“The Holocaust was the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity,” read the announcement disseminated by the office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas April 27, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Abbas’ statement is surprising; not because of the timing — during a severe crisis with Israel — but because of the claims and speculation that he is a Holocaust denier himself.

The perception of Abbas as a denier of the Holocaust is common mainly among right-wing Israeli activists. It's based on excerpts from the doctoral thesis he wrote at a university in Moscow at the beginning of the 1980s. This work, titled, "The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement (1933-1945)," was the basis for the book he wrote and published in Jordan in 1984, titled, "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism."

True, we cannot find the dissertation or the book today. But according to Abbas, the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was not 6 million, a number he claimed was an exaggeration. He also argued that the Zionist movement held a certain amount of responsibility for the destruction of the Jews by the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, he wrote in the book, “The debate over the number does not in any way detract from the heinousness of the crime committed on the Jewish nation. Killing a human being is a crime that the civilized world cannot accept and humanity cannot forgive.”

Later on, in a 2013 interview with Haaretz, Abbas expressed his unhappiness with being portrayed as a Holocaust denier, saying, “I wrote in detail about the Holocaust and said that I did not want to discuss numbers. I quoted an argument between historians in which various numbers of casualties were mentioned. … I have no desire to argue with figures. The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind. The Holocaust was a terrible thing and nobody can claim I denied it."