Palestinian leaders are “failures” who consistently miss opportunities to resolve the conflict with Israel and who align themselves with despots from Hitler to Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief and ambassador to the United States, Bandar bin Sultan, said in an interview with Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV that aired Monday.
“The Palestinian cause is a just cause, but its advocates are failures. The Israeli cause is unjust, but its advocates are successful. That sums up the events of the last 70 or 75 years,” bin Sultan said, later adding the “Palestinian cause had been robbed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders equally.”
“I believe that we in Saudi Arabia, acting on our goodwill, have always been there for them. Whenever they asked for advice and help, we would provide them with both without expecting anything in return, but they would take the help and ignore the advice. Then they would fail and turn back to us again, and we would support them again, regardless of their mistakes,” bin Sultan said.
“We even went further as a state and justified to the whole world the actions of the Palestinians, while we knew that they, indeed, were not justified, but we did not wish to stand with anyone against them,” he added.
He slammed the Palestinians for their “reprehensible” criticism of the recently signed Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The Palestinian leadership lambasted both deals as a “stab in the back.” PA President Mahmoud Abbas described the UAE as a “traitor to the homeland and our cause” and said its decision to normalize ties with Israel was “a poisoned dagger.”
Bin Sultan discussed various peace plans over the decades, including 1948’s U.N. partition plan and the 1979 Camp David Accords with Egypt – which would have seen a Palestinian state but which were rejected by the Palestinians.
“Israel was working on increasing its influence, while the Arabs were busy with each other. The Palestinians and their leaders led these disputes among the Arabs,” bin Sultan said.
The rival West Bank and Gaza ruling factions of Fatah and Hamas are always “conspiring and plotting,” against one another, bin Sultan said.
“Who are the allies of the Palestinians now? Is it Iran, which is using the Palestinian cause as a pretext at the expense of the Palestinian people?… Or is it Turkey, which Hamas leaders have thanked for its stance in support of Hamas and the Palestinian cause?” bin Sultan said.
Bin Sultan condemned Palestinian leaders for historically aligning themselves with dictators, pointing to Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini who was a Hitler ally and Nazi sympathizer.
He also condemned former late leader Yasser Arafat for his relationship with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in 1990.
Kuwait, he went on, was “an occupied Arab nation,” that had always been “home to Palestinian leaders.”
“But we saw [Arafat] embracing, laughing and joking with Saddam, congratulating him for what had happened.”
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