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Why Mahmoud Abbas Can't Make Peace with Israelis

(Washington Times) Clifford D. May - Addressing the Revolutionary Council of Fatah last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas asserted: "They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true." Rather, Europeans "fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money dealings, and so on." Abbas further claimed that David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, "forced" Jews to flee Arab countries where they had lived for centuries to Israel "by means of pressure, coercion, and murder." As for European Jews, they "are not Semites," he said, citing the discredited theory that Ashkenazi Jews are descended not from ancient Israelites but from Khazars, a medieval Turkic kingdom. In 1982, after a period of study in Moscow, Abbas was awarded a doctorate for a dissertation titled "The Relationship between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945." In it, he accused Zionists of aiding and abetting "the annihilation of the Jewish population in European countries occupied by Nazi Germany to implement the Zionist ideal of mass colonization of Palestine and create a Jewish state on its territory." He later published a paper casting doubt on whether gas chambers were used to exterminate Jews and claiming that the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust might be "even less than a million." If Abbas holds such views, no end to the conflict is possible so long as he is in office, no matter what concessions Israelis and others offer. The writer is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2023-09-14 00:00:00
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