Palestinian factions lambasted Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas for his “disgraceful meeting” with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz at the latter’s home, calling the PA leader a “traitor” and “collaborator, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The meeting on Saturday marked the first time Abbas has held talks with a senior Israeli official in Israel in over a decade.
According to Gantz, the meeting discussed cooperation on the security front and preventing terrorism and violence.
Gantz also told Abbas he wished to continue promoting cooperation on economic and civil matters.
The two previously met in Ramallah over the summer.
The two-and-a-half hour meeting was also attended by Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians Ghassan Alian, Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Majed Faraj, and Abbas adviser Hussein al-Sheikh who said the two discussed a “political horizon leading to a political solution,” as well as the recent spike in violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Recent weeks have also seen a sharp increase in terror attacks by Palestinians.
Kan news reported Abbas pledged that as long as he was in power, he wouldn’t permit the use of violence or terror against Israelis.
Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip denounced the meeting, which they said was a “provocation” to the Palestinian people “who are subjected daily to an unjust siege on the Gaza Strip and an aggressive escalation targeting their land, national rights and sanctities in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.”
Hamas condemned the meeting as a “stab to the intifada (uprising)” in the West Bank.
Hamas also warned that the meeting would embolden other countries to normalize ties with Israel.
The Gaza-based Islamic Jihad terror group accused the PA of seeking “to rid itself of its crises and failure at the expense of our people and their rights and national cause,” the report said.
The report went on to say that Palestinians expressed shock that the meeting took place on the eve of the celebrations marking the 57th anniversary of the launching of Fatah’s first terror attack on Israel.
“Days before the celebration of the anniversary of the launching of the Palestinian revolution, President Abbas presented one of the most prominent political surprises in recent years when he went to visit the minister of war crimes Benny Gantz,” wrote Hassan Asfour, a former Palestinian negotiator with Israel and editor of the Amad news agency.
Asfour said the meeting marked a “a political and national insult.”
Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, also denounced the meeting.
Gantz’s coalition party, Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin of the right-wing New Hope, slammed Gantz for hosting Abbas, who has pledged to pay salaries for terrorists and their families under the PA’s so-called “pay-for-slay” scheme — a policy the aging Palestinian leader has said was “noble.”
Elkin also noted that Abbas has pushed for senior Israeli security officials, including Gantz himself, to face prosecution by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
MK Yoaz Hendel, also of New Hope, said that despite ongoing security ties with the PA, he would have never agreed to meet with Abbas, whom he described as a “Holocaust denier [who] is playing a very strange double game.”
As the Times of Israel notes, Abbas’ history of Holocaust denial dates back to his 1980s doctoral dissertation – in which he refuted the six million figure and claimed that Zionist leaders cooperated with the Nazis – until as recently as 2018, when he said that the Holocaust was caused not by antisemitism, but by the “anti-social behavior” of the Jews, such as money-lending.
The opposition, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, slammed the meeting, warning that “it’s only a matter of time until there are dangerous concessions to the Palestinians.”
Following the meeting, the Defense Ministry announced several “confidence-building” steps, including the transfer of $32.2 million in tax payments and several thousand resident permits for the PA as well as entry permits into Israel.
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