Hamas: Jews out

By · November 30, 2007

There is no place for Jews in the Holy Land, Hamas said.

As Israel marked the 60th anniversary of a U.N. vote approving the creation of a Jewish state alongside an Arab state in what was then British Mandate Palestine, Hamas called Thursday for the 1947 General Assembly Resolution 181 to be rescinded.

“Palestine is one indivisible unit and we will not cede one inch of its soil,” the Palestinian Islamist movement said in a statement, referring to what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Palestine is an Arab and Muslim land, from its river to its sea, and there is no place in it for the Jews.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been locked in a power struggle with Hamas for months, said that this week’s Annapolis peace conference boosted chances for a two-state accommodation with Israel.

“The plain truth is that the whole world recognized our Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital,” Abbas said during a stopover in Tunis. “I am full of hope over the negotiations.”

In an apparent snub to Hamas’s maximalist rhetoric against Israel, Abbas added: “The time of extravagant promises by one rival trying to outbid another must pass, and not return. Now is a moment of truth, not of illusion.”