Presidency today condemned an Israeli minister’s remarks denying the Palestinian people’s existence and historicity as amounting to falsification of history and exposes Israeli racism.
The Presidency stated that Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s remarks that ‘There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people’ are an attempt to falsify history and in fact unmask the true face of Israeli racism as Israel continues to deny the existence of the Palestinian people, who have remained on their land since time immemorial.
The Israeli attempts to concoct false narratives denying the Palestinian people’s existence, the Presidency added, are refuted by history itself that testifies to the fact that Palestinians are the owners of their land and they have maintained deep-rooted historical ties to it since the dawn of history.
It stressed that the Palestinian people’s indigenous narrative strongly debunks Israeli fundamentalist attempts to rob Palestine and the Palestinian people of their history and forge it to make room for Israeli fabrications.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh denounced Smotrich’s remarks as conclusive evidence of Zionist fundamentalism of the current coalition Israeli government.
He added that Smotrich’s remarks fall in line with the Zionist myth of ‘a land without people and a people without land’ and that the occupied Palestinian territories are ‘disputed territories’ in stark contrast to historical and archeological evidence proving that the Palestinian people have remained attached to their land since the dawn of human history.
He concluded by stressing that Israel is a state that was founded by colonists and that it has expanded over time as a settler-colonial entity and usurped the land of Palestine.
On Sunday, Smotrich declared that “There’s no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people” at a memorial service for a late Likud activist in Paris.
The far-right lawmaker said that the Palestinian people were “an invention” cooked up in the 20th century to fight Zionism and that it was people like him and his grandparents who were the “real Palestinians”.
Speaking at a podium adorned with a map based on the crest of the Zionist Irgun militia, which shows Israel straddling the West Bank and Jordan, Smotrich, who holds significant powers over the occupied West Bank, said that the French and US governments needed to hear “this truth” about the Palestinians.
‘Do you know who are the Palestinians?’ the head of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party said. “I’m Palestinian.”
The map shown on the podium Smotrich was speaking at also showed parts of Syria and Lebanon, regions included in the concept of Eretz Yisrael – Greater Israel – a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all of these lands for a Zionist state.
Source: Palestine News & Information Agency