The NEWEST Official Discussion Thread for the creation of Israel, the UN and the British Mandate

[Sixties Fan]

MYTH

The Zionists were colonialist tools of Western imperialism.

FACT

“Colonialism means living by exploiting others,” Yehoshafat Harkabi has written. “But what could be further from colonialism than the ide- alism of city-dwelling Jews who strive to become farmers and laborers and to live by their own work?”26

Moreover, as British historian Paul Johnson noted, Zionists were hardly tools of imperialists given the powers’ general opposition to their cause. “Everywhere in the West, the foreign offices, defense min- istries and big business were against the Zionists.”27

Emir Faisal saw the Zionist movement as a companion to the Arab nationalist movement, fighting against imperialism, as he explained in a letter to Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter on March 3, 1919, one day after Chaim Weizmannpresented the Zionist case to the Paris conference. Faisal wrote:

The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with deep- est sympathy on the Zionist movement . . . We will wish the Jews a hearty welcome home . . . We are working together for a reformed and revised Near East and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is nationalist and not imperialist. And there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other (emphasis added).28

In the 1940s, the Jewish underground movements waged an an- ticolonial war against the British. The Arabs, meanwhile, were con- cerned primarily with fighting the Jews rather than expelling the British imperialists.


https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/mf2017.pdf#page=9

 

[Sixties Fan]

MYTH
The Balfour Declaration did not give Jews the right to a homeland in Palestine.

FACT
On November 2, 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establish- ment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achieve- ment of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Emir Faisal, son of Sherif Hussein, the leader of the Arab revolt against the Turks, signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference support- ing the implementation of Balfour. It acknowledged the “racial kin- ship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people” and concluded that “the surest means of working out the con- summation of their national aspirations is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab states and Palestine.”

Furthermore, the agreement called for all necessary measures “ . . . to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large
scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil.”15 Faisal had conditioned his acceptance of the Balfour Declaration
on the fulfillment of British wartime promises of independence to the Arabs. These were not kept.
Critics dismiss the Weizmann-Faisal agreement because it was never enacted; however, the fact that the leader of the Arab nationalist movement and the Zionist movement could reach an understanding is significant because it demonstrated that Jewish and Arab aspirations were not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The international community accepted the Balfour Declaration, as evident from its inclusion in the Mandate for Palestine, which specifi- cally referred to “the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine” and to the moral validity of “reconstituting their National Home in that country.” The term “reconstituting” shows recognition of the fact that Palestine had been the Jews’ home. Furthermore, the British were instructed to “use their best endeavours to facilitate” Jew- ish immigration, to encourage settlement on the land, and to “secure” the Jewish National Home. The word “Arab” does not appear in the Mandatory award.16

The Mandate was formalized by the fifty-two governments at the League of Nations on July 24, 1922.

 

[Sixties Fan]

MYTH
Arabs in Palestine suffered because of Jewish settlement.

FACT
For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly culti- vated, and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and malarial marshes. As late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusa- lem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. “The popu- lation and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years,” he said.17

The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913:
The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a sum- mer track suitable for transport by camels and carts . . . no orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna [Yavne . . . Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen . . . The ploughs used were of wood . . . The yields were very poor . . . The sanitary conditions in the village were hor- rible. Schools did not exist . . . The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert

. . . The villages in this area were
few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scat- tered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.18

Surprisingly, many people who were not sympathetic to the Zionist cause believed the Jews would improve the condition of Palestinian Arabs. For example, Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, wrote: “It is absolutely necessary that an entente be made between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do evil. The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industrious- ness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country.”19
Even a leading Arab nationalist believed the return of the Jews to their homeland would help resuscitate the country. According to Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia:
The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amaz- ing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every di- rection. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, [and] Amer- ica. The cause of causes could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons (abna’ihi-l-asliyin), for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles ( jaliya) to their homeland will prove materially and spiritu- ally [to be] an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades and in all things connected with toil and labor.20
As Hussein foresaw, the regeneration of Palestine, and the growth of its population, came only after Jews returned in massive numbers.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/mf2017.pdf#page=9

 

[Sixties Fan]

MYTH
The Zionists could have chosen another country besides Palestine.

