Meet Jibril Rajoub, A Possible Successor to Mahmoud Abbas

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Beginning in 2016, Jibril Rajoub has been talked about in the Palestinian Authority as a possible successor to Mahmoud Abbas, whenever the latter finally decides, after almost two decades into his four-year term as President For Life, that having made his half-billion dollars – he’s almost there – it’s time to retire and play with his grandchildren in whose foreign bank accounts, after all, a good deal of their kindly grampa’s loot has been parked.

A few months ago, Rajoub went on an antisemitic rant on Facebook, likening Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews. Let’s be thankful that, unlike Abbas himself in his doctoral dissertation, at least Rajoub did not engage in Holocaust denial – rather, he practiced “Holocaust appropriation.” A report on his Facebook frenzy is here.

One of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ possible successors went on an antisemitic rant on his Facebook page, equating Israel to the Nazis and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler.

Jibril Rajoub, a long-time top PA official who, among other offices, currently serves as secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, claimed that the Trump Administration was “cooperating with the path of the fascist right-wing that is being led by Netanyahu, the ugly face of Mussolini and Hitler,” according to a translation by Palestinian Media Watch.

Rajoub claimed Israelis “have exploited the issue of the Holocaust” and “what is happening in Palestine is a second holocaust.”

Apparently Jews – and Israelis – who want the world not to forget the Holocaust are engaged, in Jibril Rajoub’s cruel view, in “exploiting of the issue of the Holocaust.” Mentioning it, reminding people of the enormity of the crime, wanting to warn people of the consequences of antisemitism and to help immunize them against the new pandemic of antisemitism, a contagion spread both by the traditional far-right and now, even more dangerously, by the far-left variant, in league with Muslims who, because of what the Qur’an inculcates about Jews, are permanent carriers of the virus of antisemitism.

“We are 14 million people who are being eliminated and erased geographically, historically, humanly, religiously, and culturally,” he claimed.

Hysteria. How are the Palestinians, who are treated with special solicitude by the U.N., which spends enormous amounts of General Assembly and Security Council time on the crimes of Israel, being “eliminated and erased geographically, historically, humanly, religiously, and culturally”? No people in the word have had as much sympathetic attention paid to them by “the international community” as have the Palestinians. And what “14 million people” is Rajoub talking about? Even UNRWA, which allows those called “Palestinian refugees” to pass on to their progeny – to children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on — that refugee status, a unique privilege that no other group of refugees, out of the tens of millions who have been created by war and persecution since World War II, is permitted – speaks of “five million Palestinians.” Jibril Rajoub has decided to pluck a figure out of the air, a figure that is nearly triple that which everyone else, including UNRWA bureaucrats and Arab propagandists, routinely discuss. But if you are going to lie, why not make It a big lie? It won’t be long before we start hearing Palestinian propagandists trying out a new figure –“there are 18 million of us” – running it up a rhetorical flagpole to see if anyone salutes – and far too many will.

“They are the criminals. They are the murderers. They are the lowly ones. They are doing what happened to them to the Palestinians,” Rajoub ranted….

Last October [2020] Rajoub claimed on Facebook that Israel is “the fascist and racist regime” and shrieked, “Mussolini was a kindergarten compared to Netanyahu and the right-wing that rules in Israel — a kindergarten!”

In Sept. 2019, Rajoub proclaimed, “Netanyahu is proving that he is a continuation of fascism and Nazism. Goebbels and Mussolini are the spiritual fathers of the racist fascist culture that Netanyahu is implementing against the Palestinian people.”…

Rajoub keeps accusing the Israelis of being “racists and fascists,” Nazis, followers of Goebbels and Mussolini, doing to the “Palestinian people” what the Nazis did to the Jews. Actually, not the same, but much worse: “Mussolini was a kindergarten [sic] compared to Netanyahu.” He doesn’t mention Hitler – using Goebbels as his chosen Nazi – I suspect because Rajoub is uncomfortably aware of the role of Haj Amin al-Husseini, as Hitler’s admirer, who met with him and enthusiastically endorsed the Endlosung (Final Solution), and even helped raise three SS brigades consisting of Bosnian Muslims.

If the Israelis have been engaged in a Holocaust, they have a strange way of going about it. For we can find no evidence of a single death camp: no Israeli equivalent of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor. No evidence in Israel of any labor camps, where inmates are worked to death. No mass executions, no torture chambers, no ghoulish medical experiments. In fact, if Israel were as Jibril Rajoub says, surely the population of Palestinians would drastically decline, as did that of European Jewry during the real Holocaust.

But instead we find, quite dramatically, data that shows the exact opposite – a huge increase in the Palestinian population. In Israel, when the war ended in 1949, there were 156,000 Arabs in Israel;. today there are 1.9 million Arabs in Israel.

