Hundreds of West Bank Palestinians commemorate Holocaust

Hundreds of Palestinians were estimated to have attended the event in Ni’lin, which coincided with the United Nations-declared World Holocaust Remembrance Day with photographs purchased from an Israeli museum.

"The Holocaust was a horrible and methodical murder of six million innocents, which affects all of the citizens of Israel even today," said Khaled Mahmid, who heads the Nazareth-based Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education.

"The Koran orders us to acknowledge the Holocaust and understand it," Mahmid added.

"The Jews must remember that many of them were saved during the Holocaust thanks to their brothers in the Arab lands," he said. "We must overcome Hitler’s effects together."

He also noted that some of Israel’s behavior can be explained by the Holocaust, something he says Palestinians should take into consideration.

"The Palestinians need to understand that the Jews have a defense mechanism deriving from the horrid murder in the Holocaust," he said.

"All violence Palestinians perform on the Israelis is not effective, causes suffering, and summons Holocaust anxiety among the Jews," Mahmid added.

It is for this reason, Mahmid says, that Palestinians should "understand the Holocaust, the power and strength that the Jews’ pain has."

One of the event’s organizers, Mohammad Amira, deflected questions about why the memorial was chosen for Ni’lin, a devastated Palestinian town sliced apart by Israel’s separation barrier.

"We thought the public should understand the pain and suffering the Nazis caused the Jews," Amira said. "Unfortunately, we are paying the price for the immense pain suffered by the Jews during the Holocaust."

"There is no comparison between our suffering and that of the Jewish people in the Holocaust," he noted, "but everyone should understand that we are suffering too, as a result of what the Germans did to the Jews."

Amira, who is an active participant in Ni’lin’s Land Defense Committee against the Israeli constructed separation barrier, said attending Palestinians applauded the exhibit.

"People are surprised at what they see here; there are people who are seeing images of the suffering in the Holocaust for the first time," he said. "There are people who didn’t know anything about Jewish history."

In mid-2008, the Hamas movement condemned the Jewish Holocaust, as well, insisting that it "was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history."

"We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality," a Hamas spokesperson said in a statement.

"And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection," he added.