Palestinians Condemn US Replace “Palestinian” in Jerusalem with “Arabic”
Ramallah, MINA – Palestinian Authority condemned the US State Department’s Human Rights year report which removed the term “Palestinian population” in East Jerusalem replaced by the term “Arab population,” and said it “falsified history.”
In a human rights report released on Wednesday, the US Department of State also called Palestinians living in parts of Jerusalem on the West Bank side as a security barrier.
“Every attempt to falsify history or truth, will not give anyone legitimacy and will not change the history of Palestinian people in Jerusalem,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said in a statement on Wafa’s official website.
Palestinian leadership has long sought to build the capital of a future Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, but Israel also claims with the US support.
Abu Rudeineh also denounced the report as “another unsuccessful attempt by the US Government to implement an idea called Deal of the Century, which was rejected by the Palestinians, Arabs, and the international community.”
President Abbas firmly rejected the US plan, calling it a “slap of the century” and vowing in the name of Palestinian people “to send the peace plan to the trash of history.”
Israeli Narrative
Saeb Erekat, Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), also condemned the US human rights report, and accused him of being an Israeli narrative about Jerusalem.
“We, Palestinians, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, are sons and daughters of Jerusalem, our capital and home,” Erekat wrote on Twitter.
“Changing the appointment from a Palestinian population to an Arab population is a desperate attempt to remove Palestinian references from Jerusalem,” he said.
Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki also criticized, and claimed that the report was initiated by Israel.
“It was formulated by the Israeli occupation forces and adopted and expressed bias in supporting the occupation and narratives of the extremist right-wing government,” he said in a statement posted on the Foreign Ministry’s Facebook page.
While the Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment.
An official at the US Embassy in Jerusalem said the State Department statement aimed “to use the terms as accurately as possible, by referring to the diverse ethnic, cultural and religious identities that exist in and around Jerusalem.”
_The report is not intended to give any signal about how residents in any part of Jerusalem identify themselves,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
Since the end of 2017, the Trump administration has made several steps seen as marginalizing Palestinians, by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Palestinians and the UN Agency for Palestinian refugees, closing offices PLO representatives in Washington and conveyed plans for the Agreement of the Century to resolve the conflict, which strongly supports Israel’s position. (T/RE1)
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
