The Dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Mahmoud Abbas completed his PhD dissertation for Lumumba University in Moscow in 1982.

For years I have been reading that this piece of writing - which to the left is the original cover - entitled "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism" was one in which he denied the Holocaust.

Well now this work is actually available on his official website.

Ronen Bergman has reviewed the material and, writing in Y-Net, offers us analysis and quotes from Abbas concerning Zionism and the Jews.  Here is one:

"The Zionist movement did not send any assistance, financial or otherwise, for the victims of Nazism and it did not allow any other side to provide any kind of aid. The Zionist movement concealed the information that came from within the ghetto walls and concentration camps, news that shed light on what was really happening. If it had to publish anything, it did so by questioning that information and diminishing its importance." - Mahmoud Abbas

Should it not be obvious to all but the most obtuse that Mahmoud Abbas is not a negotiator in good faith with the Jewish people or the State of Israel?  No one who would write the paragraph above could possibly be a reasonable negotiator.

Here is another one for your edification:

"All of this wasn't enough - the Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination." - Mahmoud Abbas

Yes, I would very much like to see the evidence which demonstrates that David Ben-Gurion, or any of his associates, "led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews."  I have read one or two biographies of the man, but they always seem to leave that part out for some reason?  No doubt a Zionist plot!

Abbas denies that he has denied the Holocaust and, in fact, he does not deny the Holocaust.

According to Bergman in an interview with Avika Eldar in Ha'aretz Abbas said the following:

"One wrote there were twelve million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it."

The problem here is not Holocaust denial, but something perhaps quite worse.  Abbas is accusing the Zionist movement, and thus the many hundreds of thousands of Jews who participated in it in the mid-1940s and who lost their families to the Nazis, of colluding with the Nazis to persecute their own people - even unto genocide - in the service of Zionism. 

Bergman tells us this:

Abbas' main claims in his doctorate are that Zionist leaders ignored the Holocaust of European Jewry, sacrificing them so that they could claim a national home; that the Zionist movement deliberately and systematically thwarted the rescue of Jews from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Baltic countries; that Jews who abandoned their homes in Arab countries did not suffer any harassment or persecution, and that the root of the conflict between them and the Arabs was the privileges that they received from the French and British colonialists.

And then we find this:

When one discusses declared Zionist thought … we find that the Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, just as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race. - Mahmoud Abbas

This man is a liar who will say absolutely anything.  There is nothing within the movement for Jewish liberation which comes even remotely close to what Abbas accuses us of.

He is claiming that the early Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to commit genocide upon the Jewish people in order to extort land in the Middle East and compel European Jews to move to that land.  While that is heinous enough it thereby implies that today's Jewish supporters of the Jewish people - within the tradition of Zionism, as if there were only one - represent the contemporary form of Nazi ideology.

In the imagination of Mahmoud Abbas, not to mention G-d only knows how many of his progressive-left western allies, Zionism is the ideological and functional equivalent of Nazism today.

Berman's is a lengthy article, so I need to be judicious in quotes, but I cannot resist this one from Bergman, himself:

[Abbas] claims that Mossad abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina after he revealed the details of this plot to the American magazine "Life". In other words, it was not Eichmann's responsibility for implementing the Final Solution that led Mossad to its abduction mission in Buenos Aires, but the desire to silence the high-ranking Nazi on the subject of who was behind the execution of the Holocaust.

Bergman's is an important article.

For far, far too long we've read that Abbas denied the Holocaust, yet for some reason no western-allied Arabic and English-reader, as far as I know, has ever seriously read the damn thing and reviewed it for the public in the English language with direct quotes taken from the original Arabic.

Ronen Bergman has in Y-Net and you should definitely check it out.  There is much more material in this article to be explored and chewed upon.

To my mind, however, it drives the final spike into Abbas' standing as a negotiating partner.  The man was elected to a four year term that ended five years ago.  He also wrote the checks for the Munich Massacre during the 1972 Olympics, so why bother with him?

In truth, he should be in prison.

I understand, of course, that it is not quite so simple.  Israel has other geopolitical concerns that apparently keep it strapped to the PLO / Fatah - its insidious doppleganger - not the least of which is US president Barack Obama.  But if Obama still thinks that Abbas and his people represent genuine negotiating partners out which can come a peaceful conclusion of hostilities as embodied in a two-state solution, then the man is even more far-gone than I thought.

If Obama insists upon twisting Jewish arms to lay down to Abbas over settlement construction, he does so not out of any belief that Abbas can deliver a reasonable two-state solution from his end, but because Obama has got geopolitical concerns of his own and only a tiny percentage of those concerns have much of anything to do with Jews.

Do not expect anything resembling fair play from western powers.