Jonathan Feldstein -These Are Our Peace Partners
When they’re not shooting rockets at us, inciting terror attacks, and celebrating and paying monthly salaries to those who commit them, they are distorting and trivializing the Holocaust.
What would one expect from a people whose leader, now in his 17th year of a four-year term, wrote his Soviet “doctoral thesis” denying and distorting the Holocaust.
This week, Palestinian Authority president “Dr.” Mahmoud Abbas doubled down on the lies he’s been perpetrating for decades as part of the myth of “Palestinian” identity which have been crafted since the founding of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s, and whose raison d’etre is to delegitimize and destroy Israel.
As much as “Dr.” Abbas continues to portray the myth of the Holocaust, he does so in the context of building up the myth of a “Palestinian” people that existed as a distinct ethnic or national group before 1948, or even before 1964 when the PLO was born. He goads the world to believe that Israel somehow “occupied” a Palestinian state that ever existed, claiming that Israel and the Jewish people have no rights in the Land of Israel, first renamed “Palestine” by a conquering Roman Empire some 1800 years ago. Countless other foreign entities “occupied” “Palestine” for centuries, with the most recent being the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), the British, and Egypt and Jordan respectively before Jewish sovereignty was restored and Israel was reborn.
So, what’s the “news” in all of this? Why even mention Abbas and his history of Holocaust denial and distortion now when it’s been his MO for decades? Because this week he doubled down and overplayed his hand, renewing the same tired and disgusting lies. But he did it in Germany.
Unlike Abbas and the “Palestinian” people, Germany has taken responsibility for its role in murdering Jews. Accepting responsibility for the Holocaust, to it’s credit and even benefit, Germany made countless efforts at reparations, reconciliation, and apologies. Abbas has done no such thing, not only not taking responsibility for, but deflecting questions about Palestinian Arab terror, and using that as a way to blame Israel.
That’s what happened this week. When asked a question about taking responsibility and apologizing for the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack in the 1972 Munich Olympics games in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered, Abbas cracked open further his already open can of worms and decided to deflect blame on Israel for decades of alleged crimes. No contrition, no apology, no taking responsibility as his German hosts have done for their crimes.
Asked whether, as Palestinian Authority leader, he planned to apologize to Israel and Germany for the Munich terror attack on its 50th anniversary, Abbas responded by making up allegations of atrocities committed by Israel since 1947.
“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas ranted. “I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed….50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts,” he said, carefully pronouncing “Holocaust” in English.
It was reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was standing next to Abbas on the podium, was visibly disturbed. But Scholz made no effort to stop, reject, or contradict the Palestinian Authority leader’s statement. While that is shameful, especially in Germany, it is at least somewhat redeeming that an uproar has ensued throughout German media and society for the Chancellor not being more immediately outspoken.
Indeed, the Chancellor made a huge mistake. He should have rebuked Abbas on the spot rather than making a statement to German media after the fact saying, “Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, German media giant BILD summed up Germanys shock, anger, and responsibility that there was “not a word of dissent in the face of the worst Holocaust relativization that a head of government has ever uttered in the chancellor’s office.”
In taking responsibility as architect and perpetrator of the Holocaust, Germany understands that the word Holocaust should only be used to describe the Nazis’ singular crime of murdering six million Jews.
As much as Abbas’ remarks created an uproar in Israel, now it’s also a domestic political issue as well. German opposition leader Friedrich Merz, of Germany’s Christian Democrat party, stated that Chancellor Scholz “should have contradicted the Palestinian President in no uncertain terms and asked him to leave the house!”
Indeed. In addition to ejecting Abbas and putting him on the next plane back to Ramallah, he should be made persona non grata in any country with any sense of human decency and respect for historical truth.
Rather than allowing Abbas and other Palestinian terror leaders to sit at the table and continue to overplay their hand, it’s time to turn them away from the table altogether until they reform. They cannot continue to sit at the table and play 48 and 67 and expect to win, or do anything positive for their people.
And it’s time for Germany to double down on its responsibility and lead this charge rather than allowing the toxic and evil words of the Palestinian Authority leader to sit unchallenged.
I don’t deny the reality of living next to neighbors who have the identity that they have. Our respective prosperity is not mutually exclusive. We can get along and co-exist, and in many ways, we do that now. But achieving the elusive “peace” that people aspire to, that I pray and dream for, that’s harder, and made even more so by the Palestinian Authority, its leaders like Abbas, and other Palestinian Arab terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad which focus on destroying Israel as the means to achieve statehood.
If these are our peace partners, it’ll be a cold day in hell where all the terrorists rot before we get close to peace, if Palestinian Arabs cannot take responsibility for the crimes they have committed for decades, apologize, and stop delegitimizing Israel and denying and distorting the Holocaust. I’m waiting.
