was Responsible for Giving Hitler the Idea for the Final Solution!
Zionist Organisation Congress on 20th October, Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu made what, even by his standards was an outrageous claim. Hitler was initially only in
favour of expelling Jews from Europe (what was known as the Madgascar Plan) and
that it was the Mufti who persuaded him of the merits of exterminating them.
 |
| The Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler at their meeting on 28.11.41. |
heard Netanyahu’s statement, I immediately thought of a similar claim by Pastor
John Hagee, the President of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a
virulent anti-Semite, had stated in a sermon that Hitler was a “hunter” sent by
God to drive the Jews to Israel. [CBS News, 23.5.08. Hagee: Pro-Israel,
Anti-Semitic?] It would appear that Hitler was in fact an
agent of the Mufti not god!
 |
| Jews with the Yellow Star |
will be grist to the mill for holocaust deniers. But what Netanyahu is doing is what Zionist historians
have been doing for over 60 years, which is to try and make the Palestinians
and their leader major partners in the Holocaust and by extension to claim that
Arab hostility to Zionism has nothing to do with settler colonialism, land
theft and the expulsion of the refugees.
It’s all because the Palestinians and Arabs hate Jews. In other words anti-Zionism is nothing more
than anti-Semitism.
this. They have a whole wall devoted to
the Mufti of Jerusalem. In the Holocaust
Encyclopedia, the section devoted to the Mufti is only slightly shorter than
that accorded to Hitler and larger than the combined size of the entries for
Goebbels and Goering and for Heydrich and Himmler.
As Israeli historian, Tom Segev
noted, the only image of a Palestinian in Yad
Vashem is
‘a photo featured prominently on a wall depicting the Mufti sieg
heiling a group of Nazi storm troopers’.
Its purpose is to ensure that ‘the
visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’
plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’ [Segev, The
Seventh Million, p.425]
a minor war criminal but the idea that he instigated the final solution is
absurd. If anyone was a major war
criminal it was Walter Rauff, the father of the gas chambers, who invented the
mobile gas trucks first used in the T4 ‘Euthanasia’ programme and then the Final
Solution. Indeed the same gas trucks used in T4 trundle off to Poland for use at Chelmno. Rauff had the blood of some
100,000 Jews on his hands and, when the Nazis occupied Tunisia in 1943, intended to build an extermination camp at Kairoun and murder its Jews.
After the war he became an Israeli agent and Israel later helped him to
escape to South America. [‘In the service of the Jewish state’, Shraga Elam, Dennis Whitehead, Ha’aretz 29.3.07]
Divisions in Bosnia but they were primarily concerned with fighting the Serb
Chetniks. They had no involvement in the
Jewish deportations, bar the Skandar Division handing over some 210 Jews from New Albania (Kosovo)
to the SS. Indeed such was their
attitude to the Jewish Question that they were sent for retraining to France
where they promptly deserted to the Resistance!
The only example of a rebellion within the ranks of the SS. [Stephen Schwartz, ‘The Jews, the Serbs and the Truth,’ FrontPageMagazine.com
21.3.05., see also Gilbert Achchar pp. 143-144, The Arabs & the Holocaust]. What Netanyahu doesn’t mention is the 3
declarations issued by senior Muslim clerics in Bosnia against Croat-Nazi measures
against the Jews and Serbs – in Mostar in 1941, Banja Luka on 12.11.41 and
Sarajevo in October 1941.
was the only Nazi occupied country in Europe where the number of Jews at the
end of the war 2,000) was greater than the number at the beginning
(200). Not one Jew was deported from
Albania during the Nazi occupation.
 |
| The medal that the Nazis struck after the visit of Baron von Mildenstein, Head of the Gestapo’s Jewish desk to Palestine in 1933 |
the meeting between Hitler and the Mufti on November 28 1941 is contained in
Walter Lacquer’s Israel-Arab Reader There is no mention of the Mufti urging Hitler
to exterminate the Jews. The Mufti was only informed
of the final solution in the summer of 1943 by Himmler..
the independence of the Arab countries – Syria, Iraq, Palestine. Hitler
refused to do this because he said it would cause problems in France and
strengthen the supporters of de Gaulle who would see it as a threat to the
French Empire. In reality Hitler had no
intention of supporting Arab independence.
If Germany had conquered the Arab countries it would simply have supplanted
Britain and France as the imperialist power.
The Arabs were considered lower on the racial ladder than the Jews.
Russia (Operation Barbarossa) in June 1941.
