PNA President Abbas Accuses Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ at Berlin Presser, Provoking Fury

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) that governs the West Bank, aroused condemnation and scorn following comments to the press on Tuesday in which he accused Israel of “50 Holocausts.”

Abbas’ comment was in response to a question by a journalist about whether he intended to apologize for the 1972 killing of 11 Israeli athletes and a West German police officer by the Palestinian militant group Black September. The attack occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, and the 50th anniversary is on September 5.

“If we want to dig further into the past, yes, please, I have 50 massacres that were committed by Israel,” Abbas said at the Berlin presser. “Fifty massacres, 50 Holocausts, and to this day, every day, we have dead people killed by the [Israeli Defence Forces], by the Israeli army.”

Scholz condemned Abbas’ remarks on Wednesday, tweeting he was “disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. For us 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.”

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Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, accused Abbas of “Holocaust denial,” saying there should be “zero tolerance” for it.

During the Holocaust of World War II, the Nazi German forces exterminated nearly 12 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews, with the others being from variously minority groups including Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ people, and disabled people. Before the Nazi defeat in 1945 ended the massacres, nearly two-thirds of European Jewry had been annihilated, and many of the survivors fled from Europe in the aftermath, going especially to the Palestine territory that in 1948 would become Israel.

In the war against nearby Arab powers following its declaration of independence, Israel expelled more than 600,000 Palestinians from the land they conquered, massacring many villages and spreading news of the horrors to drive others from the land. In the decades since, Israeli forces have continued to kill Palestinian civilians, sometimes claiming they are actually terrorists, other times during police raids and checkpoint stops, especially in the West Bank.

The perpetrators of the 1972 Munich massacre, a group called Black September, were a split from Fatah - Abbas’ party - who set out to get revenge for the expulsion of Palestinian refugees from Jordan in 1970, assassinating Jordanian Prime Minister Yasfi Tal the following year. They were also linked to numerous other incidents, and after the Munich massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the Mossad to hunt down and destroy Black September in what was termed “Operation Wrath of God.”

Ironically, even the German government is facing criticism from the families of the victims of Munich, who have boycotted the September 5 opening of the memorial because they don’t believe the government has given them adequate financial compensation for it.