That’s right: the Arab population in Israel has gone up twelve times from 1949 to 2020. Some Holocaust.

But there’s still more data that doesn’t exactly square with Jibril Rajoub’s claim of a new Holocaust, perpetrated by the nazifascist Israelis who make Goebbels and Mussolini seem like “kindergarteners.” Here, too, the figures paint a different story:

In Gaza in 1948, there were 82,500 Arabs. Now there are 1.7 million, an increase of 2000%.

In the West Bank in 1948, there were 462,000 Arabs, now there are 2.16 million, an increase of 500%.

I know of no “Holocaust” or “genocide” or “massacre” or “mass murder” where the victims actually increased many times over, or for that matter, increased at all. Perhaps Jibril Rajoub would care to explain these numbers?

In fact, the Arabs inside Israel have flourished as no Arab population anywhere, always excepting those living in the oil states of the Gulf, who because of their countries’ colossal wealth enjoy the benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. The standard of living of Israeli Arabs compares favorably to that of the Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Aside from their standard of living, their quality of life, in a stable democracy subject to the rule of law, is without parallel anywhere else in the Arab or Muslim world. Israeli Arabs do not have to worry about military or dynastic despotisms, bloody coups, internecine warfare, religious fanaticism, sectarian strife, as Arabs do elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa..

Okay, even if there are no death or labor camps in Israel, still…Jibril Rajoub wants us at least to believe that Israel practices apartheid, with the Arabs supposedly treated as blacks were in South Africa in the pre-Mandela period of its existence.

There is nothing to this charge. There is no discrimination, none, against Arabs in Israel. There are, in fact, programs to offer training to young Arabs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), in which they are deemed to need more help – an Israeli form of affirmative action. As for apartheid, it does not exist in Israel. Arabs serve In the Knesset (and have done so since the very first Knesset), where the third largest bloc is now the Arab Joint List. Arab judges sit on the Supreme Court. Arabs go abroad as ambassadors for their country, Israel. Arabs study in the same universities as Jews, work in the same factories and offices with Jews, are treated in the same hospitals as Jews, work as doctors alongside Jews, play on the same sports teams and orchestras as Jews. The only difference in the treatment of Jews and Arabs in Israel is that Jews are required to serve in the military and Arabs are not. However, they may do so as they wish, and increasing numbers of Arabs, especially Christian Arabs, Druze, and Bedouins, have chosen, as volunteers, to serve in the IDF.

Jibril Rajoub presents himself as a “man of peace,” indignant that his “people” should be subject to a Holocaust inflicted by Israeli Jews, outdoing in their cruelty the nazifascism of “Goebbels and Mussolini.” But since he can adduce no facts to buttress his claim, he substitutes vitriol on Facebook as a sign of his deep sincerity.

Jibril Rajoub likes to suggest that he is opposed to terror attacks. Of course, it was for taking part in one such attack that he spent time in an Israeli prison — that he was sentenced to 15 years in an Israeli prison acquire a nuclear bomb they should certainly use it against Israel? Was this just a hypothetical, or was it a sinister hope? And why has he always referred to the Arabs who stab Israelis to death as “shahids” (martyrs)? This bespeaks admiration, not condemnation. And indeed he has said of the terrorist who dies while committing his terror act that “we honor him. And we will not ignore the fact that he fought for the Palestinian people. He sacrificed his blood and his life.” That sounds like support of terrorism to me.

If Jibril Rajoub manages to succeed Mahmoud Abbas it will mostly be more of the same, or even worse. For he will continue to liken Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Holocaust, which Abbas – a Holocaust denier – never did. He will still defend terrorists as “shahids” (martyrs) and no doubt follow Abbas’s practice of naming streets and squares after dead terrorists, and continue Abbas’ “Pay-For-Slay” program to reward terrorists, dead or alive, and their families, with generous subsidies. After all, Rajoub was himself a terrorist, throwing grenades at Israelis, as a result of which he spent 15 years in an Israeli prison. Really, the only question is how much he will manage to steal if he becomes President of the PA. Will he try to emulate the two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa Abu Marzouk, each of whom managed to accumulate a fortune of at least $2.5 billion? Or will he set his sights lower – say, to acquire only the $400 million nest egg that Mahmoud Abbas has put away for himself, for his sons Tareq and Yassir, and for his grandsons. Or might he do something really extraordinary and take from the aid money meant for the “Palestinian people” a mere $200 million, or even be satisfied with a mere $100 million? In the Arab and Muslim world, and especially among the Palestinians, a leader who steals only $100 million dollars has a special title: he’s known as an “honest man.”

First published in Jihad Watch.