It is an anti-Semitic trope that dates back to the Cold War and was frequently used by the Soviet Union and its Arab allies to accuse Israel of exploiting the Holocaust for political or financial gain.
This week it was the Palestinian Authority that issued a furious rebuke of the German parliament’s decision last week to label BDS as “antisemitic” by accusing Israel of invoking the Nazi Holocaust to “blackmail” European countries.
In a statement responding to the adoption by German parliament last Friday of a non-binding resolution in which they declared their opposition to BDS as a form of “anti-Semitism,” the PA’s Foreign Ministry also argued that the decision was actually a backhanded compliment to the BDS campaign.
The Bundestag’s decision “reflects first that the role and action of the [BDS] organization is so influential that Israel and its supporters began to look for a pretext or justification for attacking the organization and distorting its image,” the statement, carried in English by the official WAFA news agency, remarked.
The statement then accused Israel of exploiting the Holocaust for political and financial gain.
“Israel continues to impose its wishes on the representatives of the European peoples by blackmailing them using the historical German stigmatization of the Jews” — an oblique reference to the Nazi extermination of six million Jews during World War II — “to achieve what it [Israel] wants,” the statement said.
As a consequence, the PA continued, the “German establishment is entrenching its complicity in Israel’s crimes of military occupation, ethnic cleansing, siege and apartheid, while desperately trying to shield it from accountability to international law.”
The statement made no mention of the 81 million euros ($100 million) provided by German taxpayers to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA in 2018, nor of the German government’s pledge to increase its contribution to Palestinian development projects in the wake of the dramatic cuts in US government assistance over the last year.
Source: World Israel News
