Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Aug. 18, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Mohamad Torokman / Pool.

When Israeli soldiers tried to restore order at the Temple Mount during the violent Palestinian riots during Ramadan, official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV’s “Israeli affairs expert” Fayez Abbas presented it as an expression of Israeli Nazi-like ideology.

The alleged expert on Israel continued to say that “Israeli leaders are prized students of Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in the period of Nazi Germany:”

Official PA TV “Israeli affairs expert” Fayez Abbas: “What is happening now in the Al-Aqsa Mosque plaza and what will happen tomorrow or in two days at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre plaza is the greatest proof that Israel has declared religious war against Islam and Christianity at the same time. … A religious war and Israeli apartheid.

This policy that the Jew is the ‘Aryan,’ as happened in Germany — It is the same policy, the same ideological thought. I think most of the Israeli leaders are prized students of Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in the period of Nazi Germany.”

[Official PA TV, “Palestine This Morning,” April 21, 2022]

Known to be fond of the comparison of Israelis to the Nazis, senior PA official and Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub recently claimed that Israeli prisons are “an identical copy of Auschwitz and the death camps:”

Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “We hope that [Subhiya Younes’ death] will constitute a message that will awaken the world’s conscience, so that it will come out against the new Nazis, who are committing acts of terror officially, and whose prisons are an identical copy of Auschwitz and the death camps.”

[Official PA TV, May 5, 2022]

Sadly, this rhetoric is hardly new. Palestinian Media Watch has extensively documented the PA’s antisemitism, and the PA’s comparisons of Israelis to Nazis.

The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.