Official Palestinian TV Broadcasts Holocaust Denial

Two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, an official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV channel broadcasted claims that Jews “colluded with Hitler.”

On April 10, 2018, PA TV aired an interview with Hani Abu Zeid, a Palestinian political analyst and commentator. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit that translates Arabic, Persian and Russian media, reported on the incident:

Hani Abu Zeid: “The [Israeli] soldier, the officers behind him, and even the Israeli war [sic] minister, and above him, Netanyahu should stand trial as war criminals. The accumulation of cases, one after the other… The Israelis will end up shedding tears of blood [out of regret] for their current conduct. They used to cry about the false Holocaust in the days of Hitler, the scope of which was not that large. I’d like to point out…”

Interviewer: “The [Holocaust] is a lie that they spread worldwide.”

Hani Abu Zeid: “Yes, it was a lie, and many Israelis, or many Jews, colluded with Hitler, so that he would facilitate the bringing of settlers to Palestine.”

As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has noted: “Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Holocaust is a form of antisemitism.”

Yet, Holocaust denial remains commonplace in much of the Arab world, including in Palestinian society and culture. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, claimed in his doctoral dissertation—done under Soviet auspices—that the Holocaust was exaggerated.

PA TV itself often broadcasts Holocaust denial and revisionism. As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, detailed in an April 11, 2018 report. PMW noted that recent PA TV broadcasts edited out pictures of American soldiers liberating concentration camps and “erased the images of corpses in striped concentration camp uniforms…and presented photos of the remaining dead bodies as Arab victims of Jews in 1948.” PA TV also “claimed that the Jewish fighters burned Arabs in ovens in” Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

These lies and attempts to appropriate the Jewish people’s suffering in the Holocaust demean the historical record. They also obscure an important fact: Palestinian Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively colluded with Hitler and sought the destruction of worldwide Jewry.

As CAMERA noted in a Dec. 27, 2017 Washington Jewish Week Op-Ed, Abbas has called al-Husseini “a pioneer.”