According to Yad Vashem’s definition, Holocaust denial is not only the outright claim that the most tragic event in Jewish history never occurred. On the contrary, most prominent deniers worldwide have not made such claims directly, but have spread lies or half-truths. Through such means—minimizing the event, desecrating its memory, and belittling its significance—they have harmed the memory of the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel. This is done in several ways, such as reducing the number of Holocaust victims, spreading false claims about the gas chambers, and more gravely, accusing the Jews of being responsible for the Holocaust.
The Nazis, of course, were the first to deny the Holocaust to avoid being held accountable for their crimes. Today, in Western countries or Israel, Holocaust denial is a criminal offense that can lead to significant prison sentences. However, in most Arab countries, there is no such legal accountability. In these countries, not only is the Holocaust not taught, but its very occurrence is explicitly denied as a means of attacking Israel and the Jewish people.
In general, the Arab narrative in the 20th century has been that there should be no compassion for the Jewish enemy and indeed no identification with them or with the Holocaust. Instead, compassion should be reserved for the Palestinians who “lost their country” and for the refugees who were “expelled.” Since then, and to this day, Arabs refuse to teach Holocaust content or acknowledge it.
The Arab narrative surrounding the Holocaust began to take shape with the establishment of the State of Israel. The first time Arabs denied the Holocaust was when they exerted heavy pressure on West Germany regarding the Reparations Agreement and demanded that those funds be transferred to the Palestinians, whom they regarded as the actual victims who paid the price for World War II. They even threatened to cut ties with Germany and boycott it if it paid any compensation to the Jews, claiming that the Jews were responsible for starting the war. In the end, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was unimpressed by the threats, and thus, in September 1952, the Reparations Agreement was signed, paving the way for normal relations between Germany and Israel and for the payment of compensation to survivors and their families.
A Variety of Conspiracies
Today, many conspiracy theories about the Holocaust are widespread throughout the Arab world. The first, though not the most common, claims that due to the Jews’ treacherous and destructive nature and their negative influence on European society, manifested through prostitution, gambling, and predatory loans on black markets, European countries asked Adolf Hitler to expel and exterminate them. The second theory holds that the Jews, after World War II, inflated the number of victims to gain global sympathy and extort money from Germany. To this day, Palestinians claim that Germany supports Israel and sells it weapons and submarines due to “guilt,” and that Israel continues to extort the Germans even after nearly 80 years.
Another theory is promoted by Islamic extremists, such as senior cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who justified the Holocaust and described it as a “deserved punishment” imposed by Allah on the Jews for their historical misdeeds, primarily for their refusal to convert to Islam during the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
The fourth and most common theory comes from the Eichmann school of thought. In the 1980s, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen, Chairman of the Palestinian Authority) wrote his “doctoral” dissertation in Moscow on this subject (though in reality, it was not an actual doctorate but rather a Soviet propaganda book intended to defame Israel), in which he claimed that the Holocaust was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy. According to Abbas, David Ben-Gurion collaborated with Hitler to murder as many Jews as possible. The goal, he claimed, was that at the end of the war, the Jews would be compensated with a state of their own. (More on Holocaust denial in the Palestinian Authority – to follow.)
Unfortunately, most Arabs believe at least one of these conspiracy theories due to a lack of proper education. As mentioned, in Arab countries, not only is the Jewish Holocaust not taught (nor, for that matter, the Armenian genocide), but students are actively taught to deny it. All the books on the subject promote one of the theories mentioned above. Moreover, Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is among the most widely read in the Arab world and is available for free download online.
When Hitler “Saved” Germany
Holocaust denial in the Arab world involves several arguments aimed at obscuring the credibility of historical facts. First, it is a fact that around 20 million Russians died in World War II, a number higher than the number of Jews murdered. Therefore, many in the Arab world question why the Western world focuses so heavily on the murder of the Jews. This argument is a transparent attempt to downplay the scale of the Holocaust, while ignoring the fact that most of the Russian casualties were soldiers fighting on the front lines, not civilians and families who were uprooted from their homes and exterminated solely because of their religion.
