In late April, I met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at his office in Ramallah. Responding to my suggestion that he address the Jewish people on Yom HaShoah, he stated emphatically that he considers the Holocaust to be “the most tragic event in the modern era” and that he would issue an official statement affirming that.
In the Middle East, such promises have a way of getting sidetracked — or lost in translation. But a week later, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, April 27, the Palestinian President released his eagerly awaited statement through WAFA, the Palestinian news agency, not only in English, but in Arabic, too, for his own people and the Arab world, affirming, “What happened to the Jews in the Holocaust is the most heinous crime to have been committed against humanity in the modern era.”