This week’s International Conference for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem takes place 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, Jews hoped that Nazi antisemitism would vanish forever.
But as Jew-hatred proliferates worldwide in 2025, there is one antisemitic ideology that closely resembles that of the Nazis – and that is the antisemitism of the Palestinian Authority.
What was the Jewish problem for the Nazis? The Nazis said that the Jews ruined every society in which they lived; that they endangered Germany and all humanity.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: “The Jews are the eternal archenemy of the human race. They manipulate, corrupt, and destroy societies” (vol. 1, chap. 11). “The Jews … are a race of parasites… systematically undermining the fabric of societies” (1,10). “If the Jew, with the help of his Marxist creed, is victorious over the peoples of this world, then his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity” (1,11).
The Nazi message was that the Jews, by imperiling all humankind, had brought Jew-hatred upon themselves.Although dormant for many years, these Nazi messages have been resurrected and constitute the backbone of Palestinian antisemitism.
The Palestinian hatred comes from the top. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas explained that Palestinians see the Jews just as the Europeans and Hitler saw the Jews. Abbas’s own words: “They said that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and Europe hates the Jews because they are Jews. No!… They fought [the Jews] because of their social role…
“Hitler… fought the Jews because they worked based on usury and money. In other words, they caused ruin in his opinion, and therefore he hated them” (PA TV, August 24, 2023).
In the months following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 atrocities, when horrified world leaders expressed support for Israel, the PA had a unique explanation for it: “They – Europe and America – succeeded in getting rid of the Jews, whom they view as human waste, and they threw them out into Palestine… far away from Europe. They don’t want reverse migration now and their return to Europe again.” (PA TV, October 24, 2023).
Nazi and PA ideologies
A fundamental component of both Nazi and PA ideology is that the Jews’ alleged negative impact on all societies is not unintended but is part of the Jewish scheme to dominate and subjugate the world.
Three times in 2023, the PA’s official TV station chose to broadcast a warning about this Jewish ambition: “Their [Jewish] thinking is based on racism that caused them to be hated everywhere. In The Protocols of the Elders of Zion… [it says] ‘He created them [Jews] so that they would be masters over them [non-Jews]… The Europeans hated them and wanted to get rid of them, so the European countries... had the idea of establishing a Jewish state’” (January 17, February 27, and May 14, 2023).
The PA’s official daily recently published an editorial that warned of Jewish aspirations, saying: “From all corners of the globe, I see and understand the harm they have caused… They want to subjugate the entire world” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 15, 2024).
Hitler warned the world of the same threatening Jewish plan: “The Jewish people, by virtue of their innate characteristics, were driven to world domination” (Mein Kampf, 1,11).
A menace to all humanity of this scope is beyond natural human abilities. Hitler’s warning – that “the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” (1,11) – is echoed by Abbas’s adviser on Islam, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, the top religious figure in the PA.
He has said on PA TV: “Satan does not have to be in the form of a demon. He can also be in your form… And they [Satan-Jews] are still fighting us” (July 7, 2023). Palestinians are taught that Allah has warned that the Jews, who are linked to Satan – the source of the world’s evil – are the primary force of evil and danger to humanity.
What the Nazis believed is now being disseminated to Palestinians and it is not merely an exercise of minor prejudice. This is a way of understanding the world and being convinced that the Jews are behind all that is wrong with the world, all that is evil in the world, and all that is dangerous and threatening to humanity.
'Jewish threat': Annihilate all Jews
For the Nazis, and now for Palestinians, since the Jewish threat was lethal, the necessary and just solution to protect all humanity was extermination. Hitler was explicit: “The Jew’s existence is a crime against humanity, and the only solution is his removal from our midst” (2,13).
“The result will not be the… victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” (Hitler to the Reichstag, January 30, 1939).
According to Hitler, since everything that had been previously tried had not stopped the Jews, the Nazi Final Solution to save humanity, i.e., genocide/extermination, was packaged as self-defense. With the extermination of the Jews, humanity would be saved. This was Nazism, and this is also Palestinian antisemitism.
Jew-hatred is taught and encouraged
Countless times, official PA religious leaders, including the Abbas-appointed PA mufti, have taught that the Hour of Resurrection is conditioned on Muslims “fighting the Jews and killing them.”
Five times in recent months, PA TV broadcast PA religious officials praying for genocide: “Allah, count them one by one, kill them one by one, and do not leave even one” (January 10 and January 24, 2025).
The PA’s Religious Affairs Ministry, just 11 days after Hamas’s October 7 pogrom, published talking points for Friday sermons in all PA mosques. Imams were told to teach that Muslims killing Jews hiding behind rocks and trees, as happened on October 7, was the fulfillment of Muslim destiny:
“The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and the rock or a tree will say: ‘Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’” (PA Religious Affairs Ministry’s Facebook page, October 18, 2023).
According to this Islamic worldview, every person who takes a step to minimize the Jews’ power and eliminate even one Jew is doing Allah’s will on behalf of humanity.
Significantly, Hitler also justified fighting the Jews as God’s will: “I am acting according to the will of the Almighty Creator: When I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord” (Mein Kampf, 1,11).
The Nazi leaders’ pride in its Final Solution is evident in the protocols of their meetings. Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to SS officers in 1943, said: “It’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination... This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us” (October 4, 1943).
Jibril Rajoub, a top PA leader and Fatah Central Committee Secretary, likewise sees glory in killing Jews: “What happened on October 7 was an earthquake… full of epics and acts of heroism” (Al-Anba, November 26, 2023).
Thinking ahead
Today, as world leaders contemplate the future of Gaza after Hamas is removed, many countries led by Egypt are insisting that the Palestinian Authority should rule the Strip. Some have used catchy terms to argue that the PA merely needs to be “revitalized.”
When one understands the depths of PA hatred and loathing of the Jews that the PA has been transmitting to its people for years, the PA clearly cannot be an option. Israel would do well to internalize the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief justice to the Nuremberg Trials, who described with amazement that the Nazis had proclaimed every crime they would commit in advance, and yet the world ignored them.
He concluded: “We must not forget that when the Nazi plans were boldly proclaimed, they were so extravagant that the world refused to take them seriously.”
The PA’s plans and justifications regarding the Jews and Israelis are just as “extravagant” and just as “boldly proclaimed” as the Nazis’ plans. Let’s not make the same mistake the world made in 1939, or that Israel made in 2023. When people say they want to kill you and back it up as God’s directive, they must be taken seriously.
The writer is the director of Palestinian Media Watch.