On Yom HaShoah this year, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brushed off the unprecedented statement as “damage control” for failed peace talks.
But, for political science professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi — founder of the American Studies Program at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, and the first-ever Palestinian professor to take his students on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camps — the statement represents a groundbreaking shift in public opinion.