tel Aviv – not a two-state solution, but the erasure of one.

And on his lapel, in every major speech, sits a small yet telling symbol: a key. It is, as he says, “the key to Safed,” his birthplace. For him, and for the millions of Palestinians educated in his image, that key is not a nostalgic memento but a political declaration: the homes in Israel are theirs, and they will return to them. This is not an ideology of peace, but of reversal.

Abbas is not only the head of the Palestinian Authority; he is also the author of a notorious doctoral dissertation written in Moscow in the 1980s, which sought to downplay the number of Holocaust victims and suggested ties between Zionists and Nazis. Even if he has since tried to soften his words, he has never truly retracted them….

In his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University in 1983, later published as a book, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement, Abbas questioned the historical figure of six million Jewish Holocaust victims, and suggested the actual number was ”at most 800,000.” That is Holocaust minimizing, a subset of Holocaust denial.

In 2018, in an address to the PLO, Abbas repeated antisemitic tropes, claiming that the persecution of Jews in Europe was caused by their “social function” in banking and money-lending, not their religion. He repeated this claim in several speeches he made in September 2023, in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler persecuted Jews not because of antisemitism, but due to their “social role.” In other words, their persecution and murder, not just by Hitler but also by Europeans over many centuries, were to be understood, in Abbas’ view, as an understandable response to Jewish financial power.

Mahmoud Abbas has said that he will never end the “Pay-For-Slay” program, and will spend even “my last penny” on the program that both rewards past, and incentivizes future, terrorism.

There is a way to make him call off the program. If the Americans and Europeans were to agree to cut off all financial aid to the PA, or even to freeze the foreign assets of Abbas and his two partners in crime, his sons Tarek and Yasser, unless “Pay-For-Slay” ends, that would undoubtedly do the trick. And the pressure should not stop there. Abbas must agree to cleanse the PA’s schoolbooks of the antisemitic passages that still fill their pages.

The gap between Abbas’s English and Arabic is the heart of the problem. In English, he speaks of borders and “coexistence.” In Arabic, he promises the return to Jaffa and Safed. Thus was born one of the most sophisticated deceptions of our time: bilingual diplomacy.

It is what Abbas says, in Arabic, to his Palestinian audience, that matters. He tells them the truth: he wants the Palestinians to be able to exercise their Right of Return, which is a prescription for swamping the Jewish state and causing it to eventually become, through demographic conquest, a 23rd Arab state.

The Trump administration should demand of Mahmoud Abbas that he expressly distance himself from the “Right-of-Return,” and also take off that Safed pin, for if he does not, he will play no part in the governance of Gaza. And the same goes for his successor, who won’t be waiting in the wings much longer, for Abbas is now 89 years old.