Why does the Palestinian Authority still promote Holocaust denial? Because it starts at the top
Official Palestinian Authority television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust. On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish "victim narrative" is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with "simple evidence."
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: "The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…"
Official PA TV host: "There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn't harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence."
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals - Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, "Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people."
Given the ideology of the PA's leadership, this denial is entirely predictable. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side. Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only "a few hundred thousand." He even claimed that Jews were "offered up" to increase the victim count.
"Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner – suffering victims in a battle – it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting…It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement...is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions -- fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."
When the head of the PA has perverted the memory of the Holocaust throughout his life, such as when he suggested that Hitler killed Jews out of self-defense because "they caused ruin" and because of Jews' "social role," it is no surprise that PA TV echoes them. This is not a new narrative, rather it is a continuation of the Holocaust distortion that Mahmoud Abbas embedded into PA ideology and that its media still carries forward today.
According to IHRA, "distortion of the Holocaust refers, inter alia, to gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources" as well as "attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide" while "forms of Holocaust denial also include blaming the Jews for either exaggerating or creating the Shoah for political or financial gain as if the Shoah itself was the result of a conspiracy plotted by the Jews."