I Hate The Stereotype Of Us Nazi-Loving Palestinians As Antisemitic

It simply does not add up. Certainly not to six million. Maybe a few hundred thousand. But I digress.

By Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

Prejudice is a terrible thing, as I need not inform you. We all know what happens when we let our preconceived assumptions govern our reactions to others based not on the merits of their behavior, but on some generalization of the group to which the person seems to belong. Which is why I cannot stand the automatic assumption that just because we Palestinians admire what the Nazis did to the Jews and wish we could emulate Hitler, that somehow also paints us as antisemitic.

The Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1940’s, Haj-Amin al-Husseini, allied himself with Hitler and sent fighters to help the Nazis in Europe. He and his followers hoped the Wehrmacht would defeat the British in North Africa and conquer the British-controlled territory of Palestine, where local Arabs would help implement the Nazi Final Solution. They even practiced massacring Jews in Hebron long before the Nazis themselves came to power in Germany. We Palestinians raise every banner that Husseini did and vow allegiance to his declared aims, but all of a sudden that makes us antisemitic? What gives?

My own doctoral thesis questioned the scale and intensity of the so-called Holocaust. Just because minimizing, denying, and questioning the Holocaust is the hallmark of antisemites everywhere, you cannot simply assume I fall into that category. You have to look at the whole picture, not merely the part where I accuse the Jews collectively of orchestrating a hoax so they could manufacture international sympathy for their so-called plight and take over this land.

Official Palestinian media indulge repeatedly and zealously in classic anti-Jewish tropes: control of world finances and media; mendacity; lechery; and every kind of exploitation of innocents for personal and national gain. Yet the Jews and their media lapdogs would have you believe this makes Palestinian society a hotbed of antisemitism. The lack of critical thinking here should gall any person of intellect.

One of the senior figures in Fatah’s political and paramilitary leadership has adopted the name “Hitler” and proudly sports mannerisms and trappings specifically modeled on the Nazi leader and his rhetoric. It constitutes quite a stretch of credulity to take those aspects of his behavior – and the behavior of the rest of us in the PLO and Palestinian Authority who endorse, encourage, and reward his activity – and translate them into the unsupportable notion that he or any other admirer of the Nazis has anything at all against Jews. It simply does not add up. Certainly not to six million. Maybe a few hundred thousand. But I digress.

In summary, we must all be more careful about how we frame what we see and hear. Just because a Palestinian leader or public figure – for example, a Hamas official – says something negative about or against Jews, whether or not it’s thinly veiled as a diatribe against ‘Zionists,’ that’s no reason to suddenly jump to conclusions about him or any other terrorism-glorifying Palestinians exhibiting antisemitism, or stereotyping of any sort.

That’s the kind of thing only an Israeli would do.