In Berlin, Mahmoud Abbas relativizes the Holocaust. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz initially said nothing about it. His lapses reveal an astonishing lack of presence of mind. He should have known who he was dealing with.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (left) and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin on Tuesday.
A statement by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin caused a stir in Germany and beyond; But the outrage at the reaction of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who received Abbas on Tuesday, is even greater.
At the joint press conference of the politicians in the Berlin Chancellery, a journalist asked Abbas if he wanted to apologize to Israel on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. “If we want to dig further into the past, yes please,” Abbas replied. Palestinians are being killed by the Israeli army every day. “Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian locations since 1947 to this day,” the Palestinian President said. And added: “50 massacres, 50 holocausts.”
The Israeli Prime Minister also expressed his outrage
The chancellor looked irritated and grim, but said nothing and shook Abbas’ hand. The explanation that the Chancellery later prepared for Scholz’ lack of reaction is that government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit declared the press conference over immediately after Abbas’ answer.
That’s not convincing: Scholz, as chancellor the man in the house, could easily have ignored it. Friedrich Merz, head of the opposition Christian Democrats, called the incident on Twitter “incomprehensible”. The chancellor, he wrote, should have “clearly contradicted his guest and asked him to leave the house.”
Merz’s party colleague Armin Laschet called Abbas’ appearance “the worst gaffe that was ever heard in the Chancellery”. The incident also caused a stir in Israel: The fact that Abbas accused the Jewish state of “committing 50 holocausts while standing on German soil is not only a moral disgrace, but an outrageous lie,” said Prime Minister Yair Lapid.
On Wednesday morning, Scholz condemned Abbas’ statement clearly: he was “deeply outraged”. “Especially for us Germans,” the Chancellor continued, “any relativization of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.” He had already made a similar statement to the “Bild” newspaper the evening before.
Why Scholz didn’t say this to Abbas’s face on Tuesday afternoon remains a mystery. Was it cowardice or at least a lack of civil courage? This is countered by the fact that the chancellor, when his guest described Israeli policy as an “apartheid system”, expressly stated that he had a different opinion. Scholz said he didn’t think the word was right to describe the situation.
It is not Abbas’ first scandalous statement
In doing so, the Social Democrat not only indirectly contradicted his party colleague Sigmar Gabriel, who spoke of apartheid after a visit to the occupied West Bank in 2012, but also expressed himself much more clearly than American President Joe Biden, who ignored it during a visit to the West Bank in mid-July that Abbas spoke of apartheid.
Abbas backtracked a bit on Wednesday: The president reiterated that the Holocaust was unique and the most heinous crime in modern history, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa wrote. However, Abbas had already explained this in 2014; This knowledge did not deter him from statements like those in the Chancellery or from the claim made in 2018 that the mass murder of European Jews was not triggered by anti-Semitism, but by the position of the Jews as lenders of interest-bearing loans.
Against this background, nobody could have been surprised by Abbas’s statement on Tuesday, and Scholz should have been clear that he was dealing with a guest who had long attracted attention with absurd theories about the Holocaust. What Scholz can at least be accused of is a lack of presence of mind, which is astonishing for a head of government. Such a belated reaction to a scandalous statement should not happen to a phlegmatic like the German chancellor.