Germany, Israel condemn Palestinian president’s Holocaust remarks

BERLIN/JERUSALEM: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz voiced disgust on Wednesday at remarks by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the German leader said diminished the importance of the Holocaust, while Israel accused Abbas of telling a “monstrous lie”.

“For us Germans in particular, any relativisation of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable,” Scholz tweeted on Wednesday. “I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.” During a visit to Berlin on Tuesday, Abbas accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” in response to a question about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian militants.

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid also condemned the comments as a “disgrace”.

“Mahmoud Abbas accusing Israel of having committed ‘50 Holocausts’ while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace, but a monstrous lie,” Lapid said on Twitter.

“History will never forgive him.” In response to a storm of criticism, Abbas issued a statement calling Nazi Germany’s Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, “the most heinous crime in modern human history”.

He said his remark was not intended to deny the singularity of the Holocaust but to highlight “the crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of Israeli forces”.

Nakba, or catastrophe, is the term Palestinians use to describe the mass exodus of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany expressed “horror” at Abbas’s comments, which it said trampled over the memory of the six million Jews who died and tarnished that of all Holocaust victims.

‘MASSACRES’

Standing alongside Scholz, Abbas referred to a series of historical incidents in which Palestinians were killed by Israelis in the 1948 war and in the years following.

“From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities, in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Kafr Qasim and many others, 50 massacres, 50 Holocausts,” said Abbas.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa did not include his Holocaust comments in its report of the meeting with Scholz, and the Palestinian foreign ministry said Lapid’s comments were intended to divert attention from Israel’s “crimes”.

In a statement, the ministry said Israel not only continued actions against the Palestinians but was also trying to suppress comments “that remind the Israelis and the international community of the many crimes committed by Israel”.

Abbas’s comment followed months of tension and a brief conflict this month during which 49 people were killed in Gaza after Israel carried out a series of air strikes in response to what it said was an imminent threat from the militant Islamic Jihad group, which fired over 1,000 rockets in response.

Dozens of Palestinians have also been killed in clashes with Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank, while there have been a number of attacks on Israelis, including an incident on Sunday when eight people were wounded on a bus carrying Jewish worshippers in Jerusalem.

Palestinians seek an independent state in territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Negotiations have been frozen since 2014.