One of the American Jewish community’s most visible proponents of Muslim-Jewish
dialogue has announced that he would like to organize a Holocaust memorial ceremony
next year in the Palestinian Authority capital of Ramallah. It is an “existential challenge
now to identify Muslim leaders that will stand with us shoulder to shoulder that will stand
up for the Jewish community and will defend the Jewish community and I am telling you
those leaders exist,” Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the New York-based Foundation for
Ethnic Understanding told The Jerusalem Post. As part of that effort he stated that he is
“working on some very significant events to take place within Muslim countries” on
International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2015, which falls on January 27. While holding
commemorations in Jewish communities is important, it is also “preaching to the
converted” and given that Holocaust denial is a problem in the Muslim world it is
supremely important to hold “significant commemorations that will take place in the
capitals of Muslim countries.” Asked where he would like to organize such events,
Schneier cited Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Palestinian Authority.
“I would love to do it in Ramallah to see if [Palestinian Authority] President Abbas
would follow up” on his 2014 condemnation of the Holocaust, Schneier said. “To bring it
to Ramallah and to have some commemoration there and this would be a follow-up to my
meeting with President Abbas.” In a meeting with Schneier last year, the PA leader called
the Nazi genocide the “single greatest tragedy in modern-day history” and, according to
the rabbi, agreed to make a public declaration on behalf of Holocaust-remembrance
efforts around the world. Abbas has been a subject of criticism in some Israeli circles over
accusations of Holocaust denial because of his graduate thesis, written while studying in
the former Soviet Union, which asserted that “a partnership was established between
Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement” and that the Zionist movement
“gave permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as
they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.” In 2013 Abbas defended his
thesis, saying that he “challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had
ties with the Nazis before World War II,” according to a report in the Palestinian news
service Ma’an. The Palestinian Authority has been accused of distorting the Holocaust in
the past. In 2011, a PA-sponsored youth magazine ran a feature in which Hitler tells a
Palestinian girl that he “killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a
nation which spreads destruction all over the world.” Israel has been accused of the
“exaggeration of the story of the Holocaust” by Palestinian news outlets such as the
official PA newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida. According to a poll released by the Anti-
Defamation League last May, Palestinian anti-Semitism is “pervasive throughout society,”
with 93 percent of respondents affirming anti-Jewish stereotypes, making the Palestinian
Authority the most anti-Semitic territory on earth. Sixty four percent of people polled in
Judea, Samaria and Gaza affirmed that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to
them in the Holocaust” while 84% asserted that “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone
but their own kind.” Abbas’s office said they have no information on this issue and have not
received any request.
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