Ramallah, West Bank: Palestinian leaders said yesterday US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had invited more conflict in the Middle East by calling the Palestinians an "invented" people who want to destroy Israel.
Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, described his comments in an interview as "despicable". Hanan Ashrawi, another top official, said Gingrich's "very racist comments" showed he was "incapable of holding public office".
"This is the lowest point of thinking anyone can reach," Erekat, a close adviser to Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said. Such comments served only to "increase the cycle of violence", he added.
"What is the cause of violence, war in this region? Denial, denying people their religion, their existence, and now he is denying our existence," said Erekat, for years a leading figure in peace talks aimed at the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Siding with Israel
In an interview on Friday with the Jewish Channel, Gingrich predictably sided with Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, who are seeking a state of their own on land occupied by Israel in a 1967 war.
But the former speaker of the US House of Representatives departed from official US policy that respects the Palestinians as a people deserving of their own state based on negotiations with Israel.
"Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, said Gingrich, who has risen to the top of Republican polls with voting to start early next year to pick a nominee to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 election.
"I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic," he said.
There are around 11 million Palestinians around the world, Palestinian officials say. They include refugees and their descendants who left or were forced to flee their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel. More than four million of them live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Bolstering support
The 1948 war erupted after Arab states rejected a UN plan that would have divided British mandate-ruled Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
Gingrich, along with other Republican candidates, is seeking to attract Jewish support by vowing to bolster US ties with Israel if elected. He said both the Hamas fighter group, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian National Authority, which receives financial backing from the US, represent "an enormous desire to destroy Israel".
Hanan Daoud Khalil Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee, said Gingrich's remarks harked back to days when the Palestinians' existence as a people was denied by Israelis such as Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969-1974.
"It is certainly regressive," she said. "This is certainly an invitation to further conflict rather than any contribution to peace."
