| The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism | |
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Mahmoud Abbas |
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| Author(s) | Mahmoud Abbas |
| Original title | al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya |
| Country | Jordan |
| Language | Arabic |
| Subject(s) | History |
| Publisher | Dar Ibn Rushd |
| Publication date | 1984 |
| Pages | 253 |
The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism (Arabic: al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya. Publisher: Dar Ibn Rushd, Amman, Jordan. 1984) is the title of a book by Mahmoud Abbas,[1] published in Arabic.[1] It is based on his CandSc thesis,[2] completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University (now the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) under the title The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement (Russian: Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945), and defended at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
In the book, Abbas argues that the Nazi Holocaust had been exaggerated and that Zionists created "the myth" of six million murdered Jews, which he called a "fantastic lie".[3][4][5] He further claimed that those Jews which were killed by the Nazis were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot aimed to fuel vengeance against Jews and to expand their mass extermination.[6] The book also discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to facilitate Jewish emigration from Germany to Mandate Palestine.[2]
Portions of The Other Side have been considered as Holocaust denial by critics,[7] especially the parts disputing the accepted number of deaths in the Holocaust as well as the accusations that Zionist agitation was the cause of the Holocaust [8] a charge that Abbas denies.[9]
When Abbas was appointed the Palestinian prime minister in 2003, he wrote that the "Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind" and that he does not deny it,[10] and said that "When I wrote The Other Side … we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks".[11]
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Abbas attended at Patrice Lumumba University to prepare and present his doctoral thesis. The institute's director at the time, Yevgeny Primakov, appointed a Soviet-Palestine scholar, Vladimir Ivanovich Kisilev (Russian: Владимир Иванович Киселёв) as Abbas' dissertation adviser; he communicated with his student mostly in English and Arabic.[2] In an interview with the magazine Kommersant 20 years later, Kisilev remembers Abbas as a well-prepared graduate student, who came to Moscow with an already chosen research topic and a large amount of already prepared material.[2]
The Russian title of Abbas' thesis is "Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945",[12] or The Connections between Zionism and Nazism.[13]) In 1984, the book based on Abbas' doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic by Dar Ibn Rushd publishers in Amman, Jordan, under the title The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.
In the doctoral thesis, Abbas describes the Nazi Holocaust as "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed."[5][3][4]
The thesis also discussed topics such as the Haavara Agreement, by which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to facilitate Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine,.[2]
In the book, he wrote:
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.[8]
Additionally, he claimed that the much smaller number of Jews which he admitted that the Nazis did massacre were actually the victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot. "The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government's hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination."[6]
In the book, he wrote:
Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews . . . The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million.[14]
Abbas misquoted historian Raul Hilberg to support his claim that fewer than one million Jews were killed, and quoted Robert Faurisson on the nonexistence of gas chambers.[14][15][16]
A global survey of Holocaust denial, published by David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2004, describes the book as "denying the Holocaust".[17]
Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute denied the assertion by Abbas that "The historian and author, Raoul Hilberg, thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000", and said this is "utterly false". He wrote that "Professor Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study The Destruction of the European Jews, has never said or written any such thing."[8]
As Abbas was appointed prime minister in 2003, the Israel Defense Forces removed excerpts from the Abbas book from its website, including quotes questioning the use of gas chambers and talking of less than one million victims.[6] According to Knesset member Aryeh Eldad, speaking at the time of Abbas' appointment, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was asked to "conceal its information on Abu Mazen's Holocaust-denial writings" prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the American State Department.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for Abbas to clarify his position on the Holocaust in 1995, but he did not do so at that time.[18] Abbas' reported defence when asked about the book was telling: "When I wrote The Other Side…we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks…Today there is peace and what I write from now on must help advance the peace process."[11][19]
In his May 2003 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated:
| “ | I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. One wrote there were twelve million victims and another wrote there were 800,000. 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. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it.[10] | ” |