The Palestinian leader has always loved Moscow. In 1975, in the depths of the Brezhnev era, Mahmoud Abbas and other PLO chiefs expressed warm thanks for the notorious Soviet-sponsored UN Resolution 3379, which declared that Zionism was racism.
In 1982, the Russian capital was where he took his PhD from the Patrice Lumumba university. His thesis, entitled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, was quite literally a piece of Holocaust denial, arguing that the Zionists were the Nazis’ “basic partner in crime”, and that while Jews were indeed murdered, the total was one million, not six.
But even by the depraved standards of the Palestinian Authority regime over which Mr Abbas presides, his toadying visit to Vladimir Putin this week was egregious. Days after the Russian president launched multiple missile attacks on civilian targets across Ukraine in a vain attempt to rally his domestic audience in the wake of serious military setbacks, and while he continued to threaten the world with the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945, there was Abbas, embracing the corrupt dictator.
“We know perfectly well that Russia stands for justice, for international law,” he opined. Russia, he added, should take precedence over America when it came to trying to broker a peace deal with Israel.
A few weeks ago, the JC published my three-part investigation into the PA. I revealed how thugs from a British-trained and funded Palestinian security forces didn’t just murder Nizar Banat, the West Bank’s leading campaigner for accountability, democracy and an end to the corruption the Abbas regime has engendered, but tortured him to death, inflicting 42 separate injuries, breaking his ribs where they were attached to his sternum and causing him to drown in his own blood.
I also showed how endemic corruption in the Palestinian health sector had led to the building of an empty “ghost” hospital, the failure to build a long-promised cancer centre, and forced Palestinians seeking treatment for life-threatening illnesses in Israeli hospitals to bribe corrupt officials to stand any chance of being referred to the Israel transfer list.
It is no secret that some those closest to Mr Abbas have, over the years, grown fabulously rich – while he and his cohorts continue to insist that many Palestinians grapple with dire poverty, thanks, of course, to Israel.
I argued that the time has come for Britain and the international community to re-think its relationship with the PA from the ground up; to stop pouring in billions of pounds to support brutality, torture and endemic human rights abuse, and to stop deluding ourselves that a regime led in this fashion can ever constitute an effective “partner for peace”.
If the disclosure of publicly-funded death squads, institutionalised human rights abuse and grotesque inequality fuelled by corruption weren’t enough to clinch the argument, maybe Mr Abbas’s visit with Putin will.
Not only did he praise Putin, he stated his unequivocal preference for Russia over America – a country that may have its flaws, but which remains a democracy, with a free press and free elections, things that Mr Abbas, with his clampdowns on dissident journalists and refusal to hold long-promised elections years past his own, legal sell-by date, evidently detests.
Mr Abbas, 87, is not known to be a satirist. Perhaps he really believes that Putin stands for the maintenance of justice and international law, and accepts Putin’s claim that the Ukrainian government led by the Jewish President Zelensky is, in fact, “Nazi”.
But surely, now is the time for the world to wake up. In July, US President Joe Biden met Abbas in Bethlehem. “It’s good to see you again, my friend. We’ve known each other for a long time,” he said in his opening remarks.
“I hope our visit is the start of a new and reinvigorated dialogue between the Palestinian Authority and the United States… let’s work together to show the people of the region, especially young people — young people — that the future can be better than it is today.”
Enough already. Abbas has just cosied up to the world’s number one pariah, the man directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths this year, who still speaks of embroiling Europe in a still more fearsome nuclear conflict. Mahmoud Abbas is not a man anyone can work with to make the world, or the Middle East, a better place.
