Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Sigh:

Palestinian politicians on Wednesday raged against dozens of Palestinian academics who had criticized President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent remarks on the Holocaust that drew widespread accusations of antisemitism.

They lambasted the open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as “the statement of shame.”

The well-respected writers and thinkers had released the letter after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than their religion or ethnicity.

“Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people,” said the secular nationalist Fatah party that runs the Palestinian Authority.

Fatah officials called the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation” and “extremely dangerous.”

In the open letter, the legions of Palestinian academics, most of whom live in the United States and Europe, condemned Abbas’ comments as “morally and politically reprehensible.”

“We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity or historical revisionism vis-à-vis the Holocaust,” the letter added. A few of the signatories are based in east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

In Geneva on Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, blasted Abbas’ comments as “overtly antisemitic” and distorting of the Holocaust. She said the open letter from the Palestinian academics was “stronger almost than what I had to say.”

“There’s no question about it: These kind of statements must stop, because they do nothing to advance peace, and worse than that, they spread anti-Semitism,” Lipstadt told The Associated Press outside an event on antisemitism attended by dozens of diplomats on the sidelines of a session of the Human Rights Council.

The chorus of indignation among Palestinian leaders over the letter casts light on a controversy that for decades has plagued the Palestinian relationship with the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide, which killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of others, sent European Jews pouring into the Holy Land.

Israel was established in 1948 as a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, and remembering the Holocaust and honoring its victims remains a powerful part of the country’s national identity.

But the war surrounding Israel’s establishment displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who fled or were forced from their homes in what the Palestinians call the “nakba,” or catastrophe. Many Palestinians are loathe to focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust for fear of undercutting their own national cause.

“It doesn’t serve our political interest to keep bringing up the Holocaust,” said Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “We are suffering from occupation and settlement expansion and fascist Israeli polices. That is what we should be stressing.”

But frequent Holocaust distortion and denial among Palestinians has only drawn further scrutiny to the tensions surrounding their relationship to the Holocaust. That unease may have started with Al-Husseini, the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem and a Palestinian Arab nationalist. He was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to their side, and whose antisemitism was well-documented.

More recently, Abbas has repeatedly incited various international uproars with speeches denounced as antisemitic Holocaust denial. In 2018, he repeated a claim about usury and Ashkenazi Jews similar to the one he made in his speech to Fatah members last month. Last year, he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

For Israel, Abbas’ record has fueled accusations that he is not to be trusted as a partner in peace negotiations to end the decadeslong conflict. Through decades of failed peace talks, Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that began administering parts of the occupied West Bank after the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.

Abbas has kept a tight grip on power for the last 17 years and his security forces have been accused of harshly cracking down on dissent. His authority has become deeply unpopular over its reviled security alliance with Israel and its failure to hold democratic elections.

The open letter signed by Palestinian academics this week also touched on what it described as the authority’s “increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule” and said Abbas had “forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people.”

Source: Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks – Yahoo! Voices

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Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Video has emerged of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, recently asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he said were their predatory lending practices, rather than their religion.

Mr. Abbas’s false claim drew swift condemnation from Israeli and European officials. It also fueled accusations that Mr. Abbas — an architect of interim peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s — is not genuinely committed to resolving the ongoing conflict.

In a speech late last month, Mr. Abbas said: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews.”

“No,” Mr. Abbas added. Jews were persecuted, he continued, because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”

Mr. Abbas also repeated a widely discredited theory that European, or Ashkenazi, Jews have no ancient roots in the Middle East. Instead, Mr. Abbas claimed that European Jews were the descendants of a nomadic Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism during the medieval period, and therefore were not victims of antisemitism.

“When we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism — the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites,” Mr. Abbas said.

Mr. Abbas’s comments were broadcast live on Palestinian television two weeks ago, in a speech to members of his secular political party, Fatah,

The remarks were brought to a wider audience on Wednesday, when the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group that mainly translates extremist comments by Arab and Iranian leaders, distributed a subtitled version of Mr. Abbas’s speech.

Mr. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that has administered parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the 1990s, when the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships signed interim peace accords.

His comments illustrated why he has developed a checkered reputation among Israeli and Western partners. Mr. Abbas was one of the chief negotiators in the peace process, and often is credited with helping to reduce tensions following a wave of violence in the 2000s. At times, he has also described the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.

But Mr. Abbas also has a long history of antisemitic remarks. He made similar comments in 2018 about usury and Ashkenazi Jews, and last year he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

In 1984 he published a book in which he condemned the Holocaust but also cited historians who disputed the widely accepted death toll of as many as six million Jews.

