JERUSALEM (JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told a Lebanese television station that the Nazis and Zionists worked in collaboration before World War II.
The subject was the topic of Abbas’ dissertation for his doctorate in history from the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
“I challenge anyone to deny the relationship between Zionism and Nazism before World War II,” Abbas said during the Jan. 21 interview with Al-Mayadeen, a television station based in Beirut that is affiliated with Hezbollah and Iran. Abbas insisted that he has “70 more books that I still haven’t published” about the alleged collaboration.
Abbas’ dissertation is called “The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement.” A book based on the dissertation published in 1984 is titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.”
In the book, Abbas claimed that the Zionist movement inflated the numbers of dead in the Holocaust for more material gain and that the number of Jewish victims is in the tens of thousands. He also wrote that the Zionist movement helped the Nazis wipe out the Jewish people in exchange for the transfer to then-Palestine through the Jewish Agency of the assets of the German Jews who immigrated there.
Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudaineh denied that Abbas spoke of a link between Nazism and Zionism. He also said in a statement that Abbas is "committed to the peace process.”
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