There is an unfortunate but important conversation taking place around the world, and in the U.S. in particular, about the growth of antisemitism. Hatred and conspiracy theories against Jews spewed by the likes of Kanye West, and shared by Kyrie Irving, have spiked interest in finding ways to combat the oldest hatred. However, despite the growing understanding of the need to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism by an impressive number of countries and groups, there remains one institution that is completely ignored.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) remains one of the most antisemitic institutions in the world. Not a day passes without a representative or official media outlet of the PA spewing out vitriol against Jews. Not Israelis (or “Zionists,” frequently used by many as a substitute), but Jews.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, only days ago, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, a regular columnist for the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and a former advisor on national affairs to former PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, wrote an article “The awakening of American Jews,” where he relayed all the traditional antisemitic motifs against Jews. Claiming they control the government, media and Hollywood, Al-Ghoul went into further greater detail than Kanye West, or any of his supporters in recent weeks.
While the international community prepares to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day next month, PA TV teaches viewers that the Holocaust was the price the Jews paid for their their “conspiracies and wickedness.”
The manipulation and appropriation of the Holocaust is hardly something new, as the leader of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, stood a few months ago alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin and said that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts” against the Palestinians. This is not surprising for a man whose own doctoral thesis was based on denying central parts of the Holocaust.
In most of the world, an institution spreading this hatred would be sanctioned and condemned, but the PA continues to receive support and funding from the West, and its Jew-hatred is seen as a distraction.
Some years ago, when a senior European Union official responsible for funds directed towards the PA was asked to look into its incitement and antisemitism, his response was that he needed such an inquiry like he needed “a hole in the head.”
Unfortunately, the “headache” that some Europeans, Americans and others get when acting to suppress antisemitism hardly matches the very real terror attacks and murder wreaked on Jews in Israel as a result.
The Palestinian Authority machinery of hate dwarfs anything in the West.
Antisemitism is antisemitism, wherever it hides, but currently there is a two-tier hierarchy of antisemitism.
Western antisemitism is rightly called out much of the time. Unfortunately, Palestinian Authority antisemitism is ignored. Silence in the face of this antisemitism, which has a far greater real-time effect and leads to far more bloodshed, is indeed complicity.
Antisemitism in the PA is the fuel which drives its over-100-year war against the Jewish people’s sovereignty in their ancestral and indigenous homeland. It is not a side issue or a distraction, it is the central driver of terror and war against Jews.
There is no chance of peace without addressing antisemitism and incitement in the Palestinian Authority.
There is no chance of peace, however one sees a resolution to the conflict, without addressing antisemitism and incitement in the PA. It cannot be moderated or compromised with; it must be defeated.
The PA leadership must hear the strongest message from Israel and the West that antisemitism will no longer be tolerated, and until it vanishes completely, it will be seen as the actions of a regime that is uninterested in peace and one whose will to continue this war must be broken.
If any other leadership or regime acted and spread Jew-hatred like the PA, it would be shunned and under enormous pressure to change. Sanctions would be used, funding and partnerships would be withheld and those involved in actual attacks on Jews, for which people employed and associated with the PA are becoming more and more involved, would be vigorously pursued.
Without these measures, words and statements against antisemitism are empty.
If the war against antisemitism is to have any meaning, it must be constant and consistent across the globe. By ignoring and side-stepping PA antisemitism, some are showing that this war is not really serious, because when Jews lives are at stake, it doesn’t matter.
This cannot continue.
The war against Palestinian Authority antisemitism must be fought and won, just as vigorously and ruthlessly as anywhere else.
