Abbas: We Will Back One State for All People If ‘Endangered’ Two-State Solution Fails

TEL AVIV – Palestinians may revert to endorsing a one-state solution for Arabs and Jews – a scenario that would mean the end of the Jewish state – if the now “endangered” so-called two-state solution fails, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday.

“The two-state solution is now in real danger,” Abbas said in a pre-recorded speech broadcast in Gaza for the commemoration of the death of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. “We will demand equal rights for the people of historic Palestine if a two-state solution is not implemented.”

Abbas added that if a two-state solution is impossible, the PA would support a “one-state solution” with “full equality of rights for all its citizens.”

Abbas, who heads the Fatah party, also said his faction was working hard to implement the recently signed reconciliation deal with rival Gaza-based terror group Hamas in order to achieve Arafat’s “dream… for freedom, sovereignty and independence on our Palestinian national soil.”

“There is no state in Gaza and there is no state without Gaza,” he said, adding that a unity government will “ease the suffering and revive hope of a better future for all of us.”

Abbas also took the opportunity to once again slam the UK for the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, saying it was an attempt to erase Palestinian history.

He added that despite the UK’s attempts to suppress it, “Palestine” survived thanks to the martyrs who had given their lives or been imprisoned for fighting for their country and carrying out terror “operations” against Israel.

He continued by saying that the PA “maintains the culture of peace and fights terrorism in the region and the world.”

Saturday’s event was the first memorial for Arafat since the Hamas takeover in 2007.

Arafat, who even today is largely revered by the Palestinian public, is viewed by Israel as an unrepentant terrorist who both scuttled the 2000 Camp David peace talks and subsequently launched a five-year Intifada with more than 150 suicide bombings. Many Palestinians maintain the belief that Israel poisoned Arafat, who died in 2004 in a French military hospital. In a 2007 interview with Arafat’s personal physician Dr. al-Kurdi, claimed stated that the HIV virus was identified in Arafat’s blood.