Since its founding in 1994, the Palestinian Authority, an internationally recognized pre-state authority, has advanced antisemitic themes to fuel its decades-old political warfare campaign to isolate, destabilize, and subvert the State of Israel. The PA’s antisemitic discourse, rooted in Nazi and Soviet-era conspiracy theories, has resulted in violence against Israelis and diaspora Jews. Ironically, both Israel and the international community have largely overlooked this flagrant violation of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PA: to desist from incitement to terror and violence.¹ This essay documents nearly 30 years of Palestinian Authority antisemitic rhetoric in its media, social networks, official government statements, and educational system. This essay will also assess Israel’s willful blindness to these violations and offer a prescription and remedy through Israeli policy that will hold the PA to account and reform.

Since its inception in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Authority’s source organization, has perpetuated Nazi and Soviet antisemitic tropes and conspiracy libels that characterize Israelis and Jews as racially inferior, devious, conniving, and imperialistic.² Palestinian Arabs’ hatred of Jews has a long history. The first Palestinian Arab political leader, “Grand Mufti” Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was closely aligned with the Nazi regime and even called for the Reichstag to bomb Tel Aviv. He accused the pre-state yishuv of desecrating the al-Aqsa mosque, depicting Jewish worshippers as “evil marauders,” statements that ignited bloody anti-Jewish riots in the 1920s and 1930s.³ The PA lodges the exact charges, claiming “al-Aqsa is in danger” from “settlers storming al-Aqsa”⁴ – to depict peaceful Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.

Husseini’s widely distributed sermons of the 1930s incited and spread Jew-hatred across the broader Middle East.⁵ His speeches on a German-based radio service in Arabic blamed Jews for World War II.⁶ Historian Jeffrey Herf writes, “The fusion of antisemitism with anti-Zionism was the key ideological weapon of the Nazi regime in its efforts to win support from Arabs and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East.”⁷

The Mufti’s widely distributed “Proclamation to the Muslim World” rallied Muslim opposition to the Zionist project:

Since the earliest days of their history, the Jews have been an oppressed people, and there must be a good reason for that. As far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, energetic oppressive measures had to be taken against the Jews…. The Jews hate Muhammad and Islam…. The battle … began when Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina…. The Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. They know only hypocrisy and guile. Hold together, fight for Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.⁸

Both the Fatah-led PA and its rival Islamist Hamas have perpetuated a tradition of anti-Jewish declarations, blood libel discourse, and calls to jihad against Jews based on dar al-Islam,⁹ blaming Jews for wars¹⁰ as a justification for killing or harming them.¹¹ Referencing Islamic writings, Islamic clerics and spokespeople such as Raafat Alayan, the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem spokesman, consider Jews to be “sons of apes and pigs.”¹² Palestinian officials have invoked accusations reminiscent of the medieval “blood libel” against Jews. Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi retweeted a medieval-themed claim that Israelis purposely drowned an Arab boy from Beit Hanina in east Jerusalem, after he slipped into a flooded area.¹³ In 2016, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told a European Commission assembly that Israeli rabbis told their followers to poison Arab wells, a claim that he retracted after Israeli and international condemnation.¹⁴ Abbas also falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler facilitated the immigration of Jews to Israel by reaching a deal with the Anglo-Palestine Bank (now Bank Leumi) under which Jews who moved to the British Mandate of Palestine could transfer their assets to the bank, a claim also made in his dissertation.¹⁵

Hamas’ antisemitic discourse is showcased in its 1988 charter.¹⁶ Hamas legislator Sheikh Yunus al-Astal claimed, “Suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next…Therefore, we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”¹⁷ Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television station airs programs aimed at preschoolers extolling hatred of Jews and praising suicide bombings.¹⁸ Gazans fly Nazi flags at their borders,¹⁹ and in August 2009, Hamas called the Holocaust “a lie invented by the Zionists” and referred to Holocaust education as a “war crime.”²⁰ A popular Gaza City clothing shop is named “Hitler 2,” displaying a Nazi-themed black and red sign.²¹

Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the PLO’s “moderate, secular” Fatah faction and head of the internationally recognized pre-state Palestinian Authority, is no less extreme in his rhetoric than his Hamas rivals. Abbas’ Holocaust denial and Jewish “Nazi” conspiracy theories date back to his 1968 Soviet-sponsored doctoral dissertation, which is still popular today and available online in Arabic. Titled “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” it claimed that the figure of six million Holocaust victims was exaggerated and that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis.²² Abbas has not relented, and, in August 2022, he claimed that the nakba – the “catastrophe” of Palestinian Arab displacement during the Israeli War of Independence (1947-1949) – was equivalent to “50 Holocausts” in a speech delivered in Germany in the presence of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Like his blood libel diatribe delivered to European leaders in 2016, Abbas was condemned broadly for his “50 Holocausts” comments in 2022.²³

