At a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in
Berlin, Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian Authority (PA) said Israel has
caused 50 Holocausts against Palestinians. His remarks triggered outrage among
certain world leaders, including Scholz.
"From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50
massacres in Palestinian villages and cities," Abbas said in Arabic,
according to CNN. Until today and every day there are killings by the Israeli
military.
Abbas
made the comments when asked if he would apologize for the 1972 Olympics
incident in Munich, when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage by
Palestinians linked to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Chancellor
Scholz tweeted, "I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by
Palestinian President Mahmoud #Abbas. For Germans in particular, any
relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and
unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust."
It is
true that the Holocaust has singular dimensions but the German leader and
others who were outraged by the Palestinian Authority president’s remarks
cannot deny nearly eight decades of occupation, land robbery, destruction of
homes, burning of olive trees, imprisonment, injustice, genocide, displacement
of families, etc. Just in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave
their homes.
Moreover,
Abbas did not deny Holocaust that Scholz says condemns denial of it.
Also, deep down, Scholz and other current and former Western
leaders are well aware that Israel’s behaviors are by no means excusable,
otherwise they are bigoted.
Why the term Holocaust used by Abbas was taken literally. He
was just trying to express incessant cruelty against Palestinians.
The interim Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid tried to abuse
the situation and talked about morality of the remarks by the Palestinian
Authority leader, something which is quite alien to Israeli officials.
"Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust,
including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive
him (Abbas)," Lapid tweeted.
Lapid
is better to be reminded that history will never forgive or forget the stealing
of another nation’s land. Between August 5 and 7, Lapid killed 16 children in
Gaza.
Holocaust
happened during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. But the Palestinians have been
suffering since 1947 and there is no prospect for an end to their agonies.
Israelis are stealing the remaining Palestinian lands in the
West Bank and don’t allow them to establish their own country. They have also
imprisoned about two million people in Gaza.
Even Palestinians who were protesting inside the besieged
Gaza were murdered in cold blood as they were holding symbolic
“Great March of Return” demonstrations.
Also,
UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which oblige Israel to return to
the 1967 borders, carry no weight for the West.
In the Tuesday press conference Scholz also unexpectedly
refuted the statement by Abbas that Palestinians are living under the apartheid
practiced by the Israeli regime, saying he did "not think that is correct,
to use the term to describe the situation.
Manay
groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have concluded
that Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
In a commentary on August 18, Marwan Bishara, a senior political
analyst at Al Jazeera, said, “Aggrieved and angry, the Palestinians have long
believed that it was they who paid the price for the horrors inflicted upon
Jews in Europe since it is they who were robbed of their homeland by the newly
established Jewish state in 1948.”
Bishara adds “… the early Zionists chose to settle and build
a homeland for Jews in Palestine nearly half a century before the Holocaust,
knowing all too well that it is the homeland of another people. They wished it
cleansed of its non-Jewish inhabitants. Israel’s founding father, David
Ben-Gurion believed Zionism was not driven by victimhood but rather by the
necessary emancipation of the Jewish people as a new nation in Palestine.”
The
analyst goes on to say, “The Gaza Strip may not be the Buchenwald concentration
camp, but for decades, this tortured and tormented open-air prison of two
million Palestinians has had more than its share of sadistic Israeli aggression
under the pretext of security.”
In a
show of hypocrisy, over the past decades Western statesmen have not reacted to
comparing certain Arab leaders to Adolf Hitler by Israeli leaders.
“Israeli
leaders have called any Palestinian or Arab leader they disliked a ‘new Hitler’,
to justify aggression and war against Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and others.
Before their trilateral attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel and its two
co-conspirators, France and Britain, portrayed its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel
Nasser, as ‘Hitler on the Nile’,” Bishara says.
Moreover, Zionists have used the term “anti-Semitism” to
attack the opponents of Tel Aviv’s behaviors toward Palestinians. They are
using this term to justify their illegal acts.
“…, any journalist, scholar or peace activist who dares criticize
Israeli policy is routinely denounced as an anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and
neo-Nazi,” the Al Jazeera analyst writes.
He also
says, “Such Zionist and Israeli abuse of the Holocaust’s memory and even its
survivors was exposed by Israeli historian Tom Segev in his revelatory book The
Seventh Million, The Israelis and The Holocaust, as well as by American Jewish
scholar, Norman Finkelstein, in his daring book, The Holocaust Industry,
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
“The latter is highly critical of the cynical calculus
behind the persistent invocation of the Holocaust by American Zionist
organizations, in order to portray Israel as a victim, despite its 1967 war and
occupation of Palestine in its entirety.”
Courtesy: The Tehran Times
