Video has emerged of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, lately asserting that European Jews had been persecuted by Hitler due to what he mentioned had been their predatory lending practices, reasonably than their faith.
Mr. Abbas’s false declare drew swift condemnation from Israeli and European officers. It additionally fueled accusations that Mr. Abbas — an architect of interim peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians within the Nineteen Nineties — shouldn’t be genuinely dedicated to resolving the continuing battle.
In a speech late final month, Mr. Abbas mentioned: “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 had been persecuted, he continued, due to “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”
Mr. Abbas additionally repeated a extensively discredited principle that European, or Ashkenazi, Jews don’t have any historical roots within the Middle East. Instead, Mr. Abbas claimed that European Jews had been the descendants of a nomadic Turkic tribe that transformed to Judaism in the course of the medieval interval, and subsequently weren’t victims of antisemitism.
“When we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism — the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites,” Mr. Abbas mentioned.
Mr. Abbas’s feedback had been broadcast reside on Palestinian tv two weeks in the past, in a speech to members of his secular political occasion, Fatah,
The remarks had been delivered to a wider viewers on Wednesday, when the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group that primarily interprets extremist feedback by Arab and Iranian leaders, distributed a subtitled model of Mr. Abbas’s speech.
Mr. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous physique that has administered elements of the Israeli-occupied West Bank for the reason that Nineteen Nineties, when the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships signed interim peace accords.
His feedback illustrated why he has developed a checkered popularity amongst Israeli and Western companions. Mr. Abbas was one of many chief negotiators within the peace course of, and sometimes is credited with serving to to scale back tensions following a wave of violence within the 2000s. At occasions, he has additionally described the Holocaust as against the law towards humanity.
But Mr. Abbas additionally has an extended historical past of antisemitic remarks. He made related feedback in 2018 about usury and Ashkenazi Jews, and final yr he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” towards Palestinians.
In 1984 he revealed a ebook during which he condemned the Holocaust but in addition cited historians who disputed the extensively accepted loss of life 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 newest 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 assault on Wednesday within the Old City of Jerusalem that wounded a minimum of two individuals.
The European Union mentioned in a press release 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 assertion added: “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com