By November 1941 the mass shooting of some 1 million Jews, by the Einsatzgruppen
and Einsatzkommando killing squads, which operated in the rear of the Wehrmacht
in White Russia and Ukraine, had taken place.
Over 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev had already been murdered at
the end of September 1941.
Netanyahu said was true then he should hang his head in shame because it was
the Zionists who made Haj al Amin Husseini Grand Mufti after he came 4th in the
election to the post of Grand Mufti in 1921. The British High Commissioner Sir
Herbert Samuel, who had been instrumental in lobbying for the Balfour
Declaration, appointed him because the Zionists loved this chauvinist and
feudal Arab leader. [Nathan Weinstock, p. 117 Zionism: A
False Messiah, Inklinks, 1969 citing Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the
Palestinian Arab National Movement 1918-1929, London, 1974 pp. 189-93] Equally they hated the Istiqlal (Independence) Party in Palestine, because it was secular and blamed the British not the Jews. They preferred a chauvinist rogue like Haj al-Amin Husseini.
after the Revolt of 1936-39, which he had done his best to get called off. At no stage
had the Palestinians elected the Haj al-Amin Husseini. He had been imposed on them by the British and
the Zionists.
of December 1941, just days after the Mufti’s meeting with Hitler, the first extermination camp Chelmno had begun operations
using carbon monoxide gas in mobile trucks. Quite obviously it had nothing to do with the Mufti and likewise Belzec was to start its work in
March 1942. Experimentation with murder by gas had taken place in September
1941 in Auschwitz when 850 Poles and Russian prisoners of war were murdered.
The Wannsee Conference, to coordinate the logistics of the final solution, to spread it to Western Europe and deal with the thorny question of the Mischlinge (‘mixed race’ people with 1 or 2 Jewish grandparents) had originally been scheduled for December 9th 1941 but had been postponed to 20th January because of the attack on Pearl Harbour.
diaries, Adolf Hitler made a speech in Berlin to Nazi leaders. Goebbels recorded in his diary that ‘With
regard to the Jewish Question the Fuehrer is determined to make a clean sweep.
He prophesized that if they brought about another world war, they would
experience their annihilation. This was no empty talk. The world war is here.
The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question
is to be viewed without sentimentality. We’re not to have sympathy with the
Jews, but only sympathy with our German people.’ [Diary
entry of Josef Goebbels, 13 December 1941, quoted in Ian Kershaw, Fateful
Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed The World, 1940-1941, Allen Lane,
2007, p. 431]
If
we are to believe Netanyahu, this speech only came about as a result of Hitler’s
meeting with the Mufti.
Kampf, written in 1923-4, Hitler stated that the ‘sacrifice of
millions at the front’ in the first world war would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew
corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.’
‘Prophecy’ speech on January 30 1939, which Hitler repeated at least 3 times,
he spoke explicitly about annihilating the Jewish race.
I will once more be a prophet. 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 the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race
throughout Europe.” Reitlinger, The Final Solution p.24., p.593 fn. 44. January
30, 1939; January 30 1942; September 30 1942, February 24th, March
21st and November 9th 1943.
led to the final solution was the T4 programme, whereby thousands, some
estimate over 1/2 million, disabled Germans were murdered in 6 killing centres
in Germany itself, before the Catholic Bishop Galen of Munster spoke out
against it and Hitler was forced to end the programme, though it continued as
the Wild Euthenasia in the concentration camps.
[see Hitler’s Forgotten Victims, Suzanne Evans]
outlook is based on the rewriting of history.
The ‘return’ of Jews to Palestine, the denial of the Nakba and the holocaust
is no exception to this. Previously this
has meant trying to portray itself as having led the Resistance to the Nazis in
Europe whereas it was in fact a movement of collaboration – from Ha’avara in
1933 to the Kasztner Affair in 1944 in Hungary.
The Jewish groups and currents which led the Resistance were primarily the
Bund in Poland and the Communists Jews in France and Belgium. It should therefore come as no surprise that Netanyahu
now seeks to exonerate the Nazis of the major portion of the blame and instead
allocate responsibility to the Palestinians!
the Jews at the time. He wanted to expel the Jews’
Why is Benjamin Netanyahu trying to whitewash Hitler?
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 demonization 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 Tuesday, Netanyahu asserted 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.
In the video above, 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!’”
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 28 November 1941. Husseini used it to try to secure the Führer’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 Höss to Berlin
and, in privacy, told him ‘that the Führer 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
Führer’s.’”
