Abbas, Auschwitz, and the Palestinian strategy

It was often remarked that the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, would sound moderate when speaking in English and utterly intransigent when speaking in Arabic. Much of the same could be said about his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

In an exclusive op-ed for Haaretz—published to coincide with the Israeli newspaper’s one-day conference on peace in Tel Aviv that was rudely interrupted by a barrage of rockets from Gaza—Abbas sounded rather statesmanlike. “As the president of the Palestinian people I am totally committed to the vision of a two-state solution, normalization and peace with our neighbor—Israel,” Abbas wrote.

Such statements are music to the ears of the White House. In his own Haaretz op-ed, President Barack Obama stated admiringly that in Abbas, “Israel has a counterpart committed to a two-state solution and security cooperation with Israel.” Obama could not, however, bring himself to say something positive about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The vision of Abbas as a moderate is, however, sorely compromised when one looks at his other statements. Speaking to other senior members of the Palestinian leadership about the murder of the Palestinian teenager, Mohammad Abu Khudair, Abbas rhetorically asked, “Shall we recall Auschwitz?” Later on, Abbas accused Israel, on the second day of its Operation Protective Edge to counter Palestinian terrorism in Gaza, of carrying out a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Is Abbas simply seeking to offend Jewish and Israeli sensibilities, or is there a strategy behind these appalling claims? I would argue that it’s the latter.

As brutal as the killing of Abu Khudair was, to invoke in the same sentence Auschwitz, a death camp run by the Nazi Reich with efficiency and savagery in equal amounts, is morally obscene. Around 2 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were exterminated at Auschwitz. Many were children flung into the gas chambers. Few things compare with this horror, and certainly not the murder of one individual by a gang of freelance thugs.