Gaza News Agency Mocks “So-Called” Holocaust, Calls Tel Aviv a “Settlement”

April 25, 2017

Tuesday, 25 April 2017 | The popular Arabic-language Twitter feed of a Hamas-linked news agency mocked Israel’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, sharing a photograph of Israelis standing outside their vehicles as memorial sirens blared in Tel Aviv.

While the city was established by Zionist Jews in 1909 and was part of Israel before 1967, the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Center described it as a “settlement” when referring to the “so-called ‘Holocaust remembrance’” in a tweet.

There is no comparable tweet at the center’s English Twitter feed.

In “How Holocaust Denial Shaped Mahmoud Abbas’ Worldview,” which was published in the June 2016 issue of The Tower Magazine, Edy Cohen explained why many in the Palestinian territories, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, downplay or deny the Holocaust:

“Perhaps most depressing, however, is the fact that Abbas’ claims are widespread among the Palestinians and the Arab states in general. As long as this persists, peace is all but impossible, because the Palestinians and the Arab world cannot make peace with the Jewish state without admitting, to some degree, the justice of its cause. To do this, it must acknowledge and sympathize with the terrible crime done to the Jewish people.”

Former Israeli Knesset member Einat Wilf wrote last week that efforts to claim that Israel was established as a result of the Holocaust amount to “Zionism denial.”

“To portray Israel as the outcome of the Holocaust is to engage in Zionism denial. It robs the Jews of their agency, their history, their historical connection to the land of Israel and their yearning to return to it. It erases all that was dreamt, written, done and achieved by the Zionists before World War II. It turns Israel into a colonial project of guilty Europeans rather than a national liberation project of an indigenous people reclaiming their homeland. In remembering the Holocaust, Israel mourns not only all that was and still is lost, but Zionism’s greatest tragedy and failure.”

Posted on April 25, 2017

Source: (This article was originally published by The Israel Project, in its publication The Tower on 24 April 2017. Time related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See the original article at this link.)

Photo Credit: Isranet