JERUSALEM – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has claimed that, according to the Bible, the Palestinians predate Abraham, were living in the land of Israel for 6,000 years, and invented the alphabet.

Israeli watchdog Palestinian Media Watch this week published a clip of Abbas saying on national TV: “Our narrative says that we were in this land since before Abraham. I am not saying it. The Bible says it. The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham. So why don’t you recognize my right?”

PMW refuted the claim as entirely false, explaining: “The Palestinians who are Arabs could not have had ancestors in the land from biblical times predating Israelite and Judean statehood because Arabs only arrived in the land in 637 CE with the Muslim invasion. Needless to say, the ‘Palestinians’ are not mentioned in the Bible.”

Abbas also claimed that the fictitious “Canaanite-Palestinians” were the creators the modern-day alphabet.

“This land was never without a people, as we have been planted in its rocks and dust and hills since the beginning of civilization and writing and the invention of the Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6,000 years ago,” stated Abbas.

Historical facts tend to disagree. Most language historians hold that the written word was not invented until roughly 3,200 BCE in Mesopotamia with the first pure alphabets emerging around 1800 BCE in ancient Egypt.

Supreme Sharia Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who also serves as Abbas’ adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs, made similar claims that the Palestinians existed in Israel for the past few millennia. Al-Habbash claims it was 5,000 years and not the 6,000 that Abbas posits, but what’s a thousand years between discerning historians?

“They (the Jews) are thieves who stole the land, and who want to steal the history, but history cannot change and cannot be falsified. The facts bear witness to it. We have been here for the last 5,000 years and have not left this land. We have not left this land. Our forefathers are the monotheist Canaanites and Jebusites. They are the ones who built Jerusalem, before Abraham was even here,” Al-Habbash said in a televised sermon last Friday.

He added that the Jews’ claims to a Temple in Jerusalem are “unfounded myths and rumors.”

Revisionist history is part of the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing campaign to legitimize their claim to the land among the Palestinian public and the international community.