Hussein Aboubakr on the Holocaust in the Arab Moral Imagination

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fifty years ago, at the 1972 Olympic summer games in Munich, 11 Israeli olympians were held hostage and murdered by members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Recently, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, while meeting with the German chancellor, was asked about the event and whether he would apologize for what happened. Abbas declined to apologize, and instead accused the Israelis of having enacted “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians.

Why would Abbas, when asked about a crime Palestinians perpetrated against Israelis, reach for the Holocaust as a weapon? To answer that question, the Egyptian writer Hussein Aboubakr joins this week’s podcast. In conversation with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he explains what Abbas and so many Arabs think about the Holocaust, and why, in the Arab mind, that event is inextricably tied up with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in a twisted logic that has brought many to believe that Israelis are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 years ago at the 1972 summer games in Munich, a number of Israeli Olympians were held hostage and murdered
0:15.8	by members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.
0:19.7	While meeting with the German Chancellor recently, the current Palestinian Authority President
0:24.1	Mahmoud Abbas was asked about that event and whether he would apologize for the murder
0:29.6	of Israeli athletes.
0:31.6	Abbas declined to apologize and then accused the Israelis of having enacted 50 holocausts against the Palestinians.
0:40.2	Now, when you think of it, that's a strange thing to say, a strange thing to bring up at that moment,
0:45.2	and it invites some questions.
0:47.6	Mahmoud Abbas is sometimes referred to as a Holocaust denier.
0:51.3	And that's not exactly wrong, but it's not exactly right either. His
0:55.1	1982 doctoral dissertation from Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University purported to
1:01.2	analyze the secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism. Abbas does not believe
1:07.0	that the Holocaust did not happen. He thinks it did happen, even if the scale he thinks of
1:12.1	Jewish death has been exaggerated. But he also thinks that the Zionists helped to perpetrate
1:18.1	this crime against the Jews of Europe. In other words, he holds the view, A, that the Holocaust
1:24.1	did in fact happen, and so he cannot simply be called a Holocaust denier.
1:29.6	And at the same time, B, that the Holocaust was the Jew's fault,
1:33.5	so that rather than serving as a historical example of why Zionism is so necessary,
1:39.1	instead, the Holocaust is another piece of evidence for Zionism's inherit evil. Now, this allows him, and here we should
1:46.8	see Abbas as an expression of a certain habit of mind that is rather more widely believed. This allows
1:52.9	him to both assert and deny the Holocaust. And also, to reinterpret the Nazi murder of European
2:00.0	Jewry, assigning new moral roles to the
	...

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