FACT
In the late nineteenth century, the rise of anti-Semitism led to a resur- gence of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, shattering promises of equality and tolerance. This stimulated Jewish immigration to Pal- estine from Europe.
Simultaneously, a wave of Jews immigrated to Palestine from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, and Turkey. These Jews were unaware of The- odor Herzl’s political Zionism or of European pogroms. They were mo- tivated by the centuries-old dream of the “Return to Zion” and a fear of intolerance. Upon hearing that the gates of Palestine were open, they braved the hardships of travel and went to the land of Israel.

The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion, and the land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar, and Jewish holidays and festivals all orig- inated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and every Passover recite the words “next year in Jerusalem.” Jewish religion, culture, and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built.

In 1897, Jewish leaders formally organized the Zionist political movement, calling for the restoration of the Jewish national home in Palestine, where Jews could find sanctuary and self-determination, and work for the renascence of their civilization and culture.
Due to the urgency of the plight of Jews in Russia, at the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel on August 26, 1903, Herzl proposed the cre- ation of a Jewish state in Uganda as a temporary emergency refuge. While Herzl made it clear that this program would not affect the ulti- mate aim of Zionism, a Jewish entity in the land of Israel, the proposal aroused a storm of protest at the congress and nearly led to a split in the Zionist movement. The Uganda Program, which never had much support, was formally rejected by the Zionist movement at the Sev- enth Zionist Congress in 1905.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/mf2017.pdf#page=9

 

[Sixties Fan]

The British promised the Arabs independence in Palestine.

FACT
The central figure in the Arab nationalist movement at the time of World War I was Hussein ibn ‘Ali, the Sherif of Mecca in 1908. As Sherif, Hussein was responsible for the custody of Islam’s shrines in the Hejaz and was one of the Muslims’ spiritual leaders.
In July 1915, Hussein sent a letter to Sir Henry MacMahon, the High Commissioner for Egypt, informing him of the terms for Arab partici- pation in the war against the Turks. The letters between Hussein and MacMahon that followed outlined the areas that Britain was prepared to cede to the Arabs in exchange for their help.

The Hussein-MacMahon correspondence conspicuously fails to mention Palestine. The British argued the omission had been inten- tional, thereby justifying their refusal to grant the Arabs indepen- dence in Palestine after the war.29 MacMahon explained:

I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphati- cally, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to be- lieve at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.30

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/mf2017.pdf#page=9

 

[Sixties Fan]

Did Arabs deserve all the Middle East?

Failure to create a national home for the Jewish people would have meant denying the great Jewish people a share in the partition of the multi-national Ottoman Empire, where Jews had lived for centuries, including in the Holy Land. Failure to create a national home for the Jewish people would also have meant that the great Arab people would have received almost the whole of the Ottoman inheritance. That result would have been unacceptable to David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and their peers, because they significantly understood that the claim to self-determination of the great Jewish people was as compelling as that of the great Arab people.

The Paris decision-makers strongly insisted that they had also done justice to the claims of the great Arab people, which they believed they had freed from 400 years of Turkish rule and helped on the road to independence via creation or recognition of several new Arab states on lands that had formerly been subject to the Ottoman sultan. For example, 77% of the territory of the Palestine Mandate was Trans-Jordan, which finally became an independent Arab state in 1946.



The international decision to create a national home for the Jewish people, from the sea to the Jordan River, did not result in the displacement of local Arabs. To the contrary, from 1922 until 1948, the Arab population of the national home for the Jewish people almost tripled, while the Jewish population there multiplied eight times. The later problem of Arab refugees (about 726,000) from the national home for the Jewish people, and Jewish refugees (about 850,000) from Arab countries only emerged from May 1948, when local Arabs allied with several neighboring Arab states to launch a war to destroy the newly independent Israel. Their declared intention was to exterminate the Jews living between the sea and the Jordan River, just as the Turks in 1922 had spectacularly succeeded in liquidating the aboriginal Greek communities of the Anatolian littoral.

Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People

www.americanthinker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Who self-identified as Palestinian before 1948?



