PDuring his visit to Berlin, the president of the alestinian government, Mahmud Abbas, accused Israel of multiple “Holocausts” against the Palestinians, triggering outrage. “Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian locations since 1947 to this day,” Abbas said at a joint press conference with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in the Chancellery on Tuesday, adding: “50 massacres, 50 holocausts.”
He had previously been asked by a journalist whether he would apologize to Israel on the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists in Munich. Abbas said that there were dead people killed by the Israeli army every day. “If we want to continue digging into the past, yes please.” The Palestinian President did not respond to the Olympic attack in which eleven Israelis were killed.
“Relativity of the Holocaust intolerable”
Scholz followed the statements with a petrified expression, visibly annoyed and also made preparations to reply. His spokesman Steffen Hebestreit declared the press conference over immediately after Abbas’ reply. The question to the Palestinian President had previously been announced as the last. Hebestreit later reported that Scholz was outraged by Abbas’ statement. The chancellor said to the “Bild” newspaper in the evening: “Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable.”
CDU leader Friedrich Merz criticized Scholz’s handling of the incident on Twitter as “incomprehensible”. The chancellor “should have contradicted the Palestinian president in no uncertain terms and asked him to leave the house!” he wrote. The CDU politician Armin Laschet called Abbas’ performance “the worst gaffe that was ever heard in the Chancellery”.
Not the first controversial Holocaust statement
The Palestinian President had already caused a stir in 2018 with Holocaust statements in a different context. At the time he said the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, was not triggered by anti-Semitism. Instead, the trigger was the social position of the Jews as lenders of loans with interest. Afterwards he apologized for the anti-Semitic statements. It was not his intention to offend anyone.
His doctoral thesis, which he submitted in the early 1980s, is also considered controversial. In it, Abbas relativized the Holocaust and accused the Zionist movement of having collaborated with the Hitler regime. In 2014, for the first time, he described the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust as the “worst crime of modern times”.
Scholz criticizes apartheid allegations on the open stage
Scholz had previously criticized Abbas on the open stage for describing Israeli politics as an “apartheid system”. “I want to say explicitly at this point that I do not adopt the word apartheid and that I do not think it is right to describe the situation,” said Scholz.
Abbas had previously said the “transformation into the new reality of a single state in an apartheid system” does not serve security and stability in the region. Apartheid is understood as the doctrine of separating individual ethnic population groups, primarily in South Africa until 1994. It is internationally recognized as a crime against humanity.
Abbas had repeatedly accused Israel of this – most recently during a visit by US President Joe Biden to the West Bank. However, he did not go into further detail at the joint press conference.
Former SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel caused outrage about ten years ago when he described the conditions in the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank as “apartheid”. At the time he wrote on his Facebook page: “I was just in Hebron. This is a legal vacuum for Palestinians. This is an apartheid regime for which there is no justification.” He later rejected criticism of the statements and emphasized his solidarity with Israel.
In 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War. The UN classifies the areas as occupied. The Palestinians want them for their own state of Palestine – with East Jerusalem as the capital. The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has been idle since 2014.