The above examples cannot be attributed to Palestinian frustration over a failed peace process: PA officials spewed antisemitic tropes in the midst of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.²⁴ PA Chairman Yasser Arafat invoked Islamist antisemitic themes in a May 10, 1994, speech in a Johannesburg mosque, calling for a “jihad” to liberate Jerusalem, and suggested that the Oslo accords were a reversible tactical move. Though these words touched off a political firestorm in Israel,²⁵  they were brushed off by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.²⁶

In 1999, Arafat’s wife, Suha, told U.S. First Lady Hillary Clinton that Israelis intentionally poison the air and water with gas and chemicals to harm Palestinians, leading “to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.”²⁷ A year earlier, in 1998, PA officials accused Israel of spreading cancer and disease through contaminated drugs and spoiled food, including milk for Palestinian babies,²⁸ prompting then-Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Dore Gold, to petition UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, over these fraudulent allegations.²⁹ Gold’s official denunciation and insistence on UN action to remedy the PA’s violation of Oslo’s stipulations against incitement, marked a turning point towards a more aggressive Israeli policy against PA antisemitic rhetoric.

A few years later, in August 2001, at an UN-sponsored conference, Soviet anti-Zionism was repackaged and rebooted for the 21^st Century. At the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban, South Africa, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat condemned “the Israeli occupation and its racist practices and laws, which are based on racism and superiority.”³⁰ This nomenclature was incorporated into the conference’s NGO Declaration: “We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel’s brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation, dispossession, restricted land access, denationalization, ‘bantustanization,‘ and inhumane acts.”³¹

Political analyst Izabella Tabarovsky assessed:

In Durban, self-described anti-racists—including international NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—stood by as Jewish participants were harassed and prevented from speaking. Booths displayed posters picturing Jews with hooked noses and bloodied hands and ones equating Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed, along with flyers bearing Hitler’s photo, captioned “What if I had won?” The security situation deteriorated, threatening Jewish attendees’ physical safety. What began with a demonization of Israel quickly turned into a demonization of “Jews of the entire world,” who were portrayed as “accomplices of this evil regime.” By the end of the conference, demonization became personal, as human rights activists “could no longer show their Jewish colleagues respect”: their very Jewishness “shamed the antiracist cause.”³²

Durban’s “Nazification” of Israel on an international stage, under UN sanction, seven years after the internationally-witnessed Oslo peace process had begun, represented a wholesale globally legitimized uprooting of Israel’s legality and validity as a UN member. Israel’s response to the 2001 Durban conference was ineffective. It failed to mobilize the international community against the PA’s flagrant violation of Oslo.

Durban’s blow to Israel’s legitimacy was a direct continuation of the PLO’s subversion of Israel in its Soviet-drafted and sponsored UNGA resolution 3379 of November 1975, known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Patrick Moynihan said of UNGA 3379, which remained on the books until 1991, “the abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”³³ The United States, under George H.W. Bush, led the campaign that resulted in the shelving of 1975’s Soviet-sponsored 3379, with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2001, it was American Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, and not Israel, who led the walkout from the Durban Human rights debacle in 2001.³⁴

Israel’s only official response, several days after the conference, was given by Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior, who wrote:

It might have been hoped that this first Conference of the 21^st Century would have taken up the challenge of, if not eradicating racism, at least disarming it: But instead, humanity is being sacrificed to a political agenda…Can there be a greater irony than the fact that a conference convened to combat the scourge of racism should give rise to the most racist declaration in a major international organization since the Second World War?³⁵

The “Durban strategy” has been felt throughout the new century, as documented by Professor Gerald Steinberg.³⁶ After Durban, defensive moves by the IDF against terrorist activities and PLO militias have been deemed “war crimes” and “genocide” by the organizations that attended the Durban conference’s NGO forum. The Durban strategy has driven an intensifying campaign of adverse NGO reports by Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and Amnesty International that have labeled Israel an “apartheid state” – a taboo until Durban’s 2001 declaration.³⁷

