The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism ()al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya. Publisher: Dar Ibn Rushd, Amman, Jordan. 1984. is a book by Mahmoud Abbas,National Library of Australia Catalogue detail. published in 1984 in Arabic. It was re-published in 2011.al-Wajh al-Akhar: al-'Alaqat as-Sirriya bayna an-Naziya wa's-Sihyuniya. Publisher: Billsan Publishing House, Ramallah, Palestine. 2011. It is based on his CandSc thesis, completed in 1982 at Patrice Lumumba University (now the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia) under the title The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement. Abbas defended the thesis at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The book argues that Zionist leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany, particularly through the Haavara Agreement, and has been described by critics and Holocaust scholars as Holocaust revisionist.
Abbas' Holocaust revisionism does not deny that the Holocaust happened or that it is one of the worst crimes in history. The question he raises is who is guilty of this crime; he posits that blaming the Nazis is only "half the truth". According to Abbas, the Zionists collaborated in killing a large number of European Jews in order to encourage the rest to embrace Zionism and emigrate to Palestine. The book refers to the Haavara Agreement, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to facilitate Jewish emigration from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. He suggests that Israel's abduction, trial and subsequent execution of Adolf Eichmann, the high ranking Nazi who was a main architect behind the Holocaust, was a cover-up operation. Eichmann was in the process of revealing the involvement of the Zionists in the making of the Holocaust to the American magazine Life and was therefore silenced, says Abbas in the book.Abbas' book reveals: The 'Nazi-Zionist plot' of the Holocaust, by Ronen Bergman ynet news. Nov 2014
Study at Patrice Lumumba University Abbas attended Patrice Lumumba University to prepare and present his doctoral thesis. The institute's director at the time, Yevgeny Primakov, one of the Soviet masterminds of active measures and academic research, such as Operation INFEKTION, supported a Soviet specialist on Palestine, Vladimir Ivanovich Kisilev as Abbas' dissertation adviser. They communicated mostly in English and Arabic. In an interview with the magazine Kommersant 20 years later, Kisilev remembers Abbas as a well-prepared graduate student, who came to Moscow with an already chosen research topic and a large amount of already prepared material.
The title of Abbas' thesis is The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement or, in Russian, "Связи между сионизмом и нацизмом. 1933–1945". In 1984, a book based on Abbas' doctoral dissertation was published in Arabic by Dar Ibn Rushd publishers in Amman, Jordan under the title al-Wajh al-akhar : al-'alaqat al-sirriyah bayna al-Naziyah wa-al-Sihyuniyah.
Content of the thesis and book The thesis of the book is that the Zionist movement and its leaders were the partners of the Nazis in planning and carrying out the Holocaust. He builds the case on the Haavara Agreement of 1933, in which the Third Reich agreed with the Jewish Agency to enable Jews to emigrate from Germany directly to Mandatory Palestine, which he sees as evidence of collaboration.Аббас на глиняных ногах (Abbas on the feet of clay), Kommersant-Vlast No. 2(605), 17.01.2005)
According to Abbas, the Zionists worked with Hitler on making Europe unlivable for Jews in order to force them to move to Palestine:
According to Abbas' thesis, the Western powers that won the war and convicted the Nazis for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials chose to hide the Zionist participation in the Holocaust:
Abbas describes the number of Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust as agreed upon by mainstream historians, six million, as a "fantastic lie". In the book, he wrote:
Abbas quotes historian Raul Hilberg to support his allegations that fewer than one million Jews were killed.Holocaust Denial's Assault on Memory: Precursor to Twenty-First Century Genocide , H Brackman, A Breitbart, RA Cooper - Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 2007, p. 11Arafat's war: the man and his struggle for Israeli conquest by Efraim Karsh, 2003, page 98Holocaust denial as an international movement by Stephen E. Atkins, ABC-CLIO, 2009, page 214 However, Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies denied the assertion that "The historian and author, Raoul Hilberg, thinks that the figure does not exceed 890,000", and said this is "utterly false". He wrote that "Professor Hilberg, a distinguished historian and author of the classic study The Destruction of the European Jews, has never said or written any such thing."
In the book Abbas raises doubts regarding the existence of the gas chambers, quoting Robert Faurisson, on the nonexistence of gas chambers.Edi Cohen. Abu Mazen's Zionist Nazis - Book Review: Mahmoud Abbas, The Other Face: The Secret Contacts Between Nazism and Zionism. Mida June 23, 2014.
A global survey of Holocaust denial, published by David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2004, describes the book as "denying the Holocaust".
Political controversy and Abbas' clarifications After Abbas was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003, the Israel Defense Forces removed excerpts from the Abbas book from its website, including quotes questioning the use of gas chambers and talking of less than one million victims.
Abbas has been accused of Holocaust denial. In the book, he argues that Zionists created "the myth" of six million murdered Jews, which he calls a "fantastic lie".Morris, Benny. Exposing Abbas. The National Interest. May 19, 2011Mass, Warren. "Clinton Meets with Abbas". The New American. March 4, 2009Latner, Gabriel. "Palestinian Peacemakers". The American Thinker. September 28, 2010A Holocaust-Denier as Prime Minister of "Palestine"? by Dr. Rafael Medoff (The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies)
In his May 2003 interview with Haaretz, Abbas stated:
In a 2003 interview in The New York Times, he said: "When I wrote The Other Side... we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks."Soft-Spoken but Not Afraid to Voice Opinions, By GREG MYRE, NY Times, March 11, 2003
In an interview with the Ma'an news agency in 2013, Abbas defended his doctoral thesis regarding the relationship between the Zionists and the Nazis and said he "challenges anyone who can deny that the Zionist movement had ties with the Nazis before World War II."
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