TEL AVIV – While one critic has called Donald Trump’s election victory “the greatest win for anti-Semitism” since World War II, senior Palestinian officials are dubbing the president-elect a “Zionist” and “racist.”
Jibril Rajoub, Deputy Secretary of the Central Committee for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, said Trump “revealed his true face, Zionist and racist, supporting and adopting the Israeli right-wing and racist policy,” in an interview with Lebanese Al-Mayadeen TV translated by Israeli monitoring group, Palestinian Media Watch.
“In my opinion, his predecessor [Obama] is not better than him, even though at the beginning he tried to present himself in a different way,” Rajoub added.
Rajoub’s comments follow a litany of warnings about a Trump administration, including a threat from the Palestinian ambassador to the UN who said he would “make life miserable” for Trump and the U.S. if the president-elect “attacked” the Palestinians by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem…nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the UN to defend ourselves and we have a lot of weapons in the UN,” Riyad Mansour said.
Mansour conceded that such a move could not be passed as a Security Council resolution because of the U.S. veto. Nevertheless, he warned Trump, “Maybe I can’t have resolutions in the Security Council but I can make their lives miserable everyday with precipitating a veto on my admission as a member state.”
Meanwhile, Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee Saeb Erekat said he was confident that the move would not happen because “what we heard before the elections is not what we will hear after the elections”
“The American embassy will not be transferred to Jerusalem under any circumstances, as that would destroy the American interests in the Middle East, the Islamic world, and many countries around the world,” Erekat, who also served as the Palestinian chief negotiator, said on official PA radio.
In an oped for Haaretz newspaper, Erekat also claimed that Trump’s win had emboldened senior government officials to express their racist sentiments more openly.
The official PA daily printed a cartoon that commented on Trump’s outspoken stance against immigrants, showing Trump saying: “No to immigrants” and an American Indian responding by picking Trump up by his collar and saying: “Then come on, [get] out.”
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, published a column on Saturday describing Trump as “aggressive” and “racist.”
“Forty-fifth U.S. President[-elect Donald Trump] is a most problematic man. [He is] eccentric, aggressive, racist, and rash in his responses because he is short-tempered and undiplomatic in his treatment of people, groups, and states. … His election revealed the depth of the racist trend within the U.S.,” Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul wrote.
Al-Ghoul added that Trump “emphasized that he will give all support to the Israeli ethnic cleansing state.”
However, in a bizarre twist, Al-Ghoul stated, “Nonetheless, it must be objectively admitted that Trump is courageous and adventurous like no other.”
Therefore, Al-Ghoul reasoned, Palestinians would do well to seek Trump’s favor, noting that “we must open a direct dialogue with him now, immediately, even before he actually takes office on Jan. 20, 2017.”
Earlier in the year, the same newspaper published a cartoon featuring Trump beheading the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.