Another disturbing claim frequently raised concerns the scale of the victims exterminated in concentration camps. Holocaust deniers cite numbers ranging from 600,000 to 800,000 Jews, based on statements made by prominent 20th-century deniers such as Robert Faurisson and Roger Delorme. Another common antisemitic claim is the alleged harmful influence of Jews on German society. Here, many Arabs justify the Holocaust and portray Hitler as a patriot who saved Germany from Jewish corruption.
Regarding the findings and concrete evidence of the Holocaust’s existence, many Arabs argue that no conclusive evidence, such as bodies, ashes, gas chambers, and the like, has been found, even though such evidence is widely available and thoroughly documented. They justify this claim by arguing that after World War II, the global media was controlled by Jews, and that it was they who spread this narrative to the entire world.
And finally, Arab deniers question why there is an international day to commemorate Holocaust victims but not one for other historical events in which millions of civilians were killed.
The “Partners” in Extermination, According to Abbas
On April 27, 2014, Mahmoud Abbas made a groundbreaking statement about the Holocaust, calling it “the most heinous crime committed against humanity.” Most Palestinian and international news agencies published this statement, and Abbas added that the Holocaust was the result of ethnic discrimination and racism, which the Palestinians reject. But if one looks at his past, it becomes clear that he is one of the most prominent Holocaust deniers in the world today, not just in the Arab world. Abbas has made many statements against the Holocaust and the Jews. For instance, in recent years, he claimed that Hitler did not exterminate the Jews out of hatred, but because of their actions as moneylenders charging interest, which allegedly destroyed Germany’s economy.
The title of his book on the Holocaust, based on his doctoral dissertation submitted to the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow in 1982, is The Other Face: The Secret Connections Between Nazism and Zionism. Ostensibly, the book discusses the relationship between the Zionist movement and Nazism, beginning with the signing of the Haavara Agreement in August 1933, which allowed the transfer of property from tens of thousands of Jews from Germany to the Land of Israel. However, throughout the book, Abbas presents his thesis, which is essentially an indictment of Zionism and its leaders, from David Ben-Gurion onward.
In effect, he accuses them of being additional criminals—partners with the Nazis and responsible for the destruction of their people in the Holocaust. According to Abbas, they took part in it, deliberately sabotaged numerous rescue operations, provoked government hatred toward Jews to accelerate retaliation against them, and expand the scale of mass extermination—all in collaboration with the Third Reich.
Abbas refers to all of this as a conspiracy hatched by Zionist leaders against the Jewish people, with the sole purpose of establishing a national home in Palestine. He further claims that the Israeli establishment eliminated anyone who tried to expose this conspiracy.
At the beginning of his book, Abbas asks who the “other faces” are, the other truth, who was the additional partner in the crimes committed during World War II. He writes on page one: “The Western states designed the final image of the outcomes of the Second World War and of what followed from those outcomes. Regarding the crimes committed, they defined the criminals and the victims only after positioning themselves as judges and the ultimate authority on these crimes. They used the facts, events, and crimes as they pleased, and ignored what they wanted to forget—names, individuals, institutions, organizations, and states.
“In the end, they blamed the leaders of Nazism for all the crimes that occurred during that war, and pursued those who remained alive, indefinitely, with no statute of limitations. The Nuremberg cart continued to roll forward, reaping tyrants and murderers, while a fundamental partner in a fundamental crime committed during the war was left in the shadows. After defining the crimes and criminals, these countries, prosecutors, defendants, and witnesses restricted the prosecution entirely within a narrow framework that could not be deviated from. Thus, these states dealt only with half the truth, and deliberately neglected the other half.”
Abbas wonders what that “other half” is. According to him, Zionism and the leaders of the Zionist movement are the “fundamental partner” responsible for the crimes committed during World War II against the Jews. He claims they participated in the destruction of the Jewish people by encouraging persecution and antisemitism in Europe, all, as mentioned, to increase Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and accelerate the establishment of the Jewish homeland.