Durban gave rise to the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel that took root with particular intensity in the West’s progressive agenda and activities.³⁸ BDS mimics the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses,³⁹ as noted in 2019 by the German Bundestag.⁴⁰ More insidious, BDS officially preaches non-violent forms of protest, while its founders have clearly stated that they oppose Jewish self-determination in any form.⁴¹

BDS’s masking of its “politicidal” intentions toward the Jewish and democratic state has appropriated the Nazi regime’s genocide of the Jewish people with a more politically correct, camouflaged call to “Free Palestine, from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea.” BDS couches its end goal in more publicly palatable social justice themes, sidestepping a discussion of the consequences of dismantling the Jewish State, which would likely entail not only the mass displacement of Jews but would result in their physical destruction.⁴² BDS’ campus arm, Students for Justice in Palestine, harasses Jewish students, regardless of their affinity for Israel or lack thereof, while BDS-supporting academics demand denouncements of Israel.⁴³

The Durban-BDS strategy has managed to call into question the validity of a Jewish state by convincing the West that Israel is a racist, colonialist “apartheid” project that represents the antithesis of a liberal democracy anchored by a commitment to human rights. Palestinian activists pushing identity politics, backed and directed by the PA in Ramallah,⁴⁴ have shoe-horned their struggle into the popular Western social justice discourse by “racializing” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In this postmodern “woke” political reality, Palestinians are depicted as racially marginalized victims, the “brown” “indigenous” people of the Levant, while Israelis have been cast as “white settler-colonialists.” This narrative, depicting Jews as racist oppressors and colonialist aliens to their indigenous homeland negating Jewish identity and self-determination, is a form of collective Jew-hatred.⁴⁵

In the 30 years since the signing of Oslo I, Nazi-style classic antisemitic tropes, “woke” Soviet-inspired anti-“colonialist” conspiracies, and old-fashioned blood libels have provided the PA a strategic narrative directed at Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive international audiences.

Twenty years after Gold’s petition to the UN in 1998, Abbas claimed, at the 2018 Palestinian National Conference in Ramallah, that the Holocaust was not the result of antisemitism but rather of the Jews’ “social behavior, [charging] interest, and financial matters,” as his predecessor Mufti Husseini did decades before him.⁴⁶

Until recently, the phenomenon has been willfully ignored by Israel in service of its security cooperation with the PA, which Israeli government officials feared would collapse under Israeli and international condemnation and economic punishment.

Yet, the Israel-PA security relationship has only deteriorated due to the pervasive influence of the anti-Jewish anti-Israeli Palestinian narrative. Jew-hatred is mainstreamed in PA school textbooks and pushed by teachers of UNRWA (the UN’s Refugee and Works Agency).⁴⁷ Terror incitement is also justified with claims that Israel was implanted by an imperialist, “European, colonial, anti-Arab conspiracy with the goal of dividing the Arab world.”⁴⁸ Even in preschool, as documented in a viral 2023 TikTok video, Palestinian toddlers act out as PLO militants fighting against the IDF.⁴⁹ The end result is an educational system and culture that glorify violence, dominating the news feed: teenage militants perpetrate attacks, while media sources depict them as innocent victims of IDF aggression.⁵⁰

Will the Palestinian Authority Pay the Price for Antisemitism and Incitement to Murder?

Only in recent years did the Israeli government begin to take the PA’s impact on global antisemitism, terrorism, and the ideological delegitimization of Israel seriously.⁵¹ In 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu approved an unprecedented 142-million-shekel budget for the Strategic Affairs Ministry, mandated to combat delegitimization and antisemitism, under Minister Gilad Erdan, who would become Israel’s UN ambassador.⁵²

The Israeli government began to act against BDS in 2017, imposing a travel ban on BDS activists.⁵³ In 2018, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs published a report titled Terrorists in Suits, documenting the political warfare activities of terrorists masquerading as civil society activists.⁵⁴ At the UN General Assembly, Israeli representatives showed a new awareness of the effects of delegitimization. In April 2019, Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon dealt with delegitimization at its root, holding up a copy of the Bible, saying, “God gave the land to the people of Israel in Genesis, when he made a covenant with Abraham…This is our deed to our land.”⁵⁵ Reflecting the new approach, Erdan, Israel’s current UN envoy, said, “The best defense is a good diplomatic offense.”⁵⁶ 

