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Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas caused controversy this week when he said Israel continues to “lie, like Goebbels”.
The comments comparing Israel to the Nazis were made by Abbas during a speech he made at a United Nations event commemorating 75 years of the “Nakba” – the Arabic word for “catastrophe” used to describe Israel’s establishment.
The event was boycotted by the UK and US who Abbas blamed for bearing “political and ethical responsibility directly for the Nakba of the Palestinian people”.
Abbas said: “Israeli and Zionist claims continue by saying that Israel made the desert bloom. As if Palestine was a desert and they made the desert bloom… These are lies. They continue to lie, like Goebbels, and they continue to lie until people believe their lies”.
Abbas also denied Jewish ties to Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount – where the two destroyed Jewish Temples were located – and the Western Wall, stating, “They [Israel] dug under al-Aqsa… they dug everywhere, and they could not find anything”. “The ownership of al-Buraq Wall [the Western Wall] and al-Haram al-Sharif [Temple Mount] belongs exclusively and only to the Islamic Wakf alone”, he added.
Responding to the comments, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said “we will not allow the Palestinians to continue spreading lies and to distort history”.
The US State Department’s envoy combating antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, tweeted: “PA President Abbas’s equating Israel with the lies of top Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is an affront to Holocaust victims and survivors. Especially during a time of rising antisemitic violence throughout the world, such rhetoric about the world’s only Jewish state is entirely unacceptable”.
Abbas has a long history of Holocaust revisionism. In August 2022 during a press conference in Germany, he said Israel has committed “50 holocausts”. In 2018 he claimed it was Jewish “social behaviour” not antisemitism, which led the Nazis to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Whilst at University, his doctoral thesis was titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, which disputed the claim that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, questioning whether the number could be below one million. He also claimed Zionist leaders wanted more Jewish victims during the Holocaust as a means to justify the State of Israel.
