So, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants us to believe that the great Allied Forces of the US and most of Europe, plus that of the former USSR, were wrong in destroying Adolf Hitler’s evil might of the Nazi power. Instead, he is implying that they should have gone after an old Palestinian clerk who was leading the nationalist movement against the British mandate and calling for an independent Palestine. Now, according to Netanyahu, the true evil responsible for the horrific crime of Holocaust, in which an estimated six million Jews in Europe were exterminated on the eve of the Second World War, was the late Mufti of Palestine, Haj Ameen Al Hussaini.
This ‘Netanyahunian puzzle’ has bewildered people the world over, including top Jewish and Israeli historians. The Israeli leader’s claim, these historians have concluded, is simply unfounded. What Netanyahu is really doing is re-writing the history as he sees fit to simply justify his unjust policy against the Palestinians and Israel’s continuous occupation of their land and rejecting the peace agreements as stipulated in the Oslo Accords of 1993. In his speech at the World Zionist Organisation Congress last Tuesday, Netanyahu made what, even by his own standards, was an outrageous claim. Adolf Hitler, he said, was only initially interested in expelling Jews from Europe (known to historians as the Madagascar Plan), but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem “persuaded him to burn them”.
Standing next to Netanyahu in a joint press conference in Berlin last Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reminded the world that her country was responsible for the Holocaust. She clearly said: “We abide by our responsibility as Germans for the Shoa (Holocaust)”. Germans, the chancellor explained, “were very clear in our minds that the Nazis were responsible”. In his statement accusing the Mufti of the Holocaust, Netanyahu was referring to a “conversation” that took place between Al Hussaini and the Fuhrer when the two leaders met at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin on November 28, 1941. In what seems to be a deliberate twist of history, Netanyahu claimed that the Palestinian Mufti suggested “burning” Europe’s Jews was better than “expelling” them from Europe. Then, simple-minded Hitler had bought the idea and went along to implement it.
It is a well documented fact by world historians that Hitler and his top Nazi followers had begun committing the biggest crime of the 20th Century, also known as ‘The Final Solution’, long before the Mufti-Fuhrer meeting had taken place. Additionally, there is no record of such suggestion in the German archives, according to many Jewish researchers and historians. They have all confirmed the discussion was limited to matters of “common interests” such as the rising power of Communism, Jewish immigration to Palestine and the British mandated sinister plan in future Palestine.
Six years after the Mufti-Fuhrer meeting, the British colonial authority in Palestine introduced the Partition Plan, which paved the way for the birth of the state of Israel. As a conservative right-wing nationalist, Hussaini expressed his concern of ‘creeping Communism’ into Muslim Palestine and Zionist activities in Europe, Russia and some parts of the Arab world in shipping Jews to Palestine.
Assuming, just for the sake of argument, if one wants to go along with Netanyahu’s logic, it means that United Kingdom, France, Russia and other Nazi victims should be continuously bombing Germany, randomly killing its people, occupying their territories and depriving them of their basic human rights — exactly as Israel has been doing to Palestinians and other Arabs over the last 50 years.
However, we all know the Mufti was not necessarily the favourite leader for the Palestinians who considered him as a “collaborator” with the British during and after the well-known uprising against the British mandate, know as the ‘Arab revolt’ of 1936-39, led by the popular progressive leader Ezzi Al Deen Al Qassam. Al Qassam, a Syrian by origin, had a much clearer programme of liberating Palestine as he combined the struggle simultaneously against both the British mandate and Zionism. He also presented for the first time ever in the Arab world since the demise of the Ottomans, the idea of a progressive political system based on fair and free election. Meanwhile, Al Hussaini — who has become, according to Netanyahu, a representative of Palestinians — was at no stage elected by his people. He had been appointed by the British and supported by the active Zionists of the time.
What Netanyahu is really trying, but miserably failed, to do, is what some Zionist leaders and historians have been doing for almost 70 years: Turning history on its head or simply turning the tragedy of Palestine upside down. This is another attempt at making the Palestinians and their leaders major partners in the Holocaust. In another words, current Arab hostility to Zionism and Israel itself ‘has nothing to do with colonialism, theft of Palestinian and Arab land and expansion and expulsion of refugees. It is all because Arabs and Palestinians hate Jews’.
There are unlimited accounts of Hitler’s thoughts and plans to “burn” Jews long before he met any Arab official. In his own book My Life (Mein Kampf), written in 1923-24, Hitler stated that the many millions who fell at the front during the First World War “could have been prevented if 12 or 15 thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas”. What should serve as a reminder to today’s top Zionist leader Netanyahu, Hitler spoke explicitly of annihilating the Jews from the face of the earth in a speech on January 30, 1939 — two years before he met the Mufti. He clearly said: “If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a World War, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but vernichtung (annihilation) of the Jewish race throughout Europe.”
Mustapha Karkouti is a former president of the Foreign Press Association, London.
