
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, at a press conference in Berlin on 16 August. Photo: Wolfgang KummDPA.
Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond
From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, at a press conference in Berlin on 16 August. Photo: Wolfgang KummDPA.
By Ali Abunimah – Aug 17, 2022
European and Israeli officials were brimming with outrage and sanctimony on Wednesday over comments made by Mahmoud Abbas during a visit to Germany.
Standing next to Chancellor Olaf Scholz a day earlier, the Palestinian Authority leaderĀ accusedĀ Israel of committing ā50 holocaustsā against the Palestinians.
Scholz took to Twitter to declare himself ādisgusted by the outrageous remarksā made by Abbas.
āFor us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable,ā Scholz said. āI condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.ā
Ich bin zutiefst empört über die unsäglichen Aussagen des palästinensischen Präsidenten Mahmoud #Abbas. Gerade für uns Deutsche ist jegliche Relativierung des Holocaust unerträglich und inakzeptabel. Ich verurteile jeden Versuch, die Verbrechen des Holocaust zu leugnen.
— Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz (@Bundeskanzler) August 17, 2022
Armin Laschet, a prominent right-wing German politician and failed candidate for chancellor, even claimed that Abbasā words were the āmost disgusting speechā ever heard in the German Chancellery ā apparently elevating the PA leader to a place in history worse than Hitler.
RELATED CONTENT: Palestine: 44 Killed in Israeli Bombardment of Besieged Gaza (+Ceasefire Declared)
The PLO leader would have gained sympathy if he had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics 1972. Accusing Israel of ā50 Holocaustsā instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery pic.twitter.com/35O8QYcPYt
— Armin Laschet (@ArminLaschet) August 16, 2022
ThisĀ condemnationĀ wasĀ echoedĀ by aĀ chorusĀ of officials from the European Union ā which is fresh fromĀ endorsingĀ Israelās bombing of civilians in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid ā no doubt eager to distract what little international attention there is to IsraelāsĀ latest murder spreeĀ ā quickly chimed in.
āMahmoud Abbas accusing Israel of having committed ā50 Holocaustsā while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace, but a monstrous lie,ā the man who recently said IsraelĀ wouldnāt apologizeĀ for killing children in Gaza,Ā stated.
āSix million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children,ā Lapid added. āHistory will never forgive him.ā
Even German state mediaĀ is not claimingĀ that Abbas ādeniedā the Holocaust ā as Scholz charged.
Abbas himself laterĀ clarifiedĀ ā undoubtedly in an attempt to appease the PAās enraged European paymasters ā that his comment in Germany was āwas not intended to deny the singularity of the Holocaust that occurred in the last century.ā
Rather, Abbas said wanted to highlight āthe crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces.ā
āThese crimes have not stopped to this day,ā the PA leader added, accurately.
It is legitimate to debate whether such comparisons are useful, but they are not rare.
The words of Lapidās father
Indeed, a few years ago Yair Lapidās own father, the late Yosef āTommyā Lapid, compared the daily persecution of Palestinians by Israeli Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron to the persecution of Jews in Europe just before the Holocaust.
āIt was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn,ā the elder Lapid, then chair of the advisory council of Israelās Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial,Ā said in 2007.
I wonder if @YairLapid remembers when his late father, Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, compared the daily crimes of the Zionists against Palestinians to those of the Nazis against Jews. In case he's forgotten, here's a reminder. https://t.co/6W9eleFmHh https://t.co/FGdoLOrSDy pic.twitter.com/ZdtqFd5n8J
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) August 17, 2022
In a similar spirit, Israeli general Yair Golan compared Israel to Nazi Germany during a Holocaust remembrance day speech six years ago.
āIf there is one thing that frightens me about the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying the revolting trends that occurred in Europe as a whole, and in Germany in particular, some 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of those trends here, among us, in 2016,ā the generalĀ said.
Presumably learning the lessons of history ā as Holocaust memorialists insist we do ā means examining and debating contemporary events in the light of Germanyās crimes.
As United Nations cultural agency UNESCOĀ states, Holocaust education āprovides a starting point to examine warning signs that can indicate the potential for mass atrocity.ā
But according to Scholz, this isĀ verbotenĀ ā at least for Palestinians. Indeed, the German chancellorās insistence on the āsingularityā of the Holocaust only seems to be deployed when it is useful to shield Israel.
Ukrainian leader minimizes Holocaust
In April, for instance, andĀ not for the first time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr ZelenskyĀ assertedĀ that the Russian invasion of his country was worse even than the Nazi occupation during World War II.
On another occasion, speaking to Israeli lawmakers, Zelensky claimed Russia was carrying out a āfinal solutionā against Ukraine, using a term usually reserved for the Nazisā plans for the murder of millions of Jews.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German occupiers and their Ukrainian collaborators murdered at least half a million Jews during the Holocaust.
I donāt recall torrents of outrage from German or EU leaders about Zelenskyās shameless minimization of the German and Ukrainian genocide of Ukrainian Jews andĀ Poles.
If anyone is trivializing the Holocaust, it is European and Israeli leaders, and Zionist organizations who weaponize the memory of murdered Jews to justify Zionist colonization and occupation of Palestine, and the relentless murder of Palestinians that goes with it.
As Columbia University professor Joseph MassadĀ observes, āIsraeli Zionists have appropriated events in Jewish history, including the Holocaust, for propagandistic purposes to assert their ārightā to Palestine ā a land to which they had laid their suspect colonial claim half a century before the genocide.ā
āBy appropriating the Holocaust, Israel asserts that any acknowledgment of the genocide is an acknowledgment of Israelās āright to exist as a Jewish state,ā while any attempt to deny this right is to deny the Holocaust,ā Massad adds.
RELATED CONTENT: The Liberation of Palestine Is the Liberation of the World
Historically, Massad notes, the Palestine Liberation Organization āalways made a point of demonstrating its sympathy with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and condemning the Nazis.ā
But Israel and its backers rejected this solidarity because at the time the PLO refused to recognize and accept Israelās claims to the land of the Palestinians.
Germanyās āget out of jail freeā card
To this day, Israel and its supporters reject as insincere any recognition of the Holocaust or solidarity with its Jewish victims that is not explicitly accompanied by support for the brutal Zionist ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine.
Thatās exactly the process at play in Scholzās condemnation of Abbas ā which the German chancellorās office made sure to tweet inĀ HebrewĀ as well as English andĀ German.
This was Scholzās indirect way of saying that the memory of the Holocaust belongs to Israel and Zionists to use politically as they see fit.
For German elites,Ā unconditional supportĀ for Israelās occupation, murder, persecution and dispossession of the Palestinian people for almost eight continuous decades serves as an easy āget out of jail freeā card.
They feign pious atonement, while it is Palestinians whose lives and land are stolen ā supposedly in compensation for German crimes.
The statement by PA Pdnt Mahmoud Abbas is unacceptable.
The Holocaust is an indelible stain on European history; it erased Jewish life and heritage in many parts of our continent. Holocaust distortion is dangerous. It feeds antisemitism and has a corosive effect on democracy. https://t.co/F6aY3zuZhG
— Margaritis Schinas (@MargSchinas) August 17, 2022
Joining the attacks on Abbas, EU vice president Margaritis SchinasĀ assertedĀ that āthe Holocaust is an indelible stain on European history; it erased Jewish life and heritage in many parts of our continent.ā
Heās absolutely right about that. So if territory is the appropriate compensation for genocide, why has no European country, especially Germany, offered its own land for a āJewish state?ā
Palestinians areĀ sick of paying the price for European hypocrisy and genocidal crimes.