In a 1984 book published in Arabic and entitled The Other Face, Mahmoud Abbas argued that the Holocaust was in fact a product of collaboration between Zionist leaders and Nazi Germany. He also claimed, as an aside, that the number of Jews killed during World War II was “likely much smaller” than six million, “perhaps less than a million.” Not to leave any stone unturned, the book, which has never been translated, asserts that Jews never suffered persecution in Arab lands. Edy Cohen notes the likely origins of the book’s primary thesis:

Throughout the entire work, Abbas presents a blanket indictment of Zionism and its leaders, from David Ben-Gurion on down. In effect, Abbas charges that they are war criminals who collaborated with the Nazis and those responsible for the Holocaust. He further claims that the Zionists encouraged anti-Semitism in Europe in order to increase aliyah to the land of Israel and accelerate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The Zionists, [in Abbas’s view], took part in the slaughter. They intentionally thwarted many efforts to rescue Jews. They encouraged hatred of Jews so the Nazis and others would take revenge by expanding the scope of the extermination. And they did all of this in collaboration with the Third Reich. In effect, Abbas claims there was a Zionist conspiracy against the Jewish people. Moreover, he claims that this has never been revealed because all those who tried to expose the conspiracy were assassinated by the Israeli government. . . .

Abbas’s thesis . . . is, from beginning to end, pure fantasy. But it did not spring fully formed from Abbas’s head. Upon investigation, I came to the unequivocal conclusion that Abbas’s book is based on Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda disseminated in Argentina by Adolf Eichmann and his friend, the pro-Nazi Dutch journalist Wilhelmus Antonius Sassen. . . . Eichmann and Sassen claimed that the Holocaust was a lie, and that there were no gas chambers or crematoria in Hitler’s Europe. In 1957, Sassen interviewed Eichmann on the subject, and their conversations eventually comprised 659 typed pages. . . . [A] significant part of these conversations present claims identical to those of Abbas.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.