Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) “made another anti-Semitic speech, in which he recycled the most contemptible anti-Semitic slogans,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday following the PA Chairman’s speech to the Palestinian National Council (PNC), in which he said that Jews were responsible for centuries of European anti-Semitism.

“Apparently a Holocaust-denier remains a Holocaust-denier,” Netanyahu added.

“Abu Mazen is drenched with anti-Semitism, from head to toe,” Education Minister Naftali Bennett said, adding that “Abbas continues the tradition of his predecessors, the Grand Mufti who was a friend of Hitler, and Arafat, an arch-murderer of Jews. He fills the minds of the next generation with the poison of anti-Semitism. Peace will come from the public, not from a corrupt and Antisemitic Palestinian Authority.”

Abu Mazen, who is also the titular head of the Palstine Liberation Organization, told the PNC Tuesday that centuries of European Judeophobia, including the Holocaust, developed because of Jews’ “usury and banks.”

“From the 11th century until the Holocaust that took place in Germany, the Jews – who moved to Western and Eastern Europe – were subjected to a massacre every 10 to 15 years. But why did this happen? The Jewish issue that was widespread in all European countries… it wasn’t because of their religious beliefs, but rather as a result of social behaviors related to usury and banks,” Abbas said. 

Abu Mazen’s latest broadside comes against the background of the Chairman’s threats, reported in the Arabic-language al-Hayyat newspaper, to impose a series of “sanctions” on Israel including withdrawing the organization’s 1988 recognition of Israel.

MK Nachman Shai (Zionist Union), the head of the Knesset Lobby to Strengthen the Jewish People, added that “Abu Mazen will wind up his time in office as a complete failure and will end his political career in humiliation. Now he is trying to hold on to the last few grains of glory at the expense of the memory of the Holocaust.

“It’s pathetic,” Shai said. 

Other Israeli and American officials backed Shai’s and Bennett’s criticism, with Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein (Likud), Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt also condemning the Palestinian leader.

“Mahmoud Abbas is a small and irrelevant man,” Edelstein. “If he is noted in history at all, it will be for his fund to support families of terrorists who massacred Israelis and continue to do so, his history as a Holocaust denier, a racist and inciter,” said Edelstein.