“This is the true face of Palestinian ‘leadership,’” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wrote on social media in response to Mr. Abbas’s latest speech.

“It is no wonder that mere hours ago a Palestinian teenage terrorist hacked innocent Israelis with a meat cleaver,” Mr. Erdan added, referring to an attack on Wednesday in the Old City of Jerusalem that wounded at least two people.

The European Union said in a statement that Mr. Abbas’s “historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region and serve no-one’s interests.”

The statement added: “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.”

Source: Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

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Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Not helpful:

Remarks by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust have been condemned as anti-Semitic by Israeli politicians and rights activists.

Mr Abbas told a meeting in the West Bank the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism.

He described their “social function” as “usury and banking and such”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said the remarks were “anti-Semitic and pathetic”.

Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, remarked in a tweet: “Mahmoud Abbas says money-lending Jews provoked Holocaust… Now there’s a peace partner.”

In New York, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Mr Abbas’s “anti-Semitic assertions”.

In its attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe during World War Two, Nazi Germany murdered some six million of them, building death camps to expedite the mass slaughter.

Driven by fanatical nationalism, the Nazis regarded Jews as a threat to Germany’s “racial purity”.

What did Abbas say exactly?
He was addressing a rare meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday.

It was a rare meeting of the PLO’s legislative body

Carried live on Palestinian TV, the 90-minute speech in Arabic included a section on the Palestinian leader’s view of the history of European Jewry, based on what he said were books by “Jewish Zionist authors”.

Jews in eastern and western Europe, he said, had been periodically subjected to massacres over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust.

“But why did this used to happen?” he asked. “They say, ‘It is because we are Jews.’ I will bring you three Jews, with three books who say that enmity towards Jews was not because of their religious identity but because of their social function.

“This is a different issue. So the Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury [unscrupulous money-lending] and banking and such.”

Mr Abbas also denied that Ashkenazi Jews – Jews from Germany and north-eastern Europe – were actually Semitic, saying, “They have no relation to Semitic people.” Ashkenazi Jews make up one of Israel’s biggest communities, giving the state a long line of prime ministers, including Mr Netanyahu.

It is not the first time the Palestinian leader’s views on the Holocaust have caused offence.

A student dissertation he wrote in the early 1980s argued there had been a “secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism” before the war, and appeared to question the death toll of six million.

He later played down allegations of Holocaust denial, saying in 2003: “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”

How did the Anti-Defamation League respond?

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the ADL, which campaigns to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people”, dismissed the Palestinian leader’s “ahistorical and pseudo-academic assertions”.

“The Palestinian President’s latest diatribe reflects once again the depth and persistency of the anti-Semitic attitudes he harbors,” he said in a statement.

“With public speeches like these, it is not surprising that under Abbas’ leadership, the Palestinian Authority has failed to renounce and combat Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement, including narratives that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic persecution, and which deny or diminish the millennial Jewish presence in and connection to the Land of Israel.”

via Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

My friend and Mid-East expert Arun recently posted on the Arte film, Israel-Palestine: one land, twice promised, link here, noting the balance and comprehensiveness of this two hour doc.

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Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust – NYTimes.com

2014/04/28 Leave a comment

Some of the background behind Abbas’s statement on the Holocaust. While the article argues the timing is terrible, given yet another Hamas-Fatah reconciliation effort, it is nevertheless significant. And sometimes timing is deliberate to counter other events and decisions, as it is in many countries:

The rabbi who prompted the Holocaust statement, Marc Schneier, is the founder of both the celebrity-studded modern Orthodox Hampton Synagogue and the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a 25-year-old group that fosters relations between Jews and Muslims, blacks and Latinos. Rabbi Schneier said he met with Mr. Abbas at his West Bank headquarters for about 40 minutes last Sunday to enlist his support against European crackdowns on ritual animal slaughter and human circumcision, and for a program that would establish partnerships between Palestinian mosques and Israeli synagogues.

When he suggested that it would be “very significant, very meaningful” for Mr. Abbas to make a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day, Rabbi Schneier recalled in an interview, the president agreed “before I could finish my statement.”

“It was very heartfelt, very genuine,” Rabbi Schneier said.

“Of course he expressed his frustration on the negotiations, on the peace process — I’ll leave that up to the political leaders,” he added. “I’m a great believer that Muslim-Jewish reconciliation worldwide transcends the Israeli-Palestinian process. We’re working on the spiritual peace process.”

Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust – NYTimes.com.

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