Davidowicz also explains that “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 Zionist propaganda
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 favorite 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 Göring 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 colonization not
as an anti-colonial struggle but as an anti-Semitic project.”
Keystone of Zionist mythology
The story of the Mufti has thus become a keystone for the Zionist version of
Palestinian history, which 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
colonized by the British were also sympathetic to the Nazis, including
Indian nationalists. This was primarily based on the Nazis’ enmity toward
their British colonizers, 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 dehumanize
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.
Netanyahu accused of ‘absolving Hitler’ for Holocaust
PM says he never intended to imply that in 1941 a
Palestinian religious leader convinced the fuhrer to exterminate Jews; Israeli
and Palestinian leaders castigate him for ‘shameful’ comment
 |
| Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the 37th World Zionist Congress conference at the Jerusalem Convention Center on October 20, 2015. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) |
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pounded Wednesday with a barrage of
condemnations after he claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler only decided on
the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews after receiving input on the matter
from Jerusalem’s then-grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian
nationalist widely acknowledged as a fervent Jew-hater.
accused Netanyahu of “absolving” Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust, a
charge the prime minister later brushed off, saying he had merely intended to
drive home the enormity of the mufti’s role as the originator of contemporary
Palestinian “incitement” against Jews.
an address Tuesday to delegates at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem,
Netanyahu posited that the Nazi fuehrer did not initially intend to annihilate
the Jews, but rather sought to expel them from Europe. According to the prime
minister’s version of the events, Hitler changed his mind after meeting with
Husseini — who was grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, and president of
the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922 to 1937 — in Berlin near the end of 1941.
didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the
mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And
Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all
come here [to mandatory Palestine],’” continued the prime minister.
Heinrich Hoffmann Collection/Wikipedia)
was speaking in the context of enduring Palestinian accusations to the effect
that Israel is seeking to take control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; the
mufti was one of the first to peddle such allegations against Jews in Mandatory
Palestine. The charges have been fueling a recent wave of attacks against
Israelis in and around Jerusalem. Israel has repeatedly denied allegations that
it wishes to change the status quo on the Mount, which houses the Al-Aqsa
Mosque and is holy to both Jews and Muslims. As per the status quo, Jews may
visit the Temple Mount but not pray there.
overwhelming majority of Holocaust historians reject the notion that Husseini
planted the idea of a “Final Solution” for Europe’s Jews in Hitler’s mind.
Segev, a leading Israeli historian who has conducted extensive research on the
Holocaust, told The Times of Israel Wednesday that the notion that Hitler
needed to be convinced to exterminate the Jews was “entirely absurd.” He stressed that “one can surely say that [Husseini] was a war criminal, but one cannot
say Hitler needed his advice.”
born in Jerusalem to parents who escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, further stressed
that by the time Husseini and Hitler met in 1941, the annihilation of the Jews
had already begun. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed by
the Nazis and their collaborators by the time of the meeting.
Hitler goes, ‘Oh, what a great idea,’” Segev added ironically.
commentators pointed out that Hitler had discussed the possible extermination
of European Jewry as early as 1939, even before World War II began and
certainly before he met with Husseini. The order to carry out a Final Solution
against Jews was given in July 1941 — months ahead of the mufti and Hitler’s
meeting — after which the infamous Wannsee Conference was called in order to
finalize the logistics and details of the mass-murder operation.
Wannsee Conference, held in on January 20, 1942, came after the meeting between
Hitler and Husseini.
theory that Husseini played a role in the origin of the plan to commit genocide
against the Jews has been raised by a number of historians including David
Dalin and John Rothmann, but the notion has been rejected by a vast majority of
Holocaust scholars.
speech on Tuesday was not the first time the Israeli leader offered his
alternate version concerning the mufti’s role in the perpetration of the
Holocaust.
architects of the Final Solution,”
he said in 2012 during a speech at the Knesset. “He, more than anybody else, convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final
Solution, and not let the Jews leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would
come here. Rather that they would be annihilated, burned, there.”
prime minister was criticized across the political board Wednesday for his
comments, which were described as inaccurate at best and, at worst, as a
tailwind to Holocaust denial. Implying the mufti planted the idea for the Final
Solution in Hitler’s mind was tantamount to some, to absolving Hitler and the
Nazis, at least partially, for orchestrating the unprecedented, systematic
genocide of the Jews.
demand that Netanyahu correct it immediately because it trivializes the
Holocaust, the Nazis, and the terrible dictator Adolf Hitler’s share in the
terrible tragedy of our people in the Holocaust,” Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog said in a
statement. “It falls like ripe fruit
straight into the hands of Holocaust deniers, and involves them in the
Palestinian conflict.
the Israeli prime minister, he is also the prime minister of the Jewish people.
