Ramallah – The ruling Fatah party of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank hit out at dozens of Palestinian academics who had criticized President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent antisemitic outburst.
Fatah lambasted an open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as “the statement of shame.”
The intellectuals’ letter was released after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Adolf Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than based on the Nazis’ racial theories.
“Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people,” said the secular nationalist Fatah party.
Fatah officials added that the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation” and “extremely dangerous.”
The chorus of indignation casts light on the Palestinians’ complicated relationship with the Holocaust.
“It doesn’t serve our political interest to keep bringing up the Holocaust,” Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, told Associated Press. “We are suffering from occupation and settlement expansion and fascist Israeli polices. That is what we should be stressing.”
