What happened
The speech was not an off-the-cuff remark but a formal, prepared address to the Palestinian National Council, the PLO's legislative body, in which Abbas offered what he apparently intended as a historical account of antisemitism's origins in Europe — tracing it to Jewish communities' historical role in banking and finance under conditions where other professions were closed to them, then attributing the Holocaust to a buildup of resentment over that role rather than to Nazi racial ideology. This is not merely an unfortunate phrasing; it is a substantive claim that reframes the Holocaust as something Jewish people's own social position contributed to causing, rather than as an act of ideological racial extermination — a distinction historians and Jewish organisations across the political spectrum, including some normally sympathetic to Palestinian statehood, treated as antisemitic regardless of Abbas's intent.
This was not Abbas's first controversy of this kind: his 1982 doctoral dissertation had questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and explored theories about collaboration between Zionist organisations and Nazi Germany, material he has periodically been pressed to address throughout his political career, generally with partial clarifications rather than full retractions. Following the 2018 speech, his office's statement — that he 'meant no offense' and respected the Holocaust as the most heinous crime in history — addressed the reaction to the remarks without retracting the specific historical claim about Jewish 'social function' driving European antisemitism, a distinction Jewish organisations pointed out at the time as making the apology incomplete on its own terms.