Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu stirs trouble by linking Muslim leader to Holocaust
Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to the World Zionist Congress on Tuesday. His subject was "the 10 big lies".
Referring to the current cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis, Mr Netanyahu said Jews had faced attacks in the past – in 1920, 1921, 1929 – instigated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who allied himself with the Nazis during World War II.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked controversy with his comments on the Holocaust.<cite> Photo: Supplied</cite>
Then Mr Netanyahu delivered this jaw-dropping assertion: "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. He said, 'Burn them'."
r Netanyahu said the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had "a central role in fomenting the Final Solution".
Reaction in Israel – and around the Jewish world – came hard and fast. First politicians were agog. Then historians of the Holocaust piled on. Then Mr Netanyahu was mocked in social media memes and parodies.
Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting Hitler in Berlin in November 1941.<cite> Photo: German Federal Archive</cite>
Isaac Herzog, the leader of the opposition in Israel's parliament, wrote: "This is a dangerous historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimises the Holocaust, Nazism and ... Hitler's part in our people's terrible disaster."
Mr Herzog pointed out that the Holocaust had already begun by the time the Mufti met Hitler in November 1941. Itzik Shmuli, an MP in Mr Herzog's Zionist Union party, demanded that Mr Netanyahu apologise to Holocaust victims, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
"This is a great shame, a prime minister of the Jewish state at the service of Holocaust deniers – this is a first," Mr Shmuli said. "This isn't the first time Netanyahu distorts historical facts, but a lie of this magnitude is the first."
Rising tensions: Police and security stand guard in Jerusalem last week.<cite> Photo: Getty Images</cite>
"This wasn't a speech by Joerg Haider," the late leader of the far-right Freedom Party in Austria, wrote Zehava Galon of the left-wing Meretz party on her Facebook page. "This wasn't a snippet of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' doctoral thesis," which questions that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. "This was an actual quote by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, before the World Zionist Congress. It has to be seen to be believed."
"Perhaps we should exhume the corpses of the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar in September 1941, two months before the Mufti and Hitler met, and bring them up to speed on the fact that the Nazis had no intention of destroying them," Ms Galon wrote.
Babi Yar was the ravine outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev, where the mass killing of Jews by German troops and local collaborators took place.
Haj Amin al-Husseini greeting SS volunteers in Bosnia in 1943.<cite> Photo: German Federal Archive</cite>
Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, accused Mr Netanyahu of using the human tragedy of the Holocaust to try to score political points against Palestinians.
"It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbour so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of six million Jews."
Husseini, as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was one of the foremost religious and political leaders of the Palestinian population during the British Mandate period between the two world wars. He fomented riots against the mass migration of Jews to Palestine; and he allied with Hitler and the Nazis during World War II because of his opposition to British colonial rule. Husseini spent the war in Berlin, broadcasting Arabic-language propaganda and incitement against Jews and the Allies.
Part of Benjamin Netanyahu's response to the controversy, as posted by Ofir Gendelman, the Israeli Prime Minister's Arab Media spokesman, on Facebook.<cite> Photo: Screengrab</cite>
Dina Porat, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education and Commemoration in Jerusalem, told the Israeli news website Ynet that Mr Netanyahu's statements were factually incorrect.
"You cannot say that it was the Mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews," she said. "It's not true. Their meeting occurred after a series of events that point to this."
Meir Litvak, who teaches at Tel Aviv University's Department of Middle Eastern History, told the website: "Husseini supported the extermination of the Jews, he tried to prevent rescuing of Jews, he recruited Arabs for the SS. He was an abominable person, but this must not minimise the scale of Hitler's guilt."
Even Israeli Defence Minister and close Netanyahu ally Moshe Yaalon said the Prime Minister had got it wrong. "It certainly wasn't [Husseini] who invented the Final Solution," he told Israel's Army Radio. "That was the evil brainchild of Hitler himself."
As he boarded a plane to Germany on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu responded to the storm about his comments on Hitler and the Grand Mufti: "I did not intend to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution extermination of six million Jews, he made the decision."
He continued, however, to press his point: "The Mufti was instrumental in the decision to exterminate the Jews. We must not ignore the importance of his role. The Mufti repeatedly suggested that the Jews should be exterminated. He considered it an appropriate solution to the Palestinian question."
Mr Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have long dismissed the argument that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and its blockade with Egypt of the Gaza Strip play a role in periodic outbreaks of violence, insisting that the root cause of such attacks is Palestinian incitement.
"My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called 'occupation' . . . and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews," Mr Netanyahu said before departing for Berlin.
"Unfortunately, Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society, he appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews - continues. Not in the same format, but in a different one, and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders, it is necessary to stop the incitement," he added.
The Grand Mufti was sought for war crimes but never appeared at the Nuremberg trials, and later died of cancer in Beirut in 1974.
Washington Post, Reuters