Abbas faces major Israeli campaign over recent remarks

Various Israeli politicians and figures have launched a major campaign to discredit Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after publishing a video clip of a speech he delivered before Fatah’s Revolutionary Council in its recent meetings in Ramallah.

Abbas spoke about the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s genocide of European Jews. He suggested that Hitler killed the Jews not because they were Jews, but “because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth.” The PA leader also said that, “European Jews are not Semites, they have nothing to do with Semitism.” They were killed by Hitler, he said, because he considered them to be corrupting European society.

It is known that President Abbas has a doctorate in political science. His thesis was about the secret relations between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement.

Following Abbas’s recent remarks, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, wrote on X: “This is the true face of Palestinian ‘leadership’. Just as Abbas blames the Jews for the Holocaust, he also blames the Jews for all the Middle East’s issues. While he spreads this pure anti-Semitism, he also pays Palestinian terrorists for murdering Israelis and publicly commends Palestinian terrorism.”

The leader of Yisrael Beiteinu Party, far-right extremist Avigdor Lieberman, described the PA president’s statements as “scandalous and anti-Semitic”. He accused Abbas of being a staunch supporter of “terrorism” who is working to prosecute Israeli soldiers in international courts on charges of war crimes. “Abu Mazen [Abbas] also published a full doctoral dissertation on Holocaust denial, and today he proved once again that he is an extremist man, who is the sworn enemy of the State of Israel.”

The Yad Vashem Museum, Israel’s ambassador to Germany and a number of the apartheid state’s ambassadors in Europe also attacked Abbas, accusing him of inciting against the Jews and denying “the truth of the Holocaust.” 

As of this morning, neither Israeli government officials nor ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition had commented on the issue.