40% of Israeli Arabs don't believe Holocaust happened

Startling numbers are not just in Iran

May 24, 2009

A new poll shows that 40 percent of Israeli Arabs, those who live in Israel with Israeli passports next door to Jewish neighbors, don't believe the Holocaust ever happened. The disturbing poll results mark a significant increase in Holocaust deniers and those who refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist as Jewish democratic state.

Professor Sami Samocha, who conducted the survey, said the poll results are usually related to current affairs. Ynet reports:

"The most moderate year was 1995 – the golden era of the Rabin government, the Oslo Accord, and the attitude to the Palestinian people," he said. "Four years later, the great disappointment with the Netanyahu government and the October events worsened the situation."

 

In 1995, only 7 percent of Arab-Israelis said the State had no right to exist. Meanwhile, the figure rose to 22 percent last year. Samocha said the Gaza blockade, the Second Lebanon War, and the aftermath of the October 2000 Riots are exacerbating factors in this poll.

The Associated Press jumped on that statement, qualifying in the first paragraph the news service's article that "the results were likely more statements of protest than belief." Using Samocha's own words, the AP downplays the startling rise in Holocaust denial among Israeli Arabs, blaming a rising frustration among the minority group. Recognizing the Holocaust justifies Israeli policies, Samochoa says.

"When they say 'there was no Holocaust,' they are protesting. They are saying 'I am not giving legitimacy to the Jewish state,'" he said. "It's an index of despair, frustration and protest."

Palestinians and Arabs in Middle Eastern countries deny the Holocaust occurred, usually blaming Jews for making it up to gain sympathy. The Holocaust is not taught to all Arabs in Israel. One student I met here said he didn't believe the Holocaust occurred until a German was able to convince him otherwise. Education is a major factor in this issue - whether it is taught at all that a genocide of 6 million Jews occurred, or whether it is taught that this is a lie. This young man only believed what he was taught until someone explained to him the truth.

A Two-State Inconvenience for the US and Arab Nations

May 21, 2009

Some analysts writing after the Obama-Netanyahu meet and greet in DC claim that despite their pleas for a Palestinian state, subsequently reported by a breathless drive-by media, American officials and Arab nations are quite happy with the status quo. And one even calls it a "fiction."

STRATFOR explains why many don't expect two states to emerge any time soon: 

First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel’s heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends.

For this reason, the entire peace process — including the two-state solution — is a chimera. Neither side can live with what the other can offer. But if it is a fiction, it is a fiction that serves U.S. purposes. The United States has interests that go well beyond Israeli interests and sometimes go in a different direction altogether. Like Israel, the United States understands that one of the major obstacles to any serious evolution toward a two-state solution is Arab hostility to such an outcome.

Click to read the full article. He concludes 

Netanyahu has promised that the endless stalemate with the Palestinians will not be allowed to continue. He also knows that whatever happens, Israel cannot threaten the stability of Arab states that are by and large uninterested in the Palestinians. He also understands that in the long run, Israel’s freedom of action is defined by the United States, not by Israel. His electoral platform and his strategic realities have never aligned. Arguably, it might be in the Israeli interest that the status quo be disrupted, but it is not in the American interest. 

Another major topic discussed in DC was Iran as a nuclear power. Israel's general view is to strike offensively. But Obama wants to talk for the rest of the year before he has to take any harsher action beyond mean words.

From the Wall Street Journal: 

Yet as Thérèse Delpech, a leading nonproliferation expert at France's Atomic Energy Commission, warned last October at a Brookings Institution lecture, "We [the Europeans] have negotiated during five years with the Iranians . . . and we came to the conclusion that they are not interested at all in negotiating, but . . . [only] in buying time for their military program." In those five years, she also noted, Tehran never implied that if only the Americans were at the table the clerical regime would be amenable to compromise.

...Americans and Europeans don't like to dwell on the problem of anti-Semitism in the region, preferring to see it as tangential to geopolitics and economics and treatable by the creation of a Palestinian state. But Israelis are acutely conscious that unrelenting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are important factors in the Shiite Islamic Republic's increasing popularity among Arab Sunni fundamentalists -- especially in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood would probably triumph in a free election. In Iran, the anti-Jewish passion among the revolutionary elite appears to have actually increased as ordinary Iranians have soured on theocracy and state-sanctioned ideology.

For the full article, click here.