Abbas slammed

Mahmoud Abbas “knew exactly what he was doing last week” when he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians, ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin says.

The Palestinian leader made the charge at a press conference in Berlin with German chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“An abiding source of support for Israel comes from an appreciation of the Jewish quest for security and a home of their own arising from the Holocaust,” Ryvchin said this week.

“Abbas understands that if he destroys the language used to describe these events, the events themselves will lose meaning, allowing sympathy and support for Israel to shift to the Palestinians.”

But he said, “Abbas has only succeeded in offending the Germans and drawn attention to the unwavering ability of Palestinian leaders to stand on the wrong side of history.”

Ryvchin said the statement has “exploded the myth” that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism.

“His ostensible critique of Israel seamlessly transitioned into Holocaust minimisation and distortion,” he said.

“This is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the Palestinian leadership.”

AIJAC executive director Colin Rubenstein called Abbas’ words “deplorable, disgusting and abhorrent, particularly as they were made in Germany”.

“Abbas has a history of making similarly indefensible comments on the subject – and no condemnation for them can be too strong,” he said.

ZFA president Jeremy Leibler also expressed disgust. “President Abbas knew full well the impact his comment would have, on German soil.

“While we were encouraged by Scholz’s eventual rejection of Abbas’s comments, we also note the long history of Holocaust denial and the peddling of other myths in Palestinian Authority-owned media, almost always without international censure.”