‘Even Hitler,’ Says the Palestinian President Abbas explains why his movement won’t accept peace with Israel.
It’s never a good sign when a dictator delivers a rambling historical lecture, in the style of Fidel Castro or Vladimir Putin. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, proved the point on Aug. 24 before the Fatah Revolutionary Council. His subject? The Jews.
Most media will ignore his comments, which were translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. They don’t fit the liberal narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of two nationalisms that can be resolved in a “peace process” if Israelis make more concessions. The comments also don’t fit the narrative, gaining ground among Democrats, that the Israelis are extreme and the Palestinians progressive.
“The truth that we should clarify to the world,” Mr. Abbas began, “is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism.” He cited the Khazar hypothesis, which speculates that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t descended from the Holy Land, hailing instead from the medieval Tatar kingdom.
This has been discredited by a century of scholarship; today, it’s a theory one expects to find only in online fever swamps. But its usefulness in denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel has made it a mainstream claim among Palestinians.
Mr. Abbas kept going. “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” he averred. Europeans “fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on.”
“Even Hitler,” he added, “said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money.” Yes, even for Hitler, “this was not about Semitism and anti-Semitism.”
Three days before Mr. Abbas’s speech, his Fatah party’s military wing competed with Hamas to take credit for the murder near Hebron of a Jewish preschool teacher, Batsheva Nigri, in front of her child. If you wonder why the Oslo peace process hit a dead end and stayed there, consider that Mr. Abbas and Fatah have been described for decades as “moderates.”
At age 87, Mr. Abbas isn’t likely to abandon his conviction that Jews are interlopers in every part of Israel. His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, once stunned President Clinton’s negotiators by denying even that Jerusalem had been the site of the Jewish Temple. Maybe it’s time American liberals stopped being surprised. There’s a reason Arab-Israeli negotiations have moved past the Palestinian veto.
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