Israel committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and towns. 50 massacres, 50 holocausts. The angry speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the office building of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) initially left him without a word, but this was followed by contradictions on all channels. Rightly so. Equating Abbas is, in Germany, in this place, an unprecedented provocation.
From a diplomatic point of view, the matter could have ended there, but on German soil, the public prosecutor’s office quickly comes into play. Paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code (StGB) punishes as hate speech anyone who “plays down” the Nazi mass murder of Jews. Whether Abbas did this is a borderline question, regardless of whether he can be prosecuted as a guest of state.
To equate the Holocaust with other historical events (or crimes) is – in purely arithmetical terms – always a trivialization, because it is unique in the sum of the number of victims and the calculation of annihilation. But a sentence cannot be made with a pocket calculator. Article five of the Basic Law, freedom of expression, requires a complicated balancing arithmetic in this case.
Since the arguments against Abbas are well known, here is what could possibly argue for him: With his statement, he obviously wanted to cause military and paramilitary actions to be perceived by Israelis as serious crimes against people and humanity. That would presuppose that he recognizes the Holocaust as such a crime and does not downplay it, but instead exaggerates the extent of the violence perpetrated against Palestinians and wants to dramatize the deeds. An equation that has more the character of a counter-calculation.
That may be cynical, but it is by no means as cynical as yellow armbands with so-called Jewish stars, with which opponents of vaccination stylized themselves as being persecuted by the Nazi regime. In the attacks Abbas referred to, people were brutally killed. Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had already condemned the attack on the village of Deir Yassin, which he referred to in the chancellor’s office, as a massacre.
This cannot justify Abbas’ failure, but at most shows why it is difficult – or sometimes impossible – to calculate the criminal liability of words. The call for the public prosecutor is therefore the most meaningless of all the statements made after the Abbas tirade. Above all, it does not absolve from the responsibility to deal with the incident in a politically appropriate manner. This would also include no longer leaving the words of the Palestinian President uncommented on the official website of the federal government. For if not directly contradicting Abbas was a failure, it is a failure to spread his talk further.
