The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has provoked outrage across Germany with his statement that Israel committed "50 holocausts" on the Palestinians.

The President of the German-Israeli Society, the former Green Party member of the Bundestag, Volker Beck, called on the federal government on Wednesday to take this scandal as an opportunity to cancel the German grants to the Palestinian Authority if they continue to pay so-called "martyr's pensions". pay to relatives of killed terrorists.

Beck said, "we are demanding a stop to payments until the terrorist pension system is discontinued." There should be at least an "annual percentage reduction in grants."

Johannes Leithauser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Abbas spoke in Berlin on Monday afternoon after meeting Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD).

He had made various accusations against Israel and said, among other things, that the Israeli government was blocking the way for the Palestinians to have their own state, but was denying them completely equal rights in Israel.

Israel is acting as an “apartheid state”.

His comment on Israeli holocausts came in response to a question about whether the Palestinian Authority would issue an apology to mark the 50th anniversary of the PLO's assassination of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.

Abbas said, "if we want to dig into the past, yes please" and then counter-charged, stating that Israel had "committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian locations" since its inception;

Abbas has relativized the Holocaust before

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who held a brief press conference with Abbas after their meeting in the Berlin Chancellery, responded to Abbas' accusation of apartheid with a counter-speech and said that he expressly did not endorse this assessment.

Scholz subsequently voiced further criticism of Abbas' autonomous government and, among other things, called for the holding of elections that had been announced again and again.

Scholz initially left Abbas' later Holocaust accusation uncommented, only later did he say in the "Bild" newspaper that "for us Germans in particular, any relativization of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable".

The Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned Abbas' statements "in the strongest terms".

The President of the Central Council, Josef Schuster, said that the Palestinian leader was not only relativizing the Shoah and the National Socialist policy of annihilation.

He tramples on the memory of six million murdered Jews.

Schuster said such statements "must not be left uncommented."

I think it is scandalous that such a relativization of the Holocaust "remains unchallenged at a press conference in the Federal Chancellery, especially in Germany".

The new Israeli ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, also expressed a lack of understanding.

He stated that "there must be zero tolerance for Mahmoud Abbas' Holocaust denial on German soil".

Referring to Abbas, Prosor went on to say, "Even if you got your doctorate in Holocaust denial, you should understand that reconciliation between people cannot be based on lies and distortions."

In his doctoral thesis in the early 1980s, Abbas put the Holocaust into perspective and accused the Zionist settler movement of having worked with the National Socialists.

Later, in other statements, he described the extermination of European Jews as the "worst crime of modern times".

Outrage also in Israel

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel was also outraged by Abbas' Holocaust statement.

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Merkel condemns the statements made by President Abbas at his press conference in Berlin in the strongest possible terms," ​​a spokeswoman said when asked by the "Bild" newspaper.

The statement was an unacceptable "attempt to relativize the singularity of the crimes committed by Germany under National Socialism, the breach of civilization by the Shoah, or to place the State of Israel directly or indirectly on a par with Germany during the National Socialist era".

Germany will never tolerate such attempts

Abbas' performance in Berlin also caused outrage in Israel.

Both Prime Minister Jair Lapid and Defense Secretary Benny Gantz were appalled, accusing the Palestinian President of a "blatant lie" and an attempt to "distort and rewrite history."

The head of Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, called on the German government to "react appropriately to this inexcusable behavior in the Federal Chancellery".

On Wednesday, Abbas tried to dampen the outrage over his statements.

"President Abbas reiterates that the Holocaust is the most heinous crime in modern human history," wrote the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Abbas said he did not want to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust in Berlin.