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Abbas attacks US Ambassadors David Friedman and Nikki Haley

PA Chairman Abbas in speech to PLO Central Council: "There are two names that I don’t want to mention, but my conscience is bothering me, so I have to mention them. American Ambassador [to Israel] David Friedman... He says: "There is no occupation, who said there’s an occupation? Israel is building on its lands." ... The second name, their [US] Ambassador to the UN Ms. [Nikki] Haley… who said: 'I wear high heels not for fashion, [but] only to hit whoever attacks Israel.' I say to her – and may she hear me – [our] response is going to be worse, but not by way of high heels. The response will be worse... I say that these two are an insult to an [American] administration that respects itself, if it wants to respect itself." Abbas made this statement in response to comments made by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman spoke about Israel’s legal standing in the West Bank and UN Security Council Resolution 242 in an interview with the Israeli news site Walla on Sept. 28, 2017: “I think the settlements are part of Israel. I think that was always the expectation when Resolution 242 was adopted in 1967… The idea was that Israel would be entitled to secure borders… so there was always supposed to be some notion of expansion into the West Bank… And I think that’s exactly what, you know, Israel has done. I mean, they’re only occupying 2 percent of the West Bank. There is important nationalistic, historical, religious significance to those settlements, and I think the settlers view themselves as Israelis and Israel views the settlers as Israelis.” Speaking at AIPAC on March 27, 2017, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said: “So to answer the question on what can we do at the UN – we can do a lot… The way you change the culture of the UN is the United States tells them what we’re not going to put up with, we start to change the culture to what we should be talking about, and then we actually act on what we say. I wear heels; it’s not for a fashion statement, it’s because if I see something wrong we’re going to kick ‘em every single time. So how are we kicking? We’re kicking by number one putting everybody on notice, saying that if you have our back we’re going to have the backs of our friends but our friends need to have our back too. If you challenge us be prepared for what you’re challenging us for, because we will respond. The next thing we did is we said the days of Israel bashing are over. We have a lot of things to talk about, there are a lot of threats to peace and security, but you’re not going to take our number one democratic friend in the Middle East and beat up on it.”

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