As If It Never Happened
The title of the book and the illustration inside its cover convey, from the very first moment, the general claim made within—even before reading a single page—which is that Nazi ideology is equivalent to Zionist ideology. The illustration in Appendix A clearly expresses this idea, following the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” – two faces wearing soldiers’ helmets, one bearing the Nazi symbol and the other bearing the Star of David. These images leave no room for doubt about the message the author is trying, quite successfully, to convey. It is important to note that this illustration does not appear in the online edition of the book, and it is unclear whether it is present in the two most recent print editions.
Already in the book’s introduction, there is a reference to the number of Holocaust victims. Abbas states that rumors are claiming the number of victims reached six million, but according to him, no one can confirm or deny this number:
“The number of Jewish victims may be six million, and it may be much lower, perhaps even less than one million. But the debate that arises around the Jewish number does not in any way diminish the ugliness of the crime committed against them. Because the principle of killing a human being, just one person, is a crime that is unacceptable in the civilized world; it is inhumane.
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement is to inflate the numbers of those who perished in the war, so that the (political) gains it seeks will be as great as possible. This led the movement to fix this number in global public opinion, so that it would feel greater guilt and more sympathy toward Zionism… Many researchers have discussed the issue of the number of victims—six million—and have reached astonishing conclusions, according to which the number of Jewish victims is in the hundreds of thousands.”
Regarding gas chambers, Abbas continues to rely on the “facts” and “research” of Holocaust deniers, and writes on page C: “These rooms, which were said to have been intended for killing living Jews—in a scientific study published by the French professor Robert Faurisson, he opposed the existence of these chambers for the purposes claimed, namely killing living people, and asserted definitively that they were intended solely for the cremation of bodies, to prevent the spread of disease and bacteria in nearby areas.”
Abbas repeatedly emphasizes that the Zionist movement is responsible for the destruction of the Jewish people and asks on page D: “How can one believe that the founders of the Zionist movement, which was supposed to protect the people, could be responsible for the destruction of that same people?” This is without relying on any research, interviews, or even a footnote referencing a source for such an extreme claim.
He further asserts that the Jewish-Nazi conspiracy at the core of his theory was exposed, citing the Arab proverb, “When there are many thieves, the theft will be revealed.” According to him, the Mapai party, which held power in Israel, refused to grant rights to the opposition, which in turn began to expose the hidden collaboration with Hitler. However, since this is a taboo that must not be mentioned, Abbas explains, anyone who begins to speak or even hint about it pays for it in their life.
Here, the author further indulges his imagination and claims on page F that Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina after publishing details of the Zionist-Nazi conspiracy in the American magazine Life. Abbas even “reveals” that the Shin Bet murdered the Zionist leader Israel Kastner because he dared to bring the details of the conspiracy to court. He also points to a third person named Dr. Kirin (without giving a full name or date), whom he claims was a German journalist about to expose documents regarding the collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionist movement and was murdered in his hotel room in Berlin.
The Mystery of the Silence
It is impossible to separate Holocaust denial from the already rising tide of antisemitism across the world today, particularly following the Iran-Iraq War. At the same time, it is pretty clear that the primary goal of Holocaust deniers is to demonize the Jews, delegitimize the State of Israel, and minimize the scale and historical importance of the Holocaust. For various non-substantive reasons, how Holocaust denial in the Arab world is addressed and exposed, both in Israel and in the West, is severely lacking, to say the least. In the absence of encouragement and funding, very few researchers deal with Holocaust denial. The author of these lines is among the few—if not the only one—who does so. On the other hand, there are many studies focused on Holocaust denial as it appears in Western countries.
A few years ago, I translated significant portions of Mahmoud Abbas’s book, which is based on the doctorate he wrote and centers on Holocaust denial. Unfortunately, for various reasons known only to them, no organization, including universities and institutions engaged in Holocaust remembrance, agreed to publish the book’s content. Many of them do not acknowledge Holocaust denial in the Arab world and do not research this phenomenon or publish materials about it. It is time for the State of Israel and the academic community to take the issue of Holocaust denial in the Arab world, particularly in the Palestinian Authority, seriously.
