The attempted Nazi extermination of the Jewish race remains a foundational element of modern Israel’s reality. “Never again” takes on new meaning when the Jews have a sovereign state and army of their own. But did you know that Israel’s supposedly “moderate” peace partner, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, is an advocate of a particularly-nefarious Nazi-inspired conspiracy theory regarding the Holocaust?
In 1982, while a student at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, Abbas wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject. The title of his study was “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” which promoted the notion, first introduced by Nazis themselves in the aftermath of the war, that powerful Jewish figures had collaborated with the Nazi leadership to exploit the perceived mass suffering of their own people to justify the creation of the State of Israel in the Middle East.
Abbas was clearly fascinated by Nazi propaganda. In the dissertation, the Palestinian leader accuses the Jewish leadership already established in the British Mandate for Palestine of actively participating in the Holocaust by sabotaging efforts to save European Jews. The rational according to Abbas, was that the more victims they could chalk up, the more fuel the Jewish leadership had for demanding the creation of a Jewish state. He concluded that the death toll had not been nearly high enough to sufficiently aid this endeavor, and suggested that the figure of six million exterminated Jews was a gross exaggeration.
Nor did Abbas ever retract his earlier position, even after ostensibly entering into negotiations with Israel in good faith. On the contrary, in an interview he recently gave in Arabic, Abbas said that he could write another 60 books on the subject of Nazi-Zionist cooperation.
In 2014, Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, then a lecturer at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, paid a heavy price when he attempted to teach his students the truth about the Holocaust. Dajani took 27 of his Palestinian students to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and examine the evidence for themselves. Upon his return, Dajani was accused of treason, received death threats, and was ultimately forced to resign his academic post. He is today living in the US, fearful of ever returning to the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories.
In an interview with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz several years ago, Dajani said that the position held by Abbas is the prevailing view among Palestinians regarding the Holocaust, as that’s what has long been taught in local schools. “As children, we were told that the Holocaust was a Zionist plot and it did not really take place,” he said, adding that “the message was that this was a plot aimed at mobilizing empathy for the Jews and safeguarding the establishment of the State of Israel.”
Clearly, any questioning of this narrative is met in Palestinian society with near-violent opposition. Any degree of empathy with the Jews is seen as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause, calling into question the viability of current peace efforts.
