'Peace partner': Holocaust due to Jews' 'social behavior'

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

The man on whom Israel and the United States have depended to forge an agreement in which two states would live side-by-side in peace declared Monday that the "social behavior" of Jews, including money lending, was the true cause of the Holocaust.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a rare session of the Palestinian National Council, launched into a rambling "history lesson" aimed at disproving the 3,000 year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel, reported the Times of Israel.

Abbas insisted the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are not the descendants of the ancient Israelites and, therefore, have no "historical ties" to Israel.

The Holocaust, he said, was not the result of anti-Semitism but of the Jews' "social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters."

The Palestinian leaders' views of the Holocaust aren't new. He wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1982 while studying in the Soviet Union claiming the death toll of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust was exaggerated.

And official Palestinian Authority TV often broadcasts Holocaust denial and revisionism.

Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch found last month that PA TV broadcasts edited out photographs of American soldiers liberating concentration camps and images of corpses in striped concentration camp uniforms, presenting photos of the remaining dead bodies as "Arab victims of Jews in 1948."

PA TV also claimed that the Jewish fighters burned Arabs in ovens in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

MEMRI said these "lies and attempts to appropriate the Jewish people’s suffering in the Holocaust demean the historical record."

"They also obscure an important fact: Palestinian Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively colluded with Hitler and sought the destruction of worldwide Jewry." The Middle East media watchdog CAMERA noted that in a Dec. 27, 2017, Washington Jewish Week op-ed, Abbas called Husseini "a pioneer."

A Palestinian editorial last month claimed that the West created Israel partly as revenge for the losses it suffered during the Crusades.

In a speech in January, Abbas said the formation of Israel was a "colonial project" of the Europeans to safeguard European interests "that has nothing to do with Judaism." European Jews during the Holocaust, the Palestinian leader said, chose to undergo "murder and slaughter" over emigration to British-held Palestine.

In contrast, on Monday, Abbas claimed that Adolf Hitler facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel by reaching a deal with the Anglo-Palestine Bank under which Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine could transfer all their assets there through the bank.

Abbas also indicated he had no interest in cooperating with the U.S. on a peace plan, warning the Palestinian National Council he plans to take unspecified "tough steps" soon against Israel and the United States, the Times of Israel reported.

He said the Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is "completely unacceptable."

"We will not accept this deal, and we will not accept the U.S. as the sole broker."