TPS exclusive: PA source states Mahmoud Abbas’ time as its leader may be numbered after his Holocaust comments
A source in the Palestinian Authority (PA) told TPS on Wednesday that the “unfortunate” words of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) accusing Israel of committing “50 holocausts” against Palestinians were a self-inflicted wound for international public opinion toward the Palestinian cause.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in New York City in 2018. Credit: A Katz/Shutterstock.
The same source added that this may be the last significant event in the Palestinian efforts to bring about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that his words may even end up being an epitaph for Abbas’ political career.
The source added, “Abu Mazen was expected to not say such things, and especially not on German soil.”
Mahmoud Abbas has a long history as a serial Holocaust denier and was forced to apologise for comments of this type several times in the past.
In 1982, Abbas wrote his doctorate in Russian at Patrice Lumumba University titled “The connections between Nazism and Zionism between the years 1933 and 1945.”
This work was the basis of his 1984 book “The Other Face – The Secret Connections Between Nazism and Zionism.”
Anti-semites and Israel haters have long since claimed that Jews exaggerated the number of people who perished in the Holocaust in order to further the cause of Zionism. Abu Mazen himself claimed that only 896,000 Jews actually perished.
Abu Mazen added that there were not enough Jews in the world at the time to support the claim of six million murdered and that many died during the course of the fighting in World War II.
Mahmoud Abbas’ book became a bestseller among Holocaust deniers and also led to conflicts with Jewish organisations. When Abu Mazen was appointed the Palestinian Prime Minister and later the Chairman of the Authority, he denied the things that were brought against him as a Holocaust denier and condemned it, but he did not explicitly withdraw from the principles of his work.
In 2010, for example, in front of the Jewry of the United States, Abu Mazen said that he recognised the Holocaust and even added that he sent official Palestinian representatives to Holocaust ceremonies, but in 2013, in an interview with the Lebanese media, he repeated his claim that there was a connection between Nazism and Zionism in exchange for receiving the Palestinian lands.
In 2018, Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech before the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah in which he said that the holocaust was not caused by anti-Semitism but rather by the role and social behaviour of the Jews, who were mainly involved in banking and high-interest loans.
Mahmoud Abbas refuses to recognise the right of the Jewish state alongside the Palestinian state and in his speeches claimed, among other things, “Ethiopian immigrants who live here and former Soviet Union expatriates are not Jews.”
His associates, including those in charge of the relationship with Israeli society, speak at meetings about “the facts emerging from the protocols of the elders of Zion” and expand on the exploitation by the State of Israel and the Zionist movement of the memory of the Holocaust, the dimensions of which they inflate while distorting the historical facts.
A review of Mahmoud Abbas’ statements, together with a study of the messages emerging from Palestinian textbooks, it can be determined that his comments made in Germany on Tuesday actually revealed the general Palestinian mindset.
