Top adviser: PA president was citing historical narrative

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does not personally maintain that Jews were massacred in Europe for centuries because of their “social role related to usury and banks,” a senior Palestinian official said on Wednesday.

In a long speech on Monday in front of a top Palestine Liberation Organization body in Ramallah, Abbas said Jews were not killed in Europe over the years because of their religion, but rather “their social role related to usury and

banks.” The PA president said he was referencing the writings of Karl Marx and two other Jewish authors.

“President Abbas does not personally hold that Jews were killed because of their social role related to banks,” Mahmoud al-Habash, the PA president’s religious affairs adviser, told The Jerusalem Post. “He was merely stating the opinion of [Karl] Marx and other Jewish writers.”

When asked why Abbas made the statement if he does not believe it is true, Habash said: “There are two narratives: One narrative is that Jews were killed because of their social role, and another is they were killed because of their religion. We are not adopting either of these narratives, but rather leaving it to historians to determine the truth.”

Asked why Abbas only cited one of the “two narratives” for why Jews were killed in Europe, Habash repeated: “Abu Mazen is not stating his personal perspective, but rather a historical narrative that he has not adopted.”

Abbas published a book in 1983, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, based on his doctoral thesis in which he argued the number of Jewish Holocaust victims was exaggerated. Habash argued that Abbas does not condone the massacres of Jews in Europe.

“We consider all the massacres that the Jews were subjected to in the West as massacres against humanity and absolutely unacceptable,” he said. “We do not accept any aggression against anyone because of their religion or their social role. We do not justify any such acts.”

Abbas’s comments on Monday marked the second time in several months that he spoke about his perspective of Jewish history before a PLO audience. In January, Abbas delivered a speech to the PLO Central Council, in which touched on his take of Jewish history and called Israel “a colonial project with no relationship to Judaism.” Following the speech in January, Israeli officials accused Abbas of antisemitism. •