Abbas should have said that Palestinians have been and remain one of the premier victims of the European Holocaust post 1945...

They have not been ‘50 Holocausts’ for the Palestinians since 1948 but they remain in a true sense victims of that European inflicted genocide…By Kailash Kutwaroo..

The recent comments by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the ‘50 Holocausts’ inflicted upon the Palestinian people was in a real sense wrong.?Why was it wrong? Primarily, the reason it was wrong was because Palestinians have not actually suffered genocide (that is an Israeli policy to physically exterminate them as a people from the face of the earth) either currently or historically.?Neither have they been the subject of collective mass shootings and factory organised slaughter, confinement to disease infected ghettos, starvation, or used as slave labour until worked to death by the Nazi German State as was the case for European Jews between 1939-1945.

That much is true. Yet they are also good reasons why Pro-Palestinian activists should avoid such a historically dubious comparison. By making them they blunt the Palestinian case (as impressive and almost ironclad in nature on all the key points vis a vis the Israeli narrative that it is) and indirectly bolsters a victimhood Status that Israel and its supporters like to foster of the ‘Singled out Jewish State’ subject to regular misrepresentation and antisemitism.?In short, such analogies invite too easy rebuttals by its opponents.?Avoid them…

Yet in some respects the comparison was also a wasted opportunity by Abbas to explain that since 1945 Palestinians both as a collective nation and individually have been the substantial if not the greatest victims of that European inflicted Holocaust.?The evidence for that verge almost on the incontrovertible. Most notably the 1947-48 violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (almost 80% of whom were expelled or fled) from their homes and the corresponding seizure of their lands by a subjugating European settler Zionist movement and its armed militias. This event and the consequent erasing of the Palestinian Homeland would receive not denunciation from global powers but benediction and endorsement including from the departing British Mandate power, the Soviet Union, and the USA. In essence, a seminal mid-20th century injustice was inflicted upon a long-established Arab Palestinian populace (firstly Christian and later Muslim in nature) of over 1,000 years residence (if not longer) and supported by these nations (and others) to effectively compensate Jewish settlers (whose antecedents lasted formed a demographic majority in the area in the 3rd Century) for the crimes committed against it (though also and often overlooked to better anchor ongoing Western interests in the region through a cooperative European offshoot State).?

They is little to lose in the interpretation here.?No European nation, not least Germany, the prime architect of this organised murder, would suffer the loss of land and uprooting of populations for the Continent’s climatic crimes against its Jewish peoples. Palestinians did in 1948 and have continued to do so since that time.?Moreover, the cruel nature of the Israeli occupation since 1967 has elicited only trifling criticism from those powers and so-called regional Muslim nations (with exceptions such as Syria and Iran) be it over land expropriations, collective punishments, numerous military assaults, (just add the recent Israeli Gaza Strip operation) assassination of various Palestinian Liberation leaders and soldiers, humiliations of Palestinian peoples at checkpoints, prisons and in their own homes. The litany of abuses can be continued no doubt and we should not (less we can) overlook the over five and a half million Palestinian refugees who remained (with no recourse to their original homes) dislocated in the surrounding countries of the Middle East and worldwide from the various wars fought between 1948 and 1967.

Unusually, due to Western Imperialism and the nature of its engagement with the Middle East, the Palestinians were paying the price in their own lands for Europe’s antisemitic hatreds long before the Nazis had agreed to Jewry’s destruction at Wannsee in 1942. The racist arrogance of Balfour, the uncontrolled 1930’s immigration into the Palestine Mandate (a process that continued illegally into the 1940’s as well as shaped by European nations refusal to give shelter to fleeing German Jews) combined with the surreptitious buying up of Arab land by Zionist agencies are the most notable manifestations of this point.?The unjust 1947 UN partition plan devised to resolve the conflict which afforded the Jewish communities who owned less than 6% of the total land area at the time 56% of the Mandatory Palestine symbolized the zenith of a series of policy actions that cavalierly disregarded the Palestinian case before the eruption of the 1948 war.

Abbas’s comments like Human Rights Watch's labelling of Israel as an Apartheid State distort the true nature of the Israeli State’s crimes (and thus understanding of them).?Israel strategically seeks (the notion of ‘transfer’ has after all deep roots in Zionist thinking going back to David Ben Gurion if not further) the permanent movement of the Palestinians into the surrounding countries not a State sponsored separation of the Jewish and Palestinian communities.?This explicates its relentless Settlement policy in the West Bank, its annexation of East Jerusalem, the blockading of the Palestinian lands as well as its husbanding (if underplayed) of critical water resources.?To be sure there are comparable features between Apartheid South Africa and modern-day Israel such as restrictions on Palestinian movements and denial of basic civil/economic rights like residency and land ownership for Israeli Arabs that would be familiar to black South Africans of that era.?Yet the function of the Apartheid regime in South Africa was always to maintain a cheap supply of black labour working in the country's mining and other key wealth producing sectors, (whilst also investing in Urban areas unlike the Townships) In Israel the goal is not exploitation but to make Palestinians lives, especially in the occupied lands, so fundamentally intolerable that they vacate those areas. Above all else therefore, the Jewish State is an ethnic cleanser facilitator.?

It was a former lecturer and Blue Labour thinker Maurice Glasman (now Baron Glasman) who used to commentate in my undergraduate political theory seminars in the mid 1990’s that he barely understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all ‘why do Palestinians have to pay for European crimes?, disturbed by the Holocaust?, there is a country called Germany with a region called Bavaria, empty the population there and tell Jews here is a Homeland and your compensation, problem solved’…. Now that point would have been a better if still controversial one for the Palestinian President to have made.