The Jewish people has kept the same name and subjective-objective identity in each century since ancient times. By contrast, among local Muslim Arabs, the formation of a distinct, subjective-objective "Palestinian" identity did not generally occur before the second half of the 20th century. And this is understandable, because the fifty years from the Ottoman collapse to the 1967 Six-Day War was a short time for the birth of a new people. Moreover, relatively few MuslimArabs would have wanted to self-identify as "Palestinian" until three preconditions had been satisfied.

First precondition was political resurrection of the ancient toponym "Palestine" via the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1922 creation of the Palestine Mandate, which consisted of Trans-Jordan and the national home for the Jewish people, from the sea to the Jordan River.

Second precondition was the 1946 separation from the Palestine Mandate of an independent Arab state called Jordan. This is significant because the new Palestinian identity was directly focused on the territory of the national home for the Jewish people. This was then notably that smaller Palestine, from the sea to the Jordan River, that existed for less than two years -- i.e., from May 25, 1946 (the birth of Jordan) until May 14, 1948 (the birth of Israel). Before 1946, that precise territorial focus was largely absent, because as a border the Jordan River then had relatively little meaning for the self-identification of most of the Muslim Arabs living on either bank. This factor was implicitly recognized by the U.K. Peel Commission, which in 1937 recommended the creation of a new Arab state to consist of both Trans-Jordan and the Arab-inhabited parts of the national home for the Jewish people. And more than a decade later, this factor was again implicitly recognized by King Abdullah I, who in 1950 annexed to the Kingdom of Jordan the West Bank and East Jerusalem that his Arab Legion had conquered in the 1948-1949 war.

Third precondition was the abrupt jettisoning in May 1948 of the appellation "Palestine" in favor of "Israel" as the name for the newly independent Jewish state. Before 1948, the adjective "Palestinian" had too often been used as synonym for "Jewish." And to be sure, the name "Palestine" and many other specific features of the 1922 Palestine Mandate were too closely associated with Jews and Zionism to have offered much of a focus for Muslim Arabs. Therefore, they generally did not identify as "Palestinian" until the "Palestine" trademark had been definitely abandoned by the Jews.

Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People

www.americanthinker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Palestinian people in the 1960s

Arab leaders had themselves been slow to recognize the existence of a distinct Palestinian people with a right to self-determination. For example, as principal Arab leader at the Paris Peace Conference, Prince Feisal had specifically accepted the plan to create "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. And his father, the Hashemite King of the Hedjaz (later part of Saudi Arabia) was party to the 1920 Sevres Treaty that explicitly stipulated that there would be "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. Around three decades later, the governments of Egypt and Jordan showed how little regard they had for the self-determination of a Palestinian people. First, they rejected the 1947 U.N. General Assembly resolution recommending the partition of the territory of the national home for the Jewish people into two new independent states, the one Jewish and the other Arab. Second, no Palestinian state was created between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Jordan had East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The loss of those lands by Egypt and Jordan in the Six-Day War strongly encouraged the tendency of local Arabs to see themselves as distinct from the Arabs of Egypt and Jordan. Now more clearly spearheading their own irredentist struggle, local Arabs had added incentive to self-identify as "Palestinian." And all the more so, since the new identification effectively expressed their stubborn determination to eventually master all the territory that in 1922 had been internationally recognized as the "national home for the Jewish people." And certainly, history knows of other instances in which new national identities have been forged in the fire of territorial dispute and ethno-religious hatred.

Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People

www.americanthinker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Peaceful rights reconciliation

This analysis neither denies the current existence of a distinct Palestinian people nor suggests that this newborn Palestinian people is today without rights, including claims to self-determination, independence, and territory. Rather, there are now "claims of right" on all sides. Urgently required is a peaceful process that respects the dignity of both peoples and effects a reconciliation of the subsequent rights of the newly emerged Palestinian people with the prior rights of the ancient Jewish people. A peaceful process is mandatory, inter alia, because the Jewish people's aboriginal rights include "the right to life." Namely, Jews have a right to live safely in their native land -- and even more so, in that part of their aboriginal homeland, that was explicitly recognized as "national home for the Jewish people" in a series of declarations, resolutions, and treaties from 1917 to 1923. This significantly means that the Palestinian people lacks the right to wage a "war of national liberation" against the Jewish people, which is legitimately sited between the sea and the Jordan River. There, the Jewish people lives "as of right and not on sufferance," as said by Winston Churchill in 1922.

Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People

www.americanthinker.com

 

[Rambunctious]

Oooookay... now what?.....

 

[DudleySmith]

Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz

Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz​

The majority of modern ethnic Jews are descendants of converts from other regions than the area of modern Israel. Sephardics are mainly descended from Jewish converts in North Africa. Few have any genetic relations to Jews from the region of Israel. The Samaritans and Mandeans are probably far more likely to be natives of the region than Ashkenazim or most Sephardi.

 

[Esdraelon]

Oooookay... now what?.....

Regional war, massive casualties, eventually, PERMANENT Israeli control of all the land.

 

[Sixties Fan]

(July 24, 2019 / JNS) This month marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Amin al-Husseini, the one-time Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazi collaborator. Hailed as a “pioneer” by current Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, during World War II al-Husseini raised SS regiments in the Balkans, promoted the Reich’s propaganda in the Arab world, toured death camps and plotted the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry. After he escaped justice, conventional wisdom has it that the Mufti ceased to be a political force in the post-war years. But conventional wisdom is wrong.

Declassified CIA documents—many revealed for the first time—and a recent book tell a different story, one in which al-Husseini continued to be influential more than a quarter-century after the war’s end. Although he would never regain the power that he once wielded, the Mufti remained a force to be reckoned with. Intelligence agencies closely monitored him, and Arab regimes variously sought his support or his assassination. Through it all he remained not only an unapologetic anti-Semite, but also an inveterate schemer.


The Mufti’s rise to power was itself owed to intrigues. The British, who ruled Mandate Palestine after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, made al-Husseini the grand mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, making him both the country’s highest Muslim cleric and leading Arab political figure.

As Wolfgang Schwanitz and the late Barry Rubin revealed in their 2014 book Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the 24-year-old with no religious training was likely chosen in recognition of his service as a spy for the British in the final years of World War I. The decision, the historians conclude, “was one of the most remarkable errors of judgment ever made in a region rife with them.”

Indeed, al-Husseini would spend the next two decades inciting anti-Jewish violence and refusing numerous British-led attempts to broker peace. By the 1930s, the Mufti was actively seeking—and receiving—support from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. U.S. intelligence would later conclude that the 1936-39 Arab Revolt, in which Palestinians led by al-Husseini murdered rivals, Jews and British officials, “was able to continue only because of Nazi funding.”

In October 1937, the now ex-Mufti fled to Lebanon, but not before he released an “Appeal to All Muslims of the World,” in which he “urged them to cleanse their lands of the Jews … and laid the foundation for the anti-Semitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamists down to this day,” note Schwanitz and Rubin. He would eventually make his way to Berlin, where he would aid the Axis powers, befriend high-ranking Nazi officials like Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, and, in a Nov. 28 1941 meeting with Adolf Hitler, ask for “a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.”

At war’s end, al-Husseini was considered a war criminal by Yugoslavia and implicated for his role in committing war crimes. Nonetheless, the French government, which briefly captured him, allowed him to network and regroup, and apparently planned on using him to further their post-war ambitions for the region. When the Mufti fled and made his way to Egypt, little effort was made to bring him to justice. Sheltered and supported by Egypt’s King Farouk, the Mufti helped raise forces to attack the fledgling Jewish state during its War of Independence and plotted against Jordan’s King Abdullah, whom he viewed as too pro-British and too willing to compromise with the Israeli government.




