Special Report (update): PA use of Holocaust imagery during Gaza War
Special Report (update)
Holocaust imagery and terminology
used by the Palestinian Authority
during the Gaza War
"[Israel] did more evil and more horrifying things
than what happened in the Nazi crematoria"
Former PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs, Issa Karake
Ma'an, independent Palestinian news agency, July 25, 2014
"The Israeli occupation...
perpetrates the most heinous forms
of Holocaust against the Palestinian people."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 23, 2014]
"Israel has murdered
over two million Palestinian children...
over two million Palestinian children...
Jewish children murdered in the Nazi Holocaust...
did not exceed a million and a quarter."
Former PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs, Issa Karake,
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 23, 2014
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 23, 2014
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial center: in order to incite and inflame hatred, desecrates the memory of the Holocaust." [July 24, 2014] |
by Itamar Marcus
Executive Summary
Part 1: Israel is worse than the Nazis
Part 2: Israel is reenacting the Holocaust
Part 3: Netanyahu is like Hitler and the Nazis
Part 4: Additional examples and longer segments
Part 4: Additional examples and longer segments
 |
Image from Fatah Facebook - "The Main Page," July 9, 2014 |
During the Gaza operation, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, both headed by Mahmoud Abbas, actively and repeatedly desecrated the memory of the Holocaust by comparing Israel's measures against Hamas to the Nazi genocide:
"[Israel has] become adorers of Nazism, and implement that barbaric model on the flesh of our children."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 26, 2014]
Often the PA claimed Israel was worse than the Nazis:
"Israel... has surpassed Hitler's massacres... By calling Israel Nazi, sadist and fascist for its present actions, we are letting it off lightly."
[Fatah leader in Gaza Atef Abu Saif,
PA TV, July 21, 2014]
At times, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was the focus of the PA hate speech:
"Benjamin Netanyahu is a descendant of the Nazis, worships Hitler's ways and imitates him in all the Holocausts he has perpetrated."
Fatah leader and official PA daily columnist Yahya Rabah
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 3, 2014]
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial center, condemned what it called "demagogic abuse of Holocaust imagery and language" as desecration of the memory of the Holocaust:
"As an institution dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, we are also gravely concerned by the demagogic abuse of Holocaust imagery and language which distorts the past as well as the current reality for political purposes. Exploiting these terms from the Holocaust, in order to incite and inflame hatred, desecrates the memory of the Holocaust."
[http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/pressroom/pressreleases
/pr_details.asp?cid=887, July 24, 2014]
/pr_details.asp?cid=887, July 24, 2014]
PA and Fatah leaders and official news outlets used the following Holocaust comparisons and hate expressions to define Israelis and/or Israel's actions:
- "Holocaust unlike any that has been recorded"
- "Reenacting the Holocaust"
- "Surpassed Nazism and fascism"
- "Descendant of the Nazis"
- "The new Nazis"
- "Opened its gates to the death factories"
- "Holocaust state"
- "Genocidal war"
- "Holocaust war"
- "Scum is what this Hebrew state is"
- "Nazi Israeli mentality"
- "Flinging its neo-fascist flames"
- "Barbarity, arrogance, and bloodletting"
- "Surpassed Hitler's massacres"
- "Nazi, sadist and fascist"
- "The Nazi crimes"
- "[Gaza] reminded the world of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, after the atom bombs had been dropped"
- "Israel, the rogue state, which is still blackmailing Germany, Europe and humanity with the Holocaust"
In addition to embracing comparisons between Israel's Gaza operation and the Holocaust, articles in the official PA daily also included demonization and hate speech, as typified in the following description of Israeli soldiers:
"Robotic soldiers from hell, burning with extremism like fiery devils, possessed by the culture of murder and death."
[Fatah MP (until recently PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs) Issa Karake,
Ma'an, independent Palestinian news agency, July 25, 2014]
The official PA daily used its Holocaust comparison as "proof" that Israel has no right to exist:
"This war has proved once again that Israel is a completely artificial state without historic or moral roots, a myth produced by the settlement wave - a fact that prevents it from living normally. As long as it exists, it will only produce things that are against humanity... Benjamin Netanyahu is a descendant of the Nazis [who] worships Hitler's ways and imitates him in all the Holocausts he has perpetrated."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 3, 2014]
Palestinian Media Watch has reported that the PA and Fatah regularly desecrate the memory of the Holocaust with misappropriated Holocaust terminology. All of the examples in this Special Report were published during and immediately after the 2014 Gaza war, and are from official PA and Fatah sources. Mahmoud Abbas is chairman of both the PA and Fatah.
