Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu today reiterated that his government would not take part in Middle East peace talks with a Palestinian government backed by Islamist group Hamas.
In an interview with CNN, Netanyahu also said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s comments earlier today denouncing the Holocaust could not be reconciled with his alliance with Hamas.
“We will not negotiate with a government backed by Hamas,” Mr Netanyahu said on the CNN programme State of the Union.
Israel suspended US-sponsored peace talks with the Palestinians on Thursday after Mr Abbas announced a unity pact with the rival Palestinian group. Hamas is viewed by the United States, the European Union and Israel as a terrorist organisation.
Apparently seeking to build bridges, Mr Abbas said in a statement released today that the Nazi Holocaust was “the most heinous crime” against humanity in modern times.
Mr Abbas has condemned the mass killings of Jews in the second World War before and challenged allegations, stemming from a 1983 book he authored, that he is a Holocaust denier.
“President Abbas can’t have it both ways. He can’t say the Holocaust is terrible but at the same time embrace those who deny the Holocaust and seek to perpetrate another destruction of the Jewish people,” Mr Netanyahu said on CNN. “I think what President Abbas is trying to do is to placate Western public opinion that understands that he delivered a terrible blow to the peace process.”
The timing of the publication of Mr Abbas’s latest comments gave them extra significance, a day after he signalled he remained committed to the peace talks and said a future Palestinian unity government would recognise Israel.
The message, in Arabic and English, coincided with Israel’s annual remembrance day for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and included an expression of sympathy for the families of the victims.
Mr Abbas, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, made the comments at a meeting with an American rabbi last week.
“What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era,” Mr Abbas told Rabbi Marc Schneir, president of the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which promotes relations between racial and ethnic communities.
The Palestinian people, he added, “are the first to demand to lift the injustice and racism that befell other peoples subjected to such crimes”.
Before his TV appearance, Mr Netanyahu - while not referring directly to the Abbas statement - accused the Palestinian leader of forging a partnership with Holocaust deniers.
“Hamas denies the Holocaust while trying to create another Holocaust by destroying Israel,” Mr Netanyahu said in public remarks at the weekly meeting of his cabinet. “It is with this Hamas that Abu Mazen chose to create an alliance last week.”
A spokesman said Mr Netanyahu’s comments were not a direct response to Mr Abbas’s statement but the Israeli leader was aware of what the Palestinian president had said.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli monitoring group, says both Hamas and Mr Abbas’s Fatah movement have engaged in Holocaust denial. On its website, PMW cites a Hamas TV documentary which it said alleged Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to eliminate the “disabled and handicapped”.
But the website also mentions a statement issued by Mr Abbas's Palestinian Authority in January condemning the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews.
Mr Abbas has long been accused by some Israeli politicians of being a Holocaust denier over his book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which was based on his doctoral dissertation where he questioned the number of Jewish Holocaust victims.
In an interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in 2003, Mr Abbas said he had quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned.
“One wrote there were 12 million victims and another wrote there were 800,000,” he said in the interview. “I have no desire to argue with the figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”
Reuters