What similarities and differences exist between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the issues of the Holocaust?

Answer 1

There are no "issues of the Holocaust". The Holocaust was an event that took six years in Europe (1939-1945) where the Nazi German government and its collaborators primarily targetted the Jewish population in the territories they occuppied for extermination, but also murdered nearly as many Non-Jews, for a total of 11 million dead (6 million Jews and 5 million Non-Jews).

Unfortunately, most Palestinians (like most other Arabs) are either (1) ignorant of the Holocaust, (2) believe incorrectly that the number of dead in the Holocaust is orders of magnitude smaller (100,000 or so), or (3) believe that the State of Israel was awarded to the Jews as recompense for the Holocaust - forcing the Arabs to "pick up the tab" for Europe's mistake. With regards to (1), the Arab media and the leaders of the Arab World intentionally ignore or mute discussion of the Holocaust and can be directly faulted for the mass ignorance of their people. With regards to (2), willful denial is a serious issue that plagues the Arab World and should be combatted with education (which requires (1) to be ameliorated.

With regards to (3), this is a much thornier issue, because many of the nations at the United Nations who approved UNGA Resolution 181 (II) did so in response to the Holocaust. It jolted them to the reality of the violence in Anti-Semitism. However, those votes did not create Israel; the Jewish Community of Palestine (the Yishuv) was already well-established before the Holocaust in 1939 and the Zionist movement existed all the way to the 1890s. The momentum to create a Jewish State was already beginning in the 1920s with the San Remo Conference of 1920 and the Declaration of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. The Holocaust was a tragedy in Jewish history but its occurrence played no role in the Jews' wishing to live in the State of Israel nor their creation of the state.