PA President Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank August 18, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman/Pool

i24 News – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday offered a rebuttal to a series of claims by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leader, which called into question the Jewish people’s historic link to Jerusalem.

Speaking at the United Nations last week, Abbas contested the legitimacy of Jewish ties to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount site. “Israel went digging everywhere but could not trace anything,” he said. He spoke during a special session of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, marking the 75th anniversary of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “Catastrophe,” the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.

Abbas — whose deeply controversial PhD thesis, defended in the Soviet Union in 1982, was devoted to “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis” — went on to claim that Zionists “lie just like Goebbels.”

During Sunday’s government cabinet meeting, Netanyahu addressed the claims by the Palestinian leader.

“Abbas said days ago at the UN that the Jewish people has no connection to the Temple Mount and that east Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian Authority,” Netanyahu said. “Well, it should be put to his attention that we are holding a special cabinet meeting in honor of Jerusalem at the foot of the Temple Mount, on which King Solomon built the First Temple of the Jewish people.

“Moreover, it should be put to Abbas that the heart of the historic State of Israel, the City of David, was here 3,000 years ago.” Netanyahu added that Jerusalem was the Jewish capital 1,100 years before London became the capital of England, 1,800 years before Paris became the capital of France and 2,800 years before Washington D.C. became the US capital.