(PMW released a report last month on PA use of Holocaust imagery during the Gaza war. However, as the Holocaust desecration by the PA has continued unabated PMW felt it was important to release this updated report documenting the full extent. Even after this report was finalized, PMW researchers documented three additional examples of Holocaust desecration that are not included in this report.)
Parts 1-3 of this report are brief quotes of the PA and Fatah comparing Israel to Nazism and the Holocaust. Parts 1-3 follow below. Part 4 includes these same citations with longer context and additional sources:
Part 1: Israel is worse than the Nazis
"[Israel] did more evil and more horrifying things than what happened in the Nazi crematoria... Scum is what this Hebrew state is... a Holocaust state."
[PA MP and former PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Issa Karake,
Ma'an, independent Palestinian news agency, July 25, 2014]
"A Holocaust unlike any that has been recorded in history!"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 3, 2014]
"Since 1948, Israel has murdered over two million Palestinian children... the number of Jewish children murdered in the Nazi Holocaust... did not exceed a million and a quarter."
[Former PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Issa Karake,
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 23, 2014]
"Israel... has surpassed Hitler's massacres... By calling Israel Nazi, sadist and fascist for its present actions, we are letting it off lightly."
[Fatah leader in Gaza Atef Abu Saif,
PA TV, July 21, 2014]
"The new Nazis are committing more heinous crimes against our people than those committed by the Nazis against humanity."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 24, 2014]
"Another aspect of Nazism. Few European cities and states in the 1940s experienced what Gaza has experienced."
[Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, Jibril Rajoub,
Al-Ghad Al-Arabi TV, and posted on Rajoub's Facebook page, Aug. 6, 2014]
The "new Nazis in the Israeli government of death" use "white phosphorus and all existing types of poisons and biological and chemical weapons."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 26, 2014]
"No war criminal of the 20th century ever did what Israel has done."
[PLO Ambassador to India, Adli Sadeq,
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 7, 2014]
"The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis is the same as is being perpetrated by the occupation against our people, [but Israel's] is even more severe."
Former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 6, 2014]
Part 2: Israel is reenacting the Holocaust
"The Israeli Death and Holocaust State has murdered the hope for a better future."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 22, 2014]
"The insane Israeli war... revealed the bleeding face of the Zionist ethnic cleansing state, which is reenacting the Holocaust against the Arab Palestinian people."
Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, former advisor to then PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 13, 2014]
"[Israel is committing a] mass extermination as the Nazis did in Europe in the 1940s."
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub
[Awdah independent Palestinian TV channel, July 14, 2014]
"[Gazans are] undergoing the Holocaust of the 21st century by the barbaric occupation, which takes pride in murdering children."
District Governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghannam
[Ma'an, independent Palestinian news agency, July 31, 2014]
"This state [Israel] has merited a first-class Nazi decoration."
[Official Palestinian Authority TV, Aug. 28, 2014]
"The behavior of Israel, which has exclusively adopted a method of killing and destruction, is nothing more than a new version of Nazism."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 25, 2014]
"The crimes... cannot be described as anything less than crimes that will be cited in history as the Nazi crimes were."
Adnan Al-Damiri, spokesman of the PA Security Forces
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 7, 2014]
"We are facing the largest mechanism of war, destruction and killing, which vies with the Nazi and fascist [mechanisms]."
Bakr Abu Bakr, member Fatah Revolutionary Council
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 7, 2014]
"Children have become the fuel for Israel's Holocaust and war against Gaza."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 15, 2014]
"The international silence... [grants] the Nazi occupation government a green light to burn childhood in Palestine."
District Governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghannam
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 21, 2014]
"The Israeli land, sea and air war machine has been continuing its fascist Holocaust against the Palestinian Arab people."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 21, 2014]
"The Israeli occupation and aggression state... invades and perpetrates the most heinous forms of Holocaust against the Palestinian people in the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 23, 2014]
"The execution of hundreds of Palestinian children in a Holocaust similar to the Nazi Holocausts."
Member of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza, Yahya Rabah
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 9, 2014]
"The victim [Jews] assuming the role of the Nazi."
PLO Ambassador to India, Adli Sadeq
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 9, 2014]
"Hatem Abd Al-Qader, [who is] responsible for the Jerusalem [portfolio in Fatah]said that the Palestinians are facing Jewish racism and a new Nazism."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 17, 2014]
Part 3: Netanyahu is like Hitler and the Nazis
"Benjamin Netanyahu is a descendant of the Nazis, worships Hitler's ways and imitates him in all the Holocausts he has perpetrated."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Aug. 3, 2014]
"Netanyahu has surpassed Nazism and fascism in the genocidal war..."
Fatah spokesman Osama Al-Qawasmi
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 21, 2014]
"Hitler's Nazism... score[s] a stunning victory today through Netanyahu's actions, for which Hitler is applauding him joyously."
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 6, 2014]