No one will teach me what a hater of Israel the mufti was. He gave the order to
kill my grandfather, Rabbi [Yitzhak HaLevi] Herzog, and actively supported
Hitler,” Herzog added.
Galon, leader of the liberal Meretz party, was even more vituperative,
asserting that she felt “ashamed” for
Netanyahu.
politician] Jorg Haider. This is not part of the doctorate of [Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas [which accused the Zionist movement of
collaborating with Nazism and played down the extent of the Holocaust]. It is
an absolutely accurate quote by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu… It’s
unbelievable,” Galon said in a statement.
 |
| Meretz leader MK Zehava Galon, June 2013. (Miriam Alster/Flash90) |
Babi Yar in September 1941, two months before the mufti and Hitler ever met,
and let them know that the Nazis didn’t intend to destroy them. Perhaps
Netanyahu will tell that to my relatives in Lithuania murdered by the Nazis
along with nearly 200,000 members of the Jewish community there, well before
the mufti and Hitler met,” she continued.
(Arab) List party leader Ayman Odeh accused Netanyahu of distorting history in
order to incite against the Palestinian people.
millions of Jews, are converted into cheap political propaganda to assist the
refusal of peace,” Odeh said. “Netanyahu
proves every day how dangerous he is to the two nations, and how far he is
willing to go to consolidate his power and justify his catastrophic policies.”
Odeh’s words, the Palestinian Authority’s former chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat,
asserted that “Netanyahu hates
Palestinians so much that he is willing to absolve Hitler for the murder of 6
million Jews.” He added that “on
behalf of the thousands of Palestinians that fought alongside the Allied troops
in defense of international justice, the State of Palestine denounces
[Netanyahu’s] morally indefensible and inflammatory statements.”
President Mahmoud Abbas accused Netanyahu of placing “responsibility on Haj Amin al-Husseini for the killing of Jews during
the Holocaust.” He said that by implying that “Hitler was not responsible [for the Holocaust], Netanyahu wants to
change history. He is changing the history of the Jews.” In a 1984 book
based on his PhD dissertation, Abbas claimed that the Nazis had collaborated
with the Zionists, who had also exaggerated the number of Jews killed in the
Holocaust.
a statement on Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu asserted that his comments had
been misconstrued. Hitler, he said, “was
responsible for the extermination of six million European Jews — no one doubts
that.” But, he added, “we must not
ignore that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was among those who encouraged him
to adopt the Final Solution. There is much testimony to that effect, including
the testimony of Eichmann’s deputy at the Nuremberg trials.”
reporters on the tarmac at Ben-Gurion Airport as he prepared to head to Berlin,
Netanyahu said Wednesday he had no intention of “absolving Hitler of his responsibility,” but had rather meant to
show that “the forefather of Palestinian
nationalism, which was without a state and without what is referred to as an
‘occupation,’ without the territories and without settlements, was already
aspiring, through systematic incitement, to annihilate the Jews.
this day a revered figure in Palestinian society — he appears in textbooks and
celebrated as the father of the nation — and the incitement that began with
him, the incitement to kill Jews, yet persists,” he said. “The incitement must stop if we are to end
the murders. The paramount thing is to acknowledge the historical facts and not
ignore them.”
Netanyahu, Saying Palestinian Mufti Inspired Holocaust, Draws Broad Criticism
October 21, 2015
Wednesday joined Palestinians in denouncing Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel for saying it was a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who gave Hitler the idea of annihilating
European Jews during World War II.
Tuesday night that “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he
wanted to expel the Jews,” according to a transcript provided by his office. The prime
minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, protested to Hitler that “they’ll
all come here,” referring to Palestine.
with them?’ ” Mr.
Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking Mr. Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.’ ”
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speaking to the World Zionist Congress in
Jerusalem on Tuesday.
the speech “a lie” and “a disgrace.” Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, a
specialist of German history at Hebrew University, said, “With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people that we would call
Holocaust deniers.”
Parliament, said the accusation was “a
dangerous historical distortion,” and he demanded that Mr. Netanyahu “correct it immediately.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said in a radio interview that “history is actually very, very clear.”
he said. “Haj Amin al-Husseini joined
him.”
Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly accused Palestinian
leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, of lying, principally about Israel’s actions at a
contested holy site in the Old City.
falsely claimed that Israeli forces had executed a 13-year-old Palestinian who
had attacked Israelis with a knife, when the youth was alive and being treated
in an Israeli hospital.
because of a book he wrote that challenged the number of Jewish victims and
accused Zionists of collaborating with Nazis to propel more Jews to what would
become Israel. When Mr. Abbas issued a formal statement last year calling the
Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have
occurred against humanity in the modern era,” Mr. Netanyahu dismissed it.
Organization, said on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s “regrettable statements have deepened the divide” and denounced them
as “morally indefensible and
inflammatory.”
the Palestinians for the Holocaust and completely absolved Adolf Hitler’s
heinous and reprehensible genocide of the Jewish people,” Mr. Erekat said
in a statement. “It is a sad day in
history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much
that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history.”
Solution” in a 2012 speech, on Wednesday called the criticism of his
remarks “absurd.”
absolve Hitler of his responsibility,” he said, according to a statement
provided by his office as he left Israel for Germany, where he was to meet with
Chancellor Angela Merkel. “But rather to
show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and
without the so-called occupation, without land and without settlements, even
then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.”
for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews; he made the decision,”
Mr. Netanyahu added. “It is equally
absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al -Husseini, a war criminal,
for encouraging and urging Hitler.”
John Kerry on Thursday in Berlin to discuss ways of defusing the heightened
violence, said he would ask Mr. Kerry to demand that Mr. Abbas “stop the incitement that is the source of
many attacks that we see here.”
Arab pogroms against Jews in the holy land in the 1920s, collaborated with the
Nazis and promoted genocide over deportation of Europe’s Jews as part of his
virulent opposition to Zionism. He escaped prosecution in the Nuremberg trials
and died in 1974.
to Mr. Netanyahu’s 1993 book, “A Place
Among the Nations,” which details the mufti’s close ties to Nazis, protests
of their plan to expel European Jews and support of the Final Solution, quoting
from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.
the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a
collaborator and adviser” in the “execution of this plan,” the book quotes
Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, as having testified. “He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and
had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”
months before the Final Solution was formalized and the construction of
extermination camps accelerated, according to historians, but after the mass
murder of Jews had begun, and roughly one million had perished.
Israel Radio that Mr. Netanyahu was “doing
something he must not do,” and that in “the
protocol” of the 1941 meeting between the mufti and Hitler, “the text that Netanyahu speaks of does not
appear.”
responsibility of the Holocaust, for the destruction of the Jews, to the mufti
and the Arab world,” Professor Zimmermann said. “This is a trick intended to stain the Arabs of today because of the
Arabs of the past. To pile on the Arabs of the past by easing up on the Germans
of the past.”
Husseini to convince him.” he said on Army Radio. “Hitler spoke of the destruction of the Jews in his famous speech in
1939, in which he prophesied that if war will break out and the Jews started
it, the result will be the destruction of the Jewish race. He repeated these
declarations.”
German historian at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and the author of “Ataturk in the
Nazi Imagination,” said that Mr. Netanyahu “is right in noting that there were connections between the grand mufti
and the Nazis.” But he added that “this
cannot be used to shift blame away from the Nazis,” and that it “does not provide us with new scapegoats.”
leading to Auschwitz was an entirely German and a Nazi one,” Mr. Ihrig
said. “The Nazis found a lot of
inspiration in many past and contemporary events, and from contacts with lots
of peoples. But it would be folly to assume that, actually, they needed these
to go on their own genocidal path to begin with.”
collaboration with the Nazis, said he supported Mr. Netanyahu’s take on
history, though he said it was impossible to precisely balance blame for the
extermination idea.
is that both men mutually inspired each other,” Mr. Cohen said, adding that
the mufti promoted plans to bring Jews from the Middle East to concentration
camps in what was then mandatory Palestine.
“One can’t be in their heads and know who hated Jews more.”
Mr. Netanyahu, came to the prime minister’s defense, telling Israel Radio, “He made no mistake.”
they would, they would also destroy the Jews of Israel.”
that the prime minister did not erase, by an iota, Hitler’s absolute
responsibility for the destruction of six million of our people, including my
family,” he said. “But the role
played by Haj Amin el-Husseini in the decision that led to the Final Solution
also cannot be erased. And all the people who feel moved to defend Haj Amin
el-Husseini today are the ones making a historic lie.”
