Palestinian Authority leader’s Holocaust inversions: An assault on the Jewish people

Such statements coming from a high-ranking Palestinian Authority official—the one in charge of youth, sports, summer camps, and its ruling party’s Central Committee—make them all the more dangerous.

By Ephraim D. Tepler, Palestinian Media Watch

Today, as Israel commemorates Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—and remembers the six million Jews exterminated, the Holocaust continues to be invoked in the most disturbing and distorted ways by many Palestinian Authority officials, throughout PA television and print.

Of those, few have been as systematic, aggressive, and cynical as Jibril Rajoub.

Palestinian Media Watch has documented at least 17 instances in which Rajoub compared Israel to the Nazis since last Yom HaShoah alone (see all examples below).

Just this month, Rajoub again called Israel “neo-Nazis” and accused it of ethnic cleansing.

For years, Rajoub has libeled Israel as committing a “holocaust” against Palestinians and has even framed Palestinians as the true victims of the Holocaust, relegating Jewish suffering to a “lie” and a “complex” used to justify Israel’s existence.

According to the IHRA working definition, Antisemitism includes “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

While Rajoub does this often, perhaps his most cynical statement is to reduce Jewish trauma to a European problem dumped on the Palestinians, saying, “We are the victims. We are the scapegoat for what happened.”

This intentional perversion of history is meant to demonize Jews and delegitimize the Jewish state.

That such statements come from a high-ranking Palestinian Authority official—the one in charge of youth, sports, summer camps, and its ruling party’s Central Committee—makes them all the more dangerous.

The following are the instances documented by PMW of Jibril Rajoub viciously appropriating and abusing the memory of the Holocaust since the last Holocaust Remembrance Day.