(full article online)

The mufti’s war against the Jews

In 1937, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini released an “Appeal to All Muslims of the World,” urging them “to cleanse their lands of the Jews” and laying the foundation for the anti-Semitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamists to this day.

www.jns.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ There were several Muslim clans, after the Ottoman Empire fell, who were pro the Jews rebuilding their Nation on their own Ancient Homeland. Al Husseini's clan was against that, and defeated all of them. This is the man responsible for the Muslim's (and Christian) need to defeat Israel and destroy it]

The Grand Mufti’s Collaboration with Nazi Germany: Defining the Historical Problem​

Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974) collaborated extensively with Nazi Germany but had no impact on Nazi decision-making concerning the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. He did have a profound impact on Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda to the Arab societies during the Holocaust. He left a legacy of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that remains an enduring element of Palestinian and Arab politics. If we are to understand his importance for the history of politics and ideas in the Middle East, we must draw a clear distinction. On the one hand, the Mufti was an important regional leader and Nazi propagandist. In this capacity he engaged in lethal incitement against the Jews, and this is now recognized under international law as a crime because it is an essential step in the process leading to genocide. On the other, the Mufti did not participate in the decision-making process that led to the Holocaust. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate this proposition by making use of verifiable historical evidence.

Most recently, the issue of the Mufti’s historical responsibility became a subject of public controversy when, on October 20, 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, stated in an address at the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of forced emigration to one of extermination. Mistakenly, he claimed that Husseini “was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution,” but later he retracted this statement.1 It is important to note that authoritative historians of the decision-making sequence leading to the Holocaust found no such role for Husseini. The implication of their work is that, had he never arrived in Hitler’s Berlin in 1941, the Holocaust would still have taken place.



Husseini was a leading figure of the Palestinian national movement from the time of his appointment as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 to his leadership of the Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.2 After the defeat of 1948, his political star declined but his rejection of any compromise settlement with Israel had a continuing ideological impact on Palestinian politics. He claimed that Zionism was a threat to Arabs and the religion of Islam and that Zionists and later, Israelis would destroy or eliminate the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. During World War II and the Holocaust, having been chased out of the Middle East by the British, he found refuge in Hitler’s Berlin. His rejection of Zionism was inseparable from his enthusiasm for National Socialism. However, Husseini did not influence Hitler’s decisions to launch the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.

Yet, if some exaggerate Husseini’s importance for developments in Europe, it would be equally misguided to minimize the depth of his collaboration and its deep roots in his political and religious convictions. In Hitler and the Nazis he recognized ideological soulmates who shared his profound hatred of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism. He expressed his enthusiasm to German diplomats in Jerusalem as early as March 1933.3 In his confidential conversations with German diplomats and then in a major public speech in Syria in 1937, Husseini made clear that his opposition to Zionism was rooted in his interpretation of the religion of Islam. Husseini’s importance in the history of politics and ideas lay in his ability to weave together an interpretation of the religion of Islam with the secular language of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism. In his reading of the Koran and the commentaries on it, Islam emerges as a religion that is inherently anti-Semitic and is hostile both to the religion of Judaism and to the people who follow it. He was one of the founding fathers of the ideological tradition known as radical Islam or Islamism. That tradition, which continues in our own time, has Sunni and Shia variations. Its original base was in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood that inspired subsequent organizations such as Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS, but there also is a Shia variation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite their differences, both share a conviction that, among other things, the message of Islam is inherently anti-Jewish and anti-democratic and that it provides justification for terrorism against Jews, “non-believers” and “infidels” such as Christians, as well as Muslims who take a different view of Islam. It is “Islamist” because its key texts rest on selected readings of the Koran, the commentaries on it and the Hadith. It is, of course, only one interpretation of Islam but however plausible or distorted its interpretations of the texts of Islam, it could not exist without those texts.4

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Islamist Message of the Mufti​

The first of Husseini’s canonical texts, “Islam and the Jews,” was delivered in Bludan, Syria at an Arab political conference held on September 8-9, 1937.5 It took place four years before he arrived in Nazi Berlin and the fact that it was not yet dependent on the Third Reich is important. The speech displays the Islamist message he brought with him to Berlin and was the product of his very own beliefs. In 1938, a press controlled by the Nazis published a German language translation in Berlin. It became one of the founding texts of the Islamist tradition, one that defined the religion of Islam as a source of hatred of the Jews. By 1938, the Nazi political elite were able to read Husseini’s message. An Arabic edition was made available in the Middle East. As Israeli historian Zvi Elpeleg noted in his 1993 study of Husseini, following delivery of “Islam and the Jews,” the 400 delegates in Syria elected Husseini as honorary president of the pan-Arab organization gathered at the meeting.6

