No matter how Mahmoud Abbas puts it in retrospect, the Palestinian President says what the majority of Arabs think when he talks about “50 holocausts” from which his people suffered, as he did on Tuesday in Berlin.
A majority of Palestinians are unwilling to acknowledge that Judea/Palestine has a millennia-old Jewish tradition, nor do they recognize Jewish suffering in the diaspora. At its lowest point, after many centuries of persecution, came the extermination of the Jews in the Third Reich. Few Palestinian intellectuals understand that recognizing this tragedy is one of the prerequisites for making peace with Israel.
For the Palestinian leadership, it has always been important to nurture its enemy image of Israel. It helps not to have to move oneself, to rule out compromises and to fend off reforms. After all, we were at war and elections were impossible. In fact, the Palestinians have not been allowed to go to the polls for 16 years.
A good decade ago, the author of these lines visited Ramallah with colleagues from other German media. A few days earlier, a girl had been violated in a neighboring village. The suspect was wanted, found within hours, brought before the judge the next day, sentenced to death that same week, then immediately executed. When asked by the guests whether one could speak of a legal process in this case, the Palestinian government representatives explained that they only got to know the Israeli occupation. That’s why they don’t know any better.
This mindset still prevails in the Palestinian administration today. If Abbas were to question them and announce that he would transform his autonomous administration into a model of democracy for all Arab states independently of Israel, only one thing would stand in his way: he himself. than it took his motorcade from Abu Gosh to Jerusalem. The Palestinian President needs the constant reference to the alleged Israeli Nazi to survive – politically, possibly even physically.
He cites it for another reason as well. Palestinians are acutely aware of Western debates. They feel the zeitgeist, which sees a colonial power in the Jewish state. In Germany, no fewer contemporaries felt that they could absolve themselves of the guilt of their grandfathers by comparing Israeli behavior in the occupied territories with that of the SS. Never to be a victim again, that is the basic teaching of the Jews after the Shoah. The madness of the story is that there are enough people among the descendants of their killers who resent this very insight.
Abbas and his advisers know this. They consciously use this atmosphere for their own cause. His statements at the press conference alongside the Chancellor were not accidental. They were also aimed at an increasingly powerful audience in the West, which, within the framework of general “victimism” (Pascal Bruckner), not only views the Palestinians as other victims alongside Muslims, blacks, etc., but also as victims of a new Holocaust.
“One cannot clap with one hand” is an Arabic proverb. It should be remembered especially by those who repeatedly lament the lack of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Abbas does not want to hold serious talks with the Israeli government. They would endanger him just as much as holding free elections.
And Israel? Since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the takeover of power there by the radical Hamas, the mood has cooled. If the Palestinians are unwilling to acknowledge the catastrophe of the Shoah, a large proportion of Israeli Jews refuse to accept the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 as part of their identity. The prerequisite for a peace agreement also lies in the acknowledgment of this suffering.
Worse, Israel has accepted the status quo. It considers land grabbing through the expansion of settlements to be normal and sees no reason to seek a political solution to the conflict. This is dangerous for democracy. The question that remains open is whether Israel will end the occupation or whether the occupation will end Israel. However, this in no way justifies Abbas’ behavior.