ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bassem Eid (born 5 February 1958) is a Palestinian living in Israel who has an extensive career as a Palestinian human rights activist. His initial focus was on human rights violations committed by Israeli armed forces, but for many years has broadened his research to include human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the Palestinian armed forces on their own people. He founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996, although it ceased operations in 2011. He now works as a political analyst for Israeli TV and radio.
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Part 1
As the world has watched, transfixed, at the cascade of horrific images coming out of southern Israel, we strain for an appropriate comparison. How can we understand an ideology that motivates terrorists to butcher over 1,400 men, women, and children in a single day, torturing 80% of their victims and perpetrating mass rapes so brutal that they shattered leg and pelvic bones? U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East during the campaign against ISIS, said the outrages that Hamas committed were “worse than ISIS.”
There is only one real model for the force that just killed the most Jews on a single day since the Holocaust, and that, of course, is the Nazi Einsatzgruppen themselves, who initiated the slaughter of 6 million Jews in Europe. In fact, the similarities are more than incidental, as a strain of Nazi-inspired antisemitism has always been inculcated in the Palestinian national movement. For peace to come, that will have to change.
In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the Jewish Briton who was High Commissioner of the British Palestine Mandate, unwisely gave in to pressure to appoint Haj Amin al-Husseini, a leader of the 1920 anti-Jewish riots, as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the supreme Islamic religious authority in the country. The Mufti went on to engineer bloody riots against the Jewish presence in the Holy Land in 1929 (murdering 67 Jews in Hebron) and 1936-39 (killing about 415 Jews).
After the 1936 violence, the British finally dismissed al-Husseini from his position, at which point he traveled to the Third Reich and met with Hitler. He became a recruiter for the Nazi SS among the Muslim population of the Balkans. In a 1943 letter to the Mufti, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler wrote that the Nazi leadership “has been closely following the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs – and especially in Palestine – against the Jewish invaders.”
According to Faiz Bei Adrisi, senior Arab officer in the Mandate police and commander of the village subdistrict of the Jerusalem district, al-Husseini told him that his plan in the event of an Axis victory was to “build in the Dotan Valley, near Nablus, giant crematoriums of the Auschwitz kind, to which the Jews of the Land of Israel, as well as the Jews of Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and even North Africa, would be brought, so as to annihilate them with the methods used by the SS in the death camps of Europe.” When al-Husseini was laid to rest in Beirut in 1974, his spiritual godson Yasser Arafat – founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which rules in the West Bank today – was his chief mourner.
From the blog of Bassem Eid at The Times of Israel
blogs.timesofisrael.com