Abbas’s untranslated book

Over the past few years I’ve published many articles regarding this subject in the Israeli and international media.

By EDY COHEN
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses UN General Assembly (photo credit: REUTERS)
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses UN General Assembly
(photo credit: REUTERS)
On Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s website there are about 20 books listed, that have been translated to dozens of languages.
There is one book, written in Arabic, that has never been translated.
For the past 11 years Abbas has been the chairman of the PA, yet nobody bothered to check his ideology as reflected in this book – The Other Face: The Secret Contacts Between Nazism and Zionism (1984), Dar Ibn Rashid, Amman – based on Abbas’s PhD thesis, written while he was a student in the Soviet Union. (Recently it was reported that Abbas was a KGB agent and his thesis was probably written at the direct order of his Soviet commanders, to demonize Israel and the Jewish people.)
There has been a deliberate institutional silence regarding this issue. No one dared expose Abbas’ thesis, which basically denies the Holocaust. No one wanted to destroy Abbas’s “peaceful” image. Yad Vashem has never published a single article about Abbas’s thesis or book. Other academic institutions simply ignore the issue – which proves that there is no real academic freedom in Israel.
In his book Abbas claims that the Holocaust was a Zionist-Nazi plot, and indicts the Zionist movement and its leaders such as David Ben-Gurion as “fundamental partners” in the destruction of European Jewry. Abbas also wrote that the Zionists thought anything that would cause Jews to immigrate was justified, including antisemitism and cooperation with Hitler.
He makes this case by arguing that the Jews ignored the Holocaust, cooperated with Hitler and encouraged antisemitism and persecution of Jews in Europe – anything to increase immigration to the Land of Israel and speed up the growth of the Jewish National Home in Mandatory Palestine.
Abbas also claims that the Zionists deliberately sabotaged the rescue of the Jewish communities of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and the Baltic countries, including a shipment of 3,000 Jews from Hungary.
Over the past few years I’ve published many articles regarding this subject in the Israeli and international media. Many of my colleagues suggested I should stop so, lest my career be affected. Even so, and along with my friend and publisher Pierre Lavi, the urge to expose Abbas’s ideology as reflected in his book just increased.
Many publishers and department managers refused to assist me. Off the record, they explained that publishing such book could cause them to lose European funds. They are all afraid of any “radical image.”
With almost no funds, I’ve managed to publish a book, translated (into Hebrew) and edited selection from Abbas’s infamous thesis. The name of the book is The Holocaust in the eyes of Mahmoud Abbas, by Lavi p. Enterprises Ltd.
But my struggle is not over. I’m looking for funds to translate the book into English so that the whole world can be exposed to the ideology of the chairman of the PA.
Why is Israel fighting against Holocaust denial in Europe or Iran, but ignoring Holocaust denial in the PA? Mahmoud Abbas should apologize to the Jewish people and Holocaust survivors, and the Russian Academy must cancel his PhD.
The writer is an expert on Arab affairs and the author of the book The Holocaust in the eyes of Mahmoud Abbas.