Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas must be surprised at the international outcry over his accusation this week that Israeli rabbis are plotting to poison Arab wells. After all, Abbas and his colleagues have been making similar allegations for more than 30 years, yet the international community has hardly said a word. (Abbas subsequently apologized.)
The best-known allegation was the declaration by Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, at a 1999 press conference that Israel was engaged in the “daily and intensive use of poisonous gas” against Palestinians, as part of a plan that was causing “an increase in cancer cases among women and children.” The Israelis had also contaminated 80 percent of the PA’s water sources with “chemical materials,” she said.
The episode sparked controversy because then-first lady Hillary Clinton was sitting next to Suha Arafat at the time and did not respond. Clinton later said she was unaware of Mrs. Arafat’s statement because her headphones were not working at that moment.
The list of Palestinian “poisoning” claims in recent years is lengthy and colorful. The director of the PA’s Committee for Consumer Protection, for example, has accused Israel of supplying Palestinian markets with chocolates that cause mad cow disease. The PA’s website has charged that Israeli planes drop bags of poisoned candy into Palestinian neighborhoods. The Palestinian representative to the United Nations in Geneva has claimed that “the Israeli authorities infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with the HIV virus.”
The PA’s deputy minister of supplies, Abdel Hamid al-Qudsi, sees an Israeli plot to stunt Palestinian population growth. “Israel is distributing food containing material that causes cancer and hormones that harm male virility and other spoiled products in the Palestinian Authority’s territories in order to poison and harm the Palestinian population,” al-Qudsi has asserted. “It is an organized plan and conspiracy which is under the auspices of the Israel Defense Forces.”
One of the first – and, from the standpoint of anti-Israel propaganda, most successful – such allegations in modern times began in the small Palestinian village of Arabbe in the spring of 1983. A schoolgirl who opened a window in her classroom fainted. Her classmates detected a strong odor of “rotten fish or eggs,” and some of them also fainted. Both Palestinian and Israeli doctors who visited the scene that day reported a strong smell of hydrogen sulfide, which commonly occurs in raw sewage.
In the days to follow, schoolgirls in Jenin, Barkin, and Mei Saloum complained of dizziness and headaches and were admitted to a local hospital, although their symptoms quickly vanished and they were released. Yasser Arafat claimed that Israel was carrying out “mass poisoning” of Arab girls in order to render them sterile. He said the school incidents were evidence of “the genocide against the Palestinian people.”
The foreign news media ran with the story. A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times was headlined “300 Arab Girls in West Bank Poisoned by Gas,” as if the poisoning was an indisputable fact, rather than an allegation made by the world’s most notorious terrorist leader. The newspaper darkly reported that “a yellow dust that proved to be rich in sulfur was found on a windowsill at one of the schools,” and that unnamed “investigators” were “reported to believe that the dust was a residue of the gas.”
The yellow dust turned out to be pollen. A mysterious tin of white powder that supposedly was an Israeli gas was found to be evaporated milk. And a bottle of strong-smelling liquid that Palestinians found “suspicious” was nothing more than a common household disinfectant.
The Israeli authorities soon found evidence that the entire episode had been cooked up by Palestine Liberation Organization propagandists. One Palestinian activist claiming symptoms of “poisoning” was found to have had himself hospitalized six times, and he was caught “pressuring girls to continue to remain in hospital,” the Jerusalem Post reported. Masked militants in Nablus made announcements over a local mosque’s public address system that the city’s water had been polluted by the Israelis. Some local Arab doctors acknowledged that “they were being pressured not to release the girls from hospital,” according to the Jerusalem Post.
Stinging from Arafat’s accusations and hostile international media reports, the Israeli government invited the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Atlanta, to conduct its own investigation. The CDC’s inquiry concluded that the symptoms exhibited by the girls in Arrabe were caused either by “psychological factors” or by hydrogen sulphide, not poison. The girls in the other schools were suffering from nothing more than “anxiety,” to which hysterical Palestinian newspaper and radio reports “may have contributed.” Contrary to Arafat’s allegation, the CDC found “no evidence of reproductive impairment.”
Separate investigations by the World Health Organization and the International Red Cross likewise found no evidence of any Israeli poisoning.
Nonetheless, Arafat never retracted his accusations about Arrabe. Perhaps, then, it was fitting that after Arafat died from a stroke in 2004, PA officials claimed he had been poisoned by Israel – and continued spreading that blood libel long after multiple international investigations found no evidence that the Israelis poisoned him.
(6) Deborah, June 30, 2016 8:55 AM
Very Disturbing
Whilst one can be critical of the Israeli government, that should not include taking the numerous claims of the Palestinian Authority as fact. Common sense should dictate that mass poisonings are NOT in Israel's interest and would lead to widespread condemnation.
(5) Anonymous, June 29, 2016 4:33 PM
Old Medieval "Facts"
Accusing the "rabbis" (and the Jews in general) in poisoning the wells etc., etc. is a very old Medieval "tradition". When - quite recently - Mr. Abbas have an invited speech before the European Parliament, he spoke about these horrible crimes committed by the "rabbis" at his territories. After his speech he got a standing 20-min.-long ovation by the Parliamentarians whose ancestors believed in these "classical" accusations. This happened in our modern 21st century. In the Middle Ages people also considered themselves modern. And in a few centuries people may consider us as their Medieval ancestors.
(4) Eliyahu, June 28, 2016 6:50 PM
Question of competence
If, as the Arabs like to claim, we're poisoning wells, food, air, and agriculture, it doesn't look like we're very good at it since no one is getting sick or dying from it. That's the real insult here - to suggest that we are so incompetent that we try for decades to poison people and still can't get it right. Given the reality of Israeli and Jewish scientific expertise, if we wanted to poison Arabs, they'd all be dead by now. The fact that they're alive is, in itself, proof that these libels are nonsense.
(3) Velvel, June 28, 2016 4:39 PM
Well poisoning tales date back before the Black Plague in the 1300s
and Abbas, the murderous name changer (Abu Mazan) uses his lies just like the illiterate medieval monsters, religious leaders, nazis, white skinheads, black shapechangers (E Muhammud, J Wright, and others), ku klux klan, Stalinistas, and others have done for generations: to blame Jews for their failures and their manipulating of their acolytes and followers.
Too bad the "good people" like Hollande, Merkel, Putin, Obama, Clinton, Corbyn, Fisk and others acquiesce by their silence.
When Moshiach comes...
(2) Michael, June 28, 2016 3:35 PM
He who throw stones !
Poison words and deeds. That said, these self prpogating prophecies will very possibly come true, as we know only too well. Pals will sink to lowest of the low in order to appear Poor
victims. No doubt their continued open sewers will contribute as I winessed with my own eyes on MILUIM in Gaza City where, as in all despotic regimes, cash is flowing in to wrong hands for tunnel construction, or numerous military tools for killing their own kids and justify Israel's bad treatment of those propagandized innocents ! And do not forget the kids reading and text books, burgeoning with myths of pigs, mokeys and numerous other benign creatures of the animal kingdom. We have generation upon generation ad infinitum, behind and ahead of us before any significant percentage of all this will finally be put to bed with the international community fully aware of the truth ? Question remains, how long, how much more blood has to be wasted until that far off day ?
(1) Des, June 28, 2016 3:15 PM
You missed out the main poison
The main poison to be found in "palestinian" territory is the poisoning of the minds of children to hate all Jews and Christians. Fed by lies such as those described in the article, they are totally brainwashed. Any wonder there is so much violence in Israel and the "territories" occupied by Arabs.