Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that Adolf Hitler had no intention of exterminating Europe's Jews until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it.
The Israeli prime minister's attempt to whitewash Hitler and lay the blame for the Holocaust at the door of Palestinians signals a major escalation of his incitement against and demonisation of the people living under his country's military and settler-colonial rule.
It also involves a good deal of Holocaust denial.
Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that Adolf Hitler had no intention of exterminating Europe's Jews until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it.
The Israeli prime minister's attempt to whitewash Hitler and lay the blame for the Holocaust at the door of Palestinians signals a major escalation of his incitement against and demonisation of the people living under his country's military and settler-colonial rule.
It also involves a good deal of Holocaust denial.
In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to carry out the killings of 6 million Jews.
Al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest clerical authority dealing with religious issues pertaining to the Muslim community and holy sites during the 1920s and '30s, when Palestine was under British rule.
He was appointed to the role by Herbert Samuel, the avowed Zionist who was the first British High Commissioner of Palestine.
Netanyahu claims that al-Husseini “had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.
“And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here.' 'So what should I do with them?' he asked. 'Burn them!'”
Video: Netanyahu. Israel National News - Arutz.
There is no record of such a conversation whatsoever, and Netanyahu provides no evidence that it ever took place.
The Mufti did meet Hitler, once, but their 95-minute conversation took place on November 28, 1941. Husseini used it to try to secure the Fuhrer's support for Arab independence, as historian Philip Mattar explains in his book The Mufti of Jerusalem.
By then, Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews were already well under way.
Hitler's orders
In her classic history The War Against the Jews, Lucy Davidowicz writes about the preparations among Hitler's top lieutenants to carry out the genocide: “Sometime during that eventful summer of 1941, perhaps even as early as May, Himmler summoned Hoss to Berlin and, in privacy, told him 'that the Fuhrer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question,' and that 'we, the SS, must carry out the order.'”
She adds: “In the late summer of 1941, addressing the assembled men of the Einsatzkommandos at Nikolayev, he [Himmler] 'repeated to them the liquidation order, and pointed out that the leaders and men who were taking part in the liquidation bore no personal responsibility for the execution of this order. The responsibility was his alone, and the Fuhrer's.'”
Davidowicz also explains: “In the summer of 1941, a new enterprise was launched – the construction of the Vernichtungslager – the annihilation camp.
“Two civilians from Hamburg came to Auschwitz that summer to teach the staff how to handle Zyklon B, and in September, in the notorious Block 11, the first gassings were carried out on 250 patients from the hospital and on 600 Russian prisoners of war, probably 'Communists' and Jews …”
According to Netanyahu's fabricated – and Holocaust denialist – version of history, none of this could have happened. It was all the Mufti's idea.
The Mufti in Zionism
Why would Netanyahu bring up the Mufti now and in the process whitewash Hitler?
The bogus claim that the Mufti had to persuade reluctant Nazis to kill Jews has been pushed by other anti-Palestinian propagandists, notably retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.
As Columbia University professor Joseph Massad notes in his 2006 book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Haj Amin al-Husseini has long been a favourite theme of Zionist and Israeli propaganda.
Husseini “provided the Israelis with their best propaganda linking the Palestinians with the Nazis and European anti-Semitism,” Massad observes.
The Mufti fled British persecution and went to Germany during the war years.
Massad writes that al-Husseini, “attempted to obtain promises from the Germans that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.
“Documents that the Jewish Agency produced in 1946 purporting to show that the Mufti had a role in the extermination of Jews did no such thing; the only thing these unsigned letters by the Mufti showed was his opposition to Nazi Germany's and Romania's allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine.”
Yet, he adds, “the Mufti continues to be represented by Israeli propagandists as having participated in the extermination of European Jews.”
Citing Peter Novick, the University of Chicago history professor who authored The Holocaust in American Life, Massad notes that in the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, sponsored by Israel's official memorial Yad Vashem, “the article on the Mufti is twice as long as the articles on [top Nazi officials] Goebbels and Goring and longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined.”
The entry on Hitler himself is only slightly longer than the one on Husseini.
In a 2012 article for Al Jazeera, Massad explains that “Zionism would begin to rewrite the Palestinian struggle against Jewish colonisation not as an anti-colonial struggle but as an anti-Semitic project.”
Mythology
The story of the Mufti has thus become a keystone for the Zionist version of Palestinian history. It leaves out a basic fact: the Zionist movement's infamous agreement with Hitler's regime as early as 1933.
The so-called Transfer Agreement facilitated the emigration of German Jews to Palestine and broke the international boycott of German goods launched by American Jews.
Massad explains: “Despairing from convincing Britain to stop its support of the Zionist colonial project and horrified by the Zionist-Nazi collaboration that strengthened the Zionist theft of Palestine further, the Palestinian elitist and conservative leader Haj Amin al-Husseini (who initially opposed the Palestinian peasant revolt of 1936 against Zionist colonization) sought relations with the Nazis to convince them to halt their support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, which they had promoted through the Transfer Agreement with the Zionists in 1933.”
Indeed, the Mufti would begin diplomatic contacts with the Nazis in the middle of 1937, four years after the Nazi-Zionist co-operation had started.
Ironically, Massad adds: “It was the very same Zionist collaborators with the Nazis who would later vilify al-Husseini, beginning in the 1950s to the present, as a Hitlerite of genocidal proportions, even though his limited role ended up being one of propagandizing on behalf of the Nazis to East European and Soviet Muslims on the radio.”
It should be kept in mind that many Third World nationalist movements colonised by the British were also sympathetic to the Nazis, including Indian nationalists.
This was primarily based on the Nazis' enmity toward their British colonisers, and not based on any affinity with the Nazis' racialist ideology. It was certainly on this basis that India's Congress Party opposed the British declaration of war on Germany, as Perry Anderson notes in The Indian Ideology.
Indeed, the Mufti made it clear to the Germans as well as to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy, as Mattar states, that he sought “full independence for all parts of the Arab world and the rescue of Palestine from British imperialism and Zionism. He stressed that the struggle against the Jews was not of a religious nature, but for Palestinian existence and for an independent Palestine.”
That Husseini met Hitler and had relations with the Nazis is no secret. But the fabrications of Netanyahu and other Zionists should be seen for what they are: an attempt to falsely blame Palestinians for Europe's genocide of Jews and in the process erase from memory Zionism's own collaborationist history with Hitler's genocidal regime.
This vile propaganda can have no other purpose than to further dehumanise Palestinians and justify Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing and murder.
Netanyahu's attempt to blame Palestinians for the Holocaust is itself a form of genocidal incitement.
[Reprinted from Electronic Intifada.]