In Hamas controlled Gaza, the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust opened its activities with a Holocaust exhibit – which teaches nothing whatever about the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, but shows instead Israelis carrying out the Holocaust. Palestinian children in Gaza were gathered for an exhibition that depicts Israel burning children in a crematorium. Young children are seen standing beside dolls being placed into a model of a cremation oven. According to the Palestinian daily, Al-Ayyam, “The Exhibit include a large oven and inside it small children are being burned, the picture speaks for itself” [Al Ayyam, March 20, 2008, translation provided in report by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, ‘Palestinian exhibit depicts children in crematorium,’ Palestinian Media Watch, March 20, 2008).

Palestinian Authority (Fatah) TV has also taught Palestinian children that Israel burned children in the Holocaust. With ovens pictured in the background and actors playing dead children as part of a musical play, an actor in a video declared: “They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust … They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings … and when one oven stopped burning they lit a hundred more ovens.” [PA TV, March 25, 2004], viewable at ‘Palestinian Libel: Israel burned kids in ovens,’ Youtube, March 20, 2008).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “There seems no limit to the depravity of Palestinian hate education and incitement. We have seen over the years every sort of perversity, including educating children to become suicide bombers and honoring mass murderers. Here, the Palestinians, both Hamas and Fatah, depict Israelis as exterminating Nazis, while teaching nothing about the actual Holocaust in which the wartime Palestinian leadership of Haj Amin el-Husseini was in fact very active. Husseini not only orchestrated campaigns of murder against Jews in the British Mandate, but also became an ally of the Nazis and worked hard to speed up the work of deportation and murder. He is even believed to have visited Auschwitz to view the extermination process first-hand.

“The depiction of Israelis as exterminating Nazis essentially sends the message that Jews are evil people who should, like the Nazi regime, be destroyed. It is a travesty that many nations, including the U.S. continue to fund the PA and thereby work to keep this conflict alive while speaking endlessly of working hard to end it. Until and unless the Palestinians are held to their commitments to end terrorism and the incitement to hatred and murder that feeds it, no peace can be expected to become even feasible.”