At a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a news conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel has caused "50 Holocausts" against Palestinians. His remarks triggered outrage among certain world leaders, including Scholz.

"From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities," Abbas said in Arabic, according to CNN. "50 massacres, 50 Holocausts, and until today, and every day there are casualties killed by the Israeli military."

Abbas made the comments when asked if he would apologize for the 1972 Olympics incident in Munich, when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage by Palestinians linked to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Chancellor Scholz tweeted, "I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud #Abbas. For us Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust."

It is true that the Holocaust has singular dimensions but the German leader and others who were outraged by the Palestinian Authority president’s remarks cannot deny nearly eight decades of occupation, land robbery, destruction of homes, burning of olive trees, imprisonment, injustice, genocide, displacement of families, etc.  Just in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes.

Moreover, Abbas did not deny Holocaust that Scholz says condemns denial of it.

Also, deep down, Scholz and other current and former Western leaders are well aware that Israel’s behaviors are by no means excusable, otherwise they are bigoted.

Why the term Holocaust used by Abbas was taken literally. He was just trying to express incessant cruelty against Palestinians.

The interim Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid tried to abuse the situation and talk about morality of the remarks by the Palestinian Authority leader, something which is quite alien to Israeli officials.

"Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive him (Abbas)," Lapid tweeted.

Lapid is better to be reminded that history will never forgive or forget the stealing of another nation’s land. Also, just between August 5-7, Lapid killed 16 children in Gaza. 

Holocaust happened during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. But the Palestinians have been suffering since 1947 and there is no prospect for an end to their agonies.

Israelis are stealing the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank and don’t allow them to establish their own country. They have also imprisoned about two million others in Gaza.

Even Palestinians who were protesting inside the besieged Gaza were murdered in cold blood as they were holding symbolic “Great March of Return” demonstrations. 

Also, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which obliges Israel to return to the 1967 borders, carry no weight for the West.

In the Tuesday press conference Scholz also unexpectedly refuted the statement by Abbas that Palestinians are living under the "apartheid" practiced by the Israeli regime, saying he did "not think that is correct, to use the term to describe the situation". 

This is while groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have concluded that Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

In a commentary on August 18, Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, says, “Aggrieved and angry, the Palestinians have long believed that it was they who paid the price for the horrors inflicted upon Jews in Europe since it is they who were robbed of their homeland by the newly established Jewish state in 1948.”

Bishara adds “… the early Zionists chose to settle and build a homeland for Jews in Palestine nearly half a century before the Holocaust, knowing all too well that it is the homeland of another people. They wished it cleansed of its non-Jewish inhabitants. Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion believed Zionism was not driven by victimhood but rather by the necessary emancipation of the Jewish people as a new nation in Palestine.”

The analyst goes on to say, “The Gaza Strip may not be the Buchenwald concentration camp, but for decades, this tortured and tormented open-air prison of two million Palestinians has had more than its share of sadistic Israeli aggression under the pretext of security.”

In a show of hypocrisy, over the past decades Western statesmen have not reacted to comparing certain Arab leaders to Adolf Hitler by Israeli leaders.

“Israeli leaders have called any Palestinian or Arab leader they disliked a ‘new Hitler’, to justify aggression and war against Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and others. Before their trilateral attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel and its two co-conspirators, France and Britain, portrayed its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as ‘Hitler on the Nile’,” Bishara says.

Moreover, Zionists have used the term “anti-Semitism” to attack the opponents of Tel Aviv’s behaviors toward Palestinians. They are using this term to justify their illegal acts.

“…, any journalist, scholar or peace activist who dares criticize Israeli policy is routinely denounced as an anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi,” the Al Jazeera analyst writes.

He also says, “Such Zionist and Israeli abuse of the Holocaust’s memory and even its survivors was exposed by Israeli historian Tom Segev in his revelatory book The Seventh Million, The Israelis and The Holocaust, as well as by American Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein, in his daring book, The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

“The latter is highly critical of the cynical calculus behind the persistent invocation of the Holocaust by American Zionist organizations, in order to portray Israel as a victim, despite its 1967 war and occupation of Palestine in its entirety.”

It seems that Western leaders see not limit to their subservience to a thief and cruel called Israel. The murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank in addition to numerous other malicious acts over decades leave no space to defend the dark record of Israel.

The West, which its claims of defense for human rights and respect for law have deafened the world, doesn’t even bother to react to the recent Israeli move in storming the headquarters of several Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations in the occupied West Bank. However, they show indignation for a comparison, which must not be taken literally.