In a speech to the European Parliament Thursday, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas accused rabbis of “demanding” that the Israeli government poison Palestinian water.
His claim echoed unsubstantiated, debunked reports in Arabic media, as well as a centuries-old, anti-Semitic charge that Jews poisoned wells in medieval Europe—a charge that led to Jewish mass slaughter.
Still, the State Department would not denounce Abbas’s accusation Thursday.
“I’ve seen the comments,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “I can’t confirm the veracity of that.”
Kirby proceeded to reiterate the Obama administration line and called on “both sides” to deescalate rhetoric.
“We have long said what we want is for both sides to ratchet down not just the violence but the rhetoric, which can inflame some of the violence,” he said. “We just don’t find that sort of rhetoric helpful.”
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu denounced Abbas’s accusation as “blood libel” in a statement Thursday.
“Someone who refuses to meet with the [Israeli] president [Reuven Rivlin] and with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu for direct negotiations, and someone who promotes blood libels in the European parliament, is lying when he claims his hand is outstretched in peace,” the statement read.
Abbas is no stranger to anti-Semitic claims. In his 1982 doctoral dissertation he argued the Holocaust had been exaggerated, writing that “the number of Jewish victims might be 6 million and might be much smaller—even less than 1 million.”
His rhetoric from Thursday is also nothing new. As Elliot Abrams wrote in 2012 after Abbas’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly:
