GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has gotten himself into hot water with the Arab world, and with the Palestinian Authority over an interview he gave to The Jewish Channel.

Gingrich last week told the Jewish cable television station that the claim of Palestinian Authority Arabs to be “a people” is not legitimate, and that diplomatic efforts by the Obama administration in fact “favored the terrorists.”

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives said in the interview, “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire” until the early 20th century.

“I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s and it’s tragic,” he said.

Gingrich said the Hamas terrorist organization, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, and the Fatah-ruled PA government in Ramallah that controls Areas A and B in Judea and Samaria, show “an enormous desire to destroy Israel.”  

In short, added Gingrich, the peace process between the Jewish State and the PA has been “delusional,” and the effort by U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration to treat the PA the same as Israel is actually “favoring the terrorists.”

In the same interview he said that if elected president, he would also consider granting clemency for Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard, now serving his 27th year of a life sentence after being convicted on a single count of passing classified information to an ally — Israel. The crime usually carries a maximum prison term of two to four years.

A day earlier, The Washington Post reported that Gingrich vowed that if he is elected, he will move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s national capital, the city of Jerusalem.