Binyamin Netanyahu
Binyamin NetanyahuFlash 90

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening responded to Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the UN Security Council, noting that Abbas continues to avoid direct talks with Israel.

“Abbas said nothing new. He continues to run away from peace and continues to pay terrorists and their families $347 million,” Netanyahu tweeted, along with a picture outlining the amounts the PA pays to terrorists.

Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett also responded to Abbas, writing on Twitter, “A nation that invents its past has no future.”

“The ancestors of the Palestinian people may have existed 5,000 years ago, but south of here in the Arabian Peninsula. I advise Abu Mazen to focus not on building an imaginary past but on creating a practical future,” he added.

Also responding to the PA chairman’s speech was Yesh Atid chairman MK Yair Lapid.

“Abu Mazen's remarks at the UN on the issue of the refugees are a blatant lie. The world cannot allow the Palestinians to be the only people in the world where refugee status is inherited. There are not millions of Palestinian refugees, and there never have been. Israel will never agree to the right of return,” he tweeted.

In his speech, Abbas called on the international community to hold a Middle East peace conference as an alternative to a U.S.-led talks between Israel and the PA.

“Israel has closed the door on the two-state solution and is harming it,” he claimed, while also insisting that it was Israel – and not him – that was avoiding peace talks.

“[Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu avoided the Moscow Summit, and the government foiled the efforts of [former] Secretary of State John Kerry. We never refused peace talks,” charged Abbas.

The PA chairman, however, did not stop there. He also told the Security Council that PA residents are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, claiming that “Palestine” made significant contributions to humanity prior to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

"We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago, and continuously remained there to this day. Our great people remains rooted in its land. The Palestinian people built their own cities and homeland, and made contributions to humanity and civilization," he claimed.

Experts dismiss the “Canaanism” theory as historical revisionism, since the Canaanites, pagans who sacrificed their children to the idol Moloch, have long disappeared. Nevertheless, Abbas has made this claim on multiple occasions in the past.