A leading Palestinian politician recently accused Israel of planning to conquer the world by using the U.S. as its pawn.

In response to media inquiries concerning the approval by Israel’s Planning Committee of the Civil Administration to construct 2,000 units in Judea and Samaria, Hanan Ashrawi, a leading politician in the Palestinian Authority, responded in a manner that should have been taken straight from the most egregious sources of anti-Jewish rhetoric.

“With the expansion of its illegal settlement enterprise, Israel seeks not only to defy but to defeat the whole world,” Ashrawi told Wafa News.

This statement echoes the main thesis of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First published in Russia in 1903, The Protocols became the manifest for anti-Semitism, purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. Claiming to report the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting in which Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony via controlling the press and and global economy, the entire story was poorly fabricated hoax. It is, nonetheless, still cited by anti-Semites who, like Ashrawi, claim the goal of the Jews is global domination.

“In a blatant disregard for and violation of international law and conventions, as well as United Nations Security Council resolutions and the basic requirements of stability and peace, Israel persists in its illegal policies and oppressive measures in favor of its extremist settler population and colonial project,” Ashrawi went on to say.

“It is high time for the international community to send Israel a strong message that this is not the Wild West or the days of empire and extermination of indigenous peoples. We seek urgent intervention and appeal to governments worldwide and the entire global community to put an end to Israel’s impunity and to curb its voracious appetite for Palestine land and resources.”

Rabbi Ken Spiro, historian a Senior Lecturer and Researcher for Aish HaTorah Yeshiva, sees a large and insidious message in Ashrawi’s statements.

“It is great that she is saying this. The mask is off and she has revealed herself as a classical Jew-hater and not as a politician. She is saying that America is doing Israel’s dirty work, since the Jews control everything.”

“Throughout history, the Jews have been blamed for everything: using the blood of Christian children to bake matzoh, poisoning wells, being in league with the devil, controlling the world’s economy, seismic activity, solar flares, tsunamis in Southeast Asia, and recently, stealing clouds from Iran. It began thousands of years ago but this type of Jew hatred doesn’t go away. None of it has any connection with reality but it is still around.”

“A Jewish king may seek the sanction of the Sanhedrin to wage war to expand the borders of Israel. Traditionally, Jews have not done this.”

“More importantly, the Jewish global vision is that the whole world lives under the kingdom of one God, not under a political leadership. It is not a Jewish thing to convert or to conquer. Our path is to lead the world to Hashem (God, literally ‘the name’) in a non-coercive way, leading by example.”

“When you compare Judaism to its offshoot religions, Islam and Christianity, we are the most open and inclusive. According to the Talmud, the righteous of the nations have a place in the world to come. Christianity and Islam do not believe this. Christians believe in spiritually spreading the word, missionizing but not physical conquest.”

“It is ironic that this accusation comes from Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian Arab,” Rabbi Spiro said. “The Arab Christian community is the oldest Christian community in the world but it is horribly oppressed in the Middle East. The Christian leaders under the Palestinian Authority come out extremely anti-Israel, probably in fear.”

Ashrawi is a Christian Arab and received her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. She was the first woman elected to the Palestinian National Council and served as the official spokesperson for the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace process.

“Islam believes it is a religious imperative to conquer the world,” Rabbi Spiro said, referring to the Islamic concept of Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) in which the people live by Islamic law. Rabbi Spiro explained that according to the tenets of Islam, the ideal situation is that the entire world is Muslim. The alternative divides the world into Dar al-Islam, the Muslim world, and Dar al-Harb (House of Sword or War) in which non-Muslims live under Islamic domination.

“It is ironic that the Muslims, who have a theology to this day that requires a spiritual and physical conquest of the world, accuse Israel of being expansionist, when the Jews do not espouse expansionism or imperialism.”

“If you look at history, this is blatantly true,” said Rabbi Spiro. “Insofar as expansionism, Christianity has dropped its idea of expansionism in the last 1,000 years while Islam has gotten more extreme. Christian countries have dropped their colonialist ideologies but Islamic countries have not.”

Ashrawi has been criticized in the past for inventing truths that suit her anti-Jewish agenda. In 2012, American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris published an article in which he wrote, “Hanan Ashrawi Is to Truth What Smoking Is to Health… [Ashrawi] has just earned a gold medal in historical revisionism…[for asserting] there were no Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Instead, according to her, there were only ’emigrants’ who left their ancestral homes voluntarily. Jews were not singled out for persecution, and if they were, it was, in reality, a plot by ‘Zionists.'”