(JTA) — Mahmoud Abbas said the failure to seize the opportunity of statehood in 1947 was an Arab and Palestinian mistake.
"It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole,” the Palestinian Authority president told Israel’s Channel 2 TV in an interview translated by the Associated Press. “But do they punish us for this mistake for 64 years?"
The Zionist leadership accepted the 1947 U.N.-designated partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, but the Palestinians and their Arab backers rejected it, launching a war.
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