The Palestinian president has accused Israel of perpetrating “50 Holocausts” against his people, sparking outrage among Israeli and German authorities.
Tuesday in Berlin, during a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Mahmoud Abbas made the claim.
Mr. Scholz remained nothing at the time, but afterward referred to the president’s remarks as “intolerable and unacceptable.”
Mr. Abbas’s charge, according to Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, is “not only a moral humiliation but a disgusting falsehood.”
“Six million Jews, including 1.5 million Jewish children, were slaughtered during the Holocaust,” he tweeted. He will never be forgiven by history.
Mr. Abbas emphasized in a statement, in response to the criticism, that “the Holocaust is the most terrible crime in contemporary human history.”
Mr. Abbas traveled to Berlin to garner Germany’s backing for a Palestinian bid to join the United Nations as a full member state and to request assistance in reviving stalled peace talks with Israel.
After visiting Mr. Scholz at the Federal Chancellery, reporters questioned the president if he planned to apologize to Israel and Germany ahead of the 50th anniversary of a devastating attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by Palestinian militants.
Instead of responding directly to the topic, he stated, “If we want to revisit the past, go ahead.”
“From 1947 until the present, Israel has committed 50 Holocausts in Palestinian villages and cities, including Deir Yassin, Tantura, and Kafr Qasim, among others. And to this day, and every day, Israeli forces continue to kill civilians “he added.
Mr. Scholz frowned when Mr. Abbas talked, but he did not reprimand him before the news conference was ended by advisers. He also had a handshake with the president before their departure.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s largest opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), tweeted that the news conference was “unbelievable” and that Mr. Scholz “should have promptly and unequivocally contradicted the Palestinian president and ordered him to leave.”
Former leader of the CDU, Armin Laschet, stated: “If the PLO leader had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, he would have garnered more support. Instead, accusing Israel of ’50 Holocausts’ is the most revolting speech the German Chancellery has ever heard.”
Dani Dayan, the director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center, described Mr. Abbas’s words as “despicable” and “appalling” and demanded that the German government “react correctly to this unacceptable behavior done inside the Federal Chancellery.”
It was many hours before Mr. Scholz denounced the president in a statement to the German daily Bild.
“I am disgusted by the atrocious statements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,” the chancellor tweeted on Wednesday morning in English, German, and Hebrew.
Particularly for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust’s uniqueness is repugnant and unforgivable. I repudiate any attempt to deny the Holocaust’s crimes.”
Later, Mr. Abbas’s office issued a statement “emphasizing that his response was not meant to dispute the uniqueness of the Holocaust that occurred in the 20th century and denouncing it in the strongest possible terms,” according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
