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What do Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, American David Duke and British David Irving have in common? They all are Holocaust deniers. In what do they differ? In that just one of them, the Palestinian, was made a prime minister.

Only in the Middle East can such a thing possibly happen. Imagine the scandal, were Duke to run for U.S. president or Irving run for Parliament in Great Britain. In the West, these «historical revisionists,» as they liked to be called, belong to the fringes of society. In the West Bank, they belong to officialdom.

Ironically enough, Abbas was sworn in on Holocaust Remembrance Day. His Ph.D. thesis — he devoted many years to «prove» that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews during World War II and to question the fact that six millions Jews were killed during that period — was submitted to a Soviet university in 1982, and two years later it was turned into a book. He was 50 years old then. This was no youthful mistake.

But he is a moderate, we are told, just as we were told years ago that Bashar Assad, son of Hafez, was a moderate because he surfed the Web and studied ophthalmology in England. Of course, this was before he accused the Jews of killing Jesus, with the pope at his side and in front of millions of television viewers. Yasser Arafat was also heralded as a moderate during the happy days of the Oslo process, and it took many fateful years and precious lives for the world community to see that the Palestinian peace prophet was in fact an unredeemed terrorist.

All this notwithstanding, I wouldn’t write Abbas off out of hand. Anwar Sadat was a Nazi sympathizer — in 1953 he even published in a Cairo daily an open letter to Adolf Hitler, praising him («I bless you with all my heart,» he wrote) — before he made his historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979 and paid for that with his own life in 1981. Could Abbas be the Palestinian Sadat?

To prove his Western supporters right, Abbas should issue four public statements in English and Arabic, both on CNN and Palestinian television. He must:

• Repudiate his doctoral dissertation.
• Announce a stop to official incitement in mosques, media and school curricula.
• Reject the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
• Call for an end to the four-decade-long «armed struggle,» and not just the «military aspects» of the intifada.

These announcements inevitably would carry a considerable domestic political price, but without them, Abbas’ tenure would be a nonstarter as far as the peace project is concerned.

Abbas will notbe able to do this as long as Arafat blocks him. Arafat, the perpetual saboteur, will do everything in his power to remain politically relevant, and he retains considerable leverage given that he controls the portfolio of peace negotiations. Unfortunately, this internal power struggle will explode in the direction of Israel – as the latest terrorist attacks against Israelis amply demonstrate.

Israel celebrated its anniversary this week. At 55, it painfully knows the cost of political fantasies.

Necessary skepticism toward an interlocutor whose peace credentials are yet to be established, combined with measured optimism in the country’s ability to gain regional acceptance, might prove to be a healthy recipe for national survival and lasting peace.

Julián Schvindlerman, a political analyst, is author of Land for Peace, Land for War and a member of the American Jewish Committee.