The Israeli government also reacted harshly to Abbas’ “50 Holocausts” speech in Germany in 2022,⁵⁷ as opposed to previous years in which Israeli leaders turned a blind eye to PA Holocaust denial and revision.⁵⁸ Prime Minister Yair Lapid, Israeli Knesset members, ministers, and leaders such as Naftali Bennett, Benny Gantz, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sar, and Dani Dayan condemned the statement.⁵⁹ The Bennett-Lapid government also took a hard line on Palestinian vandalism of Jewish holy sites after Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus was desecrated in April 2022.⁶⁰ Lapid also commissioned a popular Israeli Hollywood actress Noa Tishby, as state envoy to combat antisemitism.⁶¹

The issues of Palestinian curriculum, textbooks, anti-Israel UNRWA teachers, and social media influence are more complex and difficult to counter.⁶² However, the Israeli government closed six east Jerusalem schools after they refused to comply with curriculum corrections of antisemitic references in schoolbooks since the Israeli Education Ministry pays teachers’ salaries there. The east Jerusalem counter-reaction posed its own challenge, when 150 Palestinian schools went on strike to protest the closure in September 2022.⁶³

The EU has exhibited increased impatience with the PA’s malign behavior. The EU has frozen funds to Palestinian Authority schools due to mass incitement and antisemitic content, while the American government has demanded to review PA and Gaza curricula. ⁶⁴ Recently, Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called on the European Union to stop funding PA textbooks.⁶⁵

Israeli pushback on PA violations poses the risk of a political and public relations boomerang, as was the case in the east Jerusalem school strike, as noted above. The PA has also threatened its own collapse as a response to sanctions. In January 2023, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh warned that Israeli sanctions imposed on the PA in response to its International Court of Justice suit against Israel would cause its implosion, appealing to the U.S. and Arab states in an interview in Israel’s left-leaning daily Ha’aretz.⁶⁶ Notably, a few years before, Shtayyeh claimed that IDF soldiers purposely infected Palestinians with COVID-19 during the pandemic.⁶⁷

In January 2023, Israel froze the transfer of tax revenues collected on behalf of the PA and channeled them to Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism. Israel also froze illegal Palestinian building in Area C and vowed to penalize PLO officials and NGOs involved in political warfare against Israel. These steps followed the PA’s petition to the International Court of Justice for a legal opinion regarding the West Bank and Gaza, which questioned, 57 years after the 1967 War if Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian territory” had become a form of de facto annexation and thus illegal under international law.⁶⁸

Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli condemned the PA as an engine for modern antisemitism in 2022.⁶⁹ In February 2023, the Knesset approved a law stripping convicted terrorists of Israeli citizenship if they received funding from the Palestinian Authority or an associated organization – a PA policy known as “pay for slay.”⁷⁰

A unified Israeli-diaspora “no tolerance” approach is critical to counter PA antisemitism. At times, Jewish organizations have erred in platforming the PA narrative in their “efforts at peace.” A case in point: in April 2021, J Street featured Abbas as a speaker at its annual conference, where he demanded that the Biden administration rescind the previous U.S. determination declaring the PLO a terror organization.⁷¹ This demand was made on the organization’s public stage, while the PA continued its “pay to slay” policy, for which Israel withheld tax revenues from the PA in 2019.⁷² Israelis and diaspora Jewry must work together and refuse to countenance the PA’s political warfare in its efforts to pit these groups against one another.

The Israeli government and Jewish organizations must also uniformly invoke the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IRHA) definition of antisemitism as the standard guide for governments and international bodies in their legal and diplomatic moves against the PA.⁷³ IHRA includes examples of antisemitism that specifically relate to Israel as the Jewish collective, informed by the “Three D” test⁷⁴ established by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, and former Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky. Sharansky has noted that in his native Soviet Union, the term “Zionist” was used as a code word for Jews.⁷⁵

PLO and PA antisemitic rhetoric constitutes a national security threat to Israel and the Jewish people today. Israel has the legal and moral mandate and responsibility to hold the Palestinian Authority accountable for its ongoing antisemitic incitement, rampant at all levels of Palestinian public discourse. Israel should penalize the PA for breaches of Oslo Accords stipulations by withholding funds and referring the PA to international bodies such as the European Commission, UN Human Rights Council, International Court of Justice, and International Criminal Court for violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by inciting and encouraging deadly terrorism, which has killed and wounded thousands of Israelis and Jews. Israel must adopt a no-tolerance approach to PA antisemitic discourse that will counterbalance the PA’s constant delegitimization campaign against Israel in the West. Israeli measures will deter PA leaders by creating awareness and deepening financial penalties among donor nations.

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Notes