At a time when the German government is cancelling its consultations with the Israeli government and assigning full blame to Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas is being given the royal treatment in Berlin and even received the “Hope for Peace Award.”
(...) The recent visit to Germany by the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas revealed the strangeness of German policy toward the Middle East, especially regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Germany, which sees itself as the guardian of democracy and protector of human rights, went out of its way to honor an Arab leader who was indeed chosen in free elections but who has not allowed any elections since 2005, is accused by his subjects of violating human rights and of corruption, has fled from making brave decisions to advance a peace agreement with Israel, is a Holocaust denier who continues to encourage violence against Jews under the cover of “resistance to the occupation,” has done nothing to stop the incitement to violence in the areas under his control, and refuses to recognize the Jewishness of the state of Israel—even though such recognition is the official policy of the German government. Mahmoud Abbas symbolizes everything Germany opposes, and yet it still gives him honors generally reserved for the world’s great leaders. (...)
The “Hope for Peace” award certainly greatly flattered Mahmoud Abbas, and perfectly fit his own self-created image as the standard bearer of true peace, in contradiction of all the facts which the judges who decided to give him the prize probably did not bother looking into. The granting of the prize was based on general impressions, not an examination of reality. Thanks to dozens of years of institutionalized anti-Israel attitudes, biased and sometimes even false media reports, and an education system that indoctrinates generations of Germans with anti-Israel propaganda, the Palestinians led by Mahmoud Abbas are seen by the German public as unfortunate victims bearing olive branches for peace, while the Israelis led by Benjamin Netanyahu (and all his predecessors from the right and the left) are considered to be cruel occupiers, murderous oppressors, and warmongers. (...)
The official website for the prize makes no mention whatsoever of the Holocaust revisionism in the doctorate he wrote for Moscow University, or his work as a KGB agent. In accordance with the traditional German approach, Israel and its actions are the sole obstacle to peace. If in the past Germans claimed that the Jews are warmongers, today they can say that it is Israel—adding in the same breath that they, of course, are not anti-Semites. To balance out the granting of the prize to Abbas, an award was also granted to famous architect Daniel Libesekind, who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin among other buildings.
The awarding of the “Hope for Peace Prize” to Mahmoud Abbas granted the German unity government, in which Angela Merkel’s Conservative Union sits with the Social Democrats, a chance to demonstrate publicly sympathy for the Palestinians as an expression of the trend of distancing from Israel. Abbas met for talks with Chancellor Merkel, with the foreign minister (and until recently also the leader of the Social Democrats) Sigmar Gabriel, and with the chairman of the Bundestag, and was invited to give a speech at the primary headquarters of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is closely linked to the conservative Christian Democratic Party.
Fatah — A “Sister Party”
A few weeks after Chancellor Merkel decided to put off the annual consultations with the Israeli government, which were planned for this coming May, as an expression of her displeasure with the Regularization Law—which Berlin believes buries any chance of a two-state solution—Mahmoud Abbas has received a very warm embrace by both the German right and left.
The foreign minister boasted on social media about his meeting with his “friend” Abbas, and was quick to note that Germany adheres to the two-state solution. Gabriel’s party, the Social Democrats, which has a good chance of forming a left-wing government after the general elections in September, sees Abbas’s Fatah movement as a “sister party,” despite the lack of socialist and democratic elements in Fatah, whose roots are Islamist.read more
Read more at Mida (in Hebrew)
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