Abbas did not deny the Holocaust, falsely claims PA daily, while implicitly comparing Israel to the Nazis
Excerpt of a column by Bassem Barhoum, regular columnist for the official PA daily
Headline: “Shaked hides behind the Holocaust in order to perpetuate the occupation”
“Israeli Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked thinks that she is smart and that she invented something new by evading [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas’ invitation and hiding behind the Nazi Holocaust (see note below -Ed.). This is the first time that a senior Israeli official is using this reason to evade meeting President Mahmoud Abbas…
Shaked invented a new reason… when she cheaply claimed that President Mahmoud Abbas denies the Nazi Holocaust, and therefore she does not want to meet with him. While inventing this empty claim, this same extremist and fascist right-winger forgot that she leads a state that constitutes a racist military and settler occupying power, and that her hands and those of all the terrorists of her ilk in Israel are soaked in the blood of Palestinian children.
I do not want to get into this false accusation, because it is the right of President Mahmoud Abbas – like any researcher – to check historical facts for which the Palestinian people has paid dearly, and the meaning of this research is not a denial of the Holocaust. One of these facts is that the leaders of the Zionist movement went all around Europe and developed connections to achieve their goals, but this does not mean that he denied the Holocaust (sic., in his thesis Abbas challenged the number of Holocaust victims and accused the Zionist movement of culpability).
The 1933 agreement between the Nazi party and the Zionist movement, which was meant to encourage the immigration of Jews to Palestine, is perhaps one of the proofs of this, and this requires research (the 1933-1939 Ha’avara Agreement was an arrangement for Jews to leave Germany for the Land of Israel –Ed.). Even though later on during World War II Hitler annulled this agreement, many Israeli historians indicated attempts by extremist Zionist factions to contact Nazi Germany, out of a belief that Britain had begun to go back on establishing the Jewish state at the beginning of the 1940s, and also because it temporarily limited the Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The question is why President Mahmoud Abbas invited Shaked, and why Shaked evaded it on this lowly excuse? I estimate that in his meeting with ministers from the leftist party Meretz in the Israeli government, the president wanted to convey the message that he is prepared to sit with any senior Israeli official to reach a political agreement and bring about a just peace.
Through them he extended an invitation to the most extremist member of the occupation government, Ayelet Shaked, in order to prove who is the side that is truly responsible for missing the opportunities for peace and for the continuation of the bloody conflict.
And what about this right-wing racist? It is clear that she does not want to deviate from the policy of expansion, settlement, and occupation, or from the dream of greater Israel…
Just as [Israeli Prime Minister Naftali] Bennett refused to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas on the lowly excuse that he submitted lawsuits against the war criminals in the occupation army… so too the excuse of his comrade in the extremist ‘Jewish Home’ party (sic., their party is Yamina) was no less lowly. The goal of them both was clear, and it certainly is not to show sympathy to the Nazis’ victims, but rather to use this great pain to perpetuate the occupation.”
In response to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas saying he wanted to meet with her, Israeli Minister of Interior Ayelet Shaked wrote on her Twitter account on Oct. 3, 2021: “It won’t happen. I won’t meet with a Holocaust denier who is suing Israeli soldiers at The Hague and paying murderers of Jews. Good night.”
