PA leaders appropriate the Holocaust as crime against Palestinians

• Abbas’ religious affairs advisor: “It may be that what the Palestinian people is experiencing now was not experienced by humanity in World War II… Now they are committing a worse and more criminal holocaust against the Palestinian people”
• Palestinian National Council member: “I compare Netanyahu to Joseph Goebbels”
• Palestinian National Council presidency: “The women of Palestine…are suffering at the Nazi military checkpoints”
• Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “The scope of the aggression against the Gaza Strip is unprecedented in history…even in World War II”

For years, the Palestinian Authority has been defining its situation as a holocaust tragedy that is happening to Palestinians. Now, senior PA leaders invoke the Holocaust to say that the Palestinian experience is on a level worse than the atrocities committed against the Jews. This is all in an effort to demonize the Jews and thus to incite violence against them.

In an interview with the Voice of Palestine posted on Facebook, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who is PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, said:

“It may be that what the Palestinian people is experiencing now was not experienced by humanity in World War II, and was not experienced by humanity during [any] war. The tragedies, massacres, and holocaust in the operation by Israel, the occupation state, in the Gaza Strip did not happen even in World War II, which they speak about all the time, about the Holocaust that they underwent. Now they are committing a worse and more criminal holocaust against the Palestinian people.”

[PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Facebook page, Feb. 10, 2024]

In another post on Facebook, the same Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who is also the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah judge and the chairman of the Supreme Council for Shari'ah Justice, introduced another video of his with text that said: 

“The Gaza Strip is being subjected to a holocaust and famine as a result of the Israeli aggression and the war of annihilation that Israel is carrying out under American auspices.”

In the video of his interview with Egyptian Extra TV News, Al-Habbash went on to say:

“We stand before a holocaust, facing a massacre, facing a human tragedy that is taking place before the eyes of the world, and there are still those, and more precisely the US, who are continuing to give a green light for this aggression to continue claiming more lives."

[PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Facebook page, Feb. 24, 2024]

Another PA official of significance, Mundir Mar’i, who is a Palestinian National Council member and the branch secretary of the Fatah movement in Austria, said in a YouTube video posted on the Falestinona channel, which serves Fatah’s Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon:

“I compare Netanyahu to [Joseph] Goebbels, who was the Nazi propaganda minister…. Now we are going in the same direction and on the same path. Goebbels was the propaganda minister, and now he has parallels in the form of Benjamin Netanyahu, [Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel] Smotrich, and [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben Gvir.”

[Falestinona (Fatah’s Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon), YouTube channel, Feb. 10, 2024]

The Palestinian National Council, which is the legislative body of the PLO, made further use of the term Nazi in a statement:

“March 8 [2024] (i.e., International Women’s Day) is arriving this year at a time when the women of Palestine are experiencing the darkest days in modern history, both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem (sic., apparent intent is “and in the Gaza Strip”), and are suffering at the Nazi military checkpoints.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 9, 2024]

These statements follow a CBC interview with Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub in which he said:

“The scope of the aggression against the Gaza Strip is unprecedented in history. In other words, there has been no precedent to the scope of the victims, the scope of the destruction, and the scope of the killing and genocide, even in World War II.”

[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Feb. 3, 2024]

The attempts by these PA officials to reframe the Holocaust as a Palestinian experience is part of their subversive campaign to paint the Jewish people as the monster, and thus to justify terror. By drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, the campaign reveals itself as one of the manifestations of Antisemitism described by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It is time for the world to recognize Palestinian Authority Antisemitism and to begin condemning it as it condemns Antisemitism everywhere else.