Mahmoud Al-Habbash, the PA Supreme Shari'a Judge and President Mahmoud 'Abbas's advisor for religious affairs, said at a June 4, 2018 conference that the struggle in Jerusalem is between the rightful owners of the city – the Muslims and Christians – and "some foreign Western imperialists that have no connection to this soil." He added that the state of Israel is an imperialist Western enterprise whose purpose is to weaken and divide the Arab world, and that the claim that the Jews have a historical connection to Jerusalem is nothing but a distortion of history.

The conference at which Al-Habbash spoke, organized by "the Muslim-Christian Council for the Salvation of Jerusalem and the Holy Places" and the Organization for Muslim Cooperation (OIC) under the title "The Monotheistic Religions against the Judaization of Jerusalem and Its Holy Places," was also attended by other PA officials, including the Palestinian Mufti, as well as other Christian and Muslim religious leaders, and ambassadors.



Mahmoud Al-Habbash (image: Palsawa.com, June 4, 2018)



Al-Habbash (second from right) at the conference with other participants (image: Alquds-online.org, June 5, 2018)

The following are translated excerpts fromn Al-Habbash's statements at the confrence: [1]

"The battle for Jerusalem is not a religious one; it a political battle between the rightful owners [of the city] and the imperialists. This obligates us to raise the Arab and Muslim world's awareness of the Arab, Muslim and Christian identity of Jerusalem...

"We must be careful when using a particular term or word in connection with Jerusalem, for this is not a conflict with the Jews, but a struggle between the [real] residents and owners of Jerusalem, who are Muslim, Christian and Arab, and some foreign Western imperialists that have no connection to this soil. The catastrophe of Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, or with the Balfour Declaration. It began much earlier, about 450 years ago, when imperialist calls began to be heard in the West.

"Palestine is not the [Jewish] Promised Land or the land of the [Jewish] forefathers – for if it is, why did they consider it as [only] one of several options when they started looking for a place for their state?...

"There is a difference between faith and claiming territory based on a false Jewish or Biblical pretext whose sole purpose is to take over the land. The Al-Burak Wall [i.e., the Western Wall] has nothing to do with a [Jewish] temple, and [the Jews] have no right over its stones. This is an imperialist myth that exploited and distorted history and the holy sites in order to advance and justify imperialist projects.

"U.S. President Trump's step [of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the embassy there]... is nothing but a consolidation of the imperialist plan to plant a state [in the region] that will drive a wedge between the Asian and African parts of the Arab world, so as to keep [the Arabs] divided, backward and easily controlled...

"[The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem] is an American settlement in Jerusalem, and an emblem of imperialism. We, 13 million Palestinians, say that Jerusalem will not be Judaized and its identity and culture will not be altered. It will remain the eternal capital of the Palestinian state..."