Word: holocaust
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...Thus the events celebrated by many Jews as a moment of deliverance from the evil of the Holocaust is commemorated in the Palestinian national narrative as al-Nakbah, the catastrophe, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were turned into refugees. It is these entirely separate narratives that have made the conflict so intractable over the past half century. The importance of the Palestinians' understanding and acknowledging the Holocaust would have been underlined at the Tehran conference had Iran granted the visa applied for by Khaleed Mahameed, a Palestinian lawyer from Nazareth, who runs a small Holocaust museum there...
...Zionism, the political movement advocating the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, had been around for a half century before the Holocaust, but it had always been a minority movement among the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust changed that, creating a new sense of dire necessity in which a Jewish State had to fight its way into being. In the war that accompanied Israel's emergence, the Palestinian Arabs who had been two-thirds of the population of Palestine found themselves confined to 22% of its territory (the West Bank and Gaza), and prevented by new Israeli laws from...
...Ahmadinejad is hardly the first voice in the Middle East to question the basic facts of the Holocaust - even the moderate Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas wrote a Ph.D thesis in the early 1980s in which he claimed that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was less than 1 million, and that it had been inflated by the Zionist movement to win international sympathy. (Abbas later denied diminishing the Holocaust, which he denounced as "a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity...
...hard to understand the attraction of Holocaust denial among many Arab intellectuals. After all, the Palestinians ultimately paid a heavy price as the international community sought to redress the unspeakable horrors inflicted on the Jews of Europe. The 1947 U.N. partition plan allocated 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state and 45% to an Arab state, with Jerusalem to be kept under international control. The Arabs of Palestine and its neighboring states rejected the plan, focusing on its implications for their own people rather than on the horrors visited on the Jews by Europeans, and they went...
...That view is still widespread in the Arab world today, but it's very different from denying the Holocaust. The idea that tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews would choose to move to the impossibly harsh environment of an increasingly violent Palestine in the two years after World War II out of anything but a perception of dire necessity reminds me of another myth - albeit a Zionist one - with which I was fed growing up: that Israel's Jewish majority was ensured when hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had "miraculously" chosen to up and leave their homes...