At a conference with Scholz, Palestinian President Abbas accused Israel of multiple “Holocausts”. Scholz is outraged – but does not contradict directly. Now the chancellor is speaking again.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has once again sharply criticized Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ accusations of the Holocaust against Israel. “I am deeply outraged by the unspeakable statements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,” wrote the SPD politician on Twitter on Wednesday. “Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable. I condemn every attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.”
The Union had previously criticized Scholz for dealing with Abbas’ allegations. “An incredible process in the Chancellery,” wrote CDU leader Friedrich Merz on Twitter on Tuesday evening. The chancellor should have “clearly contradicted the Palestinian president and asked him to leave the house!” he argued.
CDU MP Matthias Hauer said: “Of course, Chancellor Olaf Scholz could and should have contradicted the Palestinian President after the Holocaust had been put into perspective. To remain silent after such a derailment is unforgivable.”
SPD foreign politician protects Scholz
Meanwhile, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is getting support from his party. The foreign policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Nils Schmid, spoke of a sham debate. “The problem is not the chancellor’s reaction, the problem is the attitude of Palestinian President Abbas,” Schmid told the newspapers of the Funke media group on Wednesday. The fact that Scholz did not react immediately to his “bad derailment” was “owed to the choreography of such a press conference during a state visit”.
Abbas: “50 massacres, 50 holocausts”
During his visit to Berlin, 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,” he said at a joint press conference with Scholz in the Chancellery on Tuesday, adding: “50 massacres, 50 holocausts.”
The SPD politician 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 told the “Bild” newspaper in the evening: “Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable.”
Prien: “Too little, too late”
The deputy CDU federal chairman Karin Prien later wrote on Twitter with a view to Scholz: “Too little, too late”. The FDP parliamentary group deputy Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, on the other hand, said that a broader public was finally finding out “how the Palestinians and Abbas – Israel’s alleged “partners” – are feeling. That’s more important than criticism of the @Bundeskanzler, whose outrage was clearly visible”.
Before making the statement, Abbas was 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 are people being killed by the Israeli army every day. “If we want to continue digging into the past, yes please.” In his reply, the Palestinian President did not address the attack on the Olympics, in which eleven Israelis were killed.
Abbas gives in
Meanwhile, Abbas gave in on Wednesday. “President Abbas reiterates that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern human history,” wrote the Palestinian news agency Wafa. In Berlin he did not want to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Rather, Abbas meant “the crimes and massacres against the Palestinian people that Israel’s armed forces have committed since the Nakba.” “These crimes have not stopped to this day.”
Israeli Prime Minister Jair Lapid previously reacted with clear words: “That Mahmoud Abbas accuses Israel of having committed “50 holocausts” while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace, but an outrageous lie,” he wrote on Twitter and referred to the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. History will never forgive Abbas. Lapid is himself the son of a Holocaust survivor.
The new German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, also criticized the Holocaust comparison as “wrong and unacceptable”. “Germany will never tolerate any attempt to deny the uniqueness of the crimes of the Holocaust,” the former government spokesman wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
The CDU politician Armin Laschet called Abbas’ performance “the worst gaffe that was ever heard in the Chancellery”. The federal government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, told the editorial network Germany (RND) that Abbas was not doing “legitimate Palestinian concerns” any service. “By putting the Holocaust into perspective, President Abbas lacked any sensitivity towards us German hosts,” criticized Klein. “That also applies to the question asked about the attack on the Olympics, which was carried out by PLO terrorists.”
prehistory
The Palestinian President had already caused a stir in 2018 with Holocaust statements in a different context. At the time he said the Holocaust 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 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 don’t adopt the word apartheid and that I don’t think that’s the right way 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.
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.