As Husseini was in hiding in order to avoid capture by the British, the text was read in his absence. He wrote:

The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina…In those days the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was a swindler…They tried to undermine his honor…They began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mohammed…and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today…the verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.7

While anti-Jewish passages are present in classic Islamic texts, Husseini’s distinctive contribution was to give them greater importance than had previously been the case and thereby to define Islam as a religion inherently hostile to the Jews. He engaged in what historians and literary scholars call the labor of selective tradition, that is, the selective interpretation of texts in light of contemporaneous concerns. That effort is not possible if the original texts lack relevant material. Husseini’s reading of the Koran drew legitimacy and authority from the ancient texts.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Between 1941 and 1945, Husseini became a major contributor to the Third Reich’s Arabic language propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. In the process, his speeches and essays of the 1930s and 1940s became canonical texts of the tradition of Islamism and were distributed in thousands of print editions and to hundreds of thousands of listeners through Arabic language radio broadcasts of the Nazi regime. In one of the successor trials in Nuremberg after World War II, Otto Dietrich, Nazi Germany’s Reich Press Chief was indicted and convicted for crimes against humanity due to his role in the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns.8 Husseini’s key role in producing Arabic language anti-Semitic propaganda could have served as the basis of a similar indictment. In 1946-1947, the United States delivered 3,914 persons for trial to sixteen European countries, two-thirds to France and Poland.9 Husseini was not among them.

In June 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) examined the willingness of Arab governments to bring Husseini and other Arab collaborators to trial. It concluded that “in the Near East the popular attitude toward the trial of war criminals is one of apathy. As a result of the general Near Eastern feeling of hostility to the imperialism of certain Allied powers, there is a tendency to sympathize with rather than condemn those who have aided the Axis.”10 Therefore, it was not likely that an Arab country would have put him on trial while Britain, France and Yugoslavia (where he played a role in organizing a Bosnian SS Division) declined to do so. Had such a trial taken place, the centrality of Husseini’s role in spreading anti-Jewish hatred and his open appeals for murdering Jews in the Middle East would have become better known to a global audience. His role in Nazi propaganda alone would have justified indictment in Nuremburg either as a crime against humanity or under the terms of the incitement clause of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.11

In June 1947, American intelligence officials reported that Husseini “promised to produce documents disproving his ‘alleged pro-Axis activities as claimed by the Jews and proving his innocence,’ but he never did so. To neutralize any U.S. effort to pursue him as a war criminal, al-Hussaini lied by claiming he had ‘never spoken against America’ in his Berlin radio talks.”12 Neither the United States nor Great Britain indicted him. The government of Yugoslavia, which could have indicted him for his role in helping to form the Bosnian SS Division, also declined to press charges. In the absence of a trial, Husseini and his apologists have had an easier time obscuring his record of collaboration with Nazi Germany or excusing or misrepresenting it as desperate opportunism rather than ideological conviction. It was not until 2009 and the publication of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab Worldthat the extensive record of his most important collaboration with the Nazis became adequately known. Among much else, that record also confirms that beginning in the 1930s, Husseini’s efforts to make the Arab-Israeli clash also a Muslim-Jewish clash included a focus on supposed Zionist designs on the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. If the same standards were applied to Husseini as to Dietrich, the former’s role in Nazi Germany should have led to an indictment and a trial for crimes against humanity and incitement to the newly named crime of genocide.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

The Mufti’s Importance as a Regional Leader and Axis Propagandist​

As the scholarship on Husseini has established, and as Schwanitz and Rubin remind us, the Mufti’s primary contacts in Berlin were with officials in the German Foreign Ministry including Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop, the Ministry’s Foreign Propaganda Office as well as with Heinrich Himmler and officials in the SS Reich Security Main Office.39 Yet, as the major speeches he gave in 1942 and 1943 indicate, the Mufti’s importance to the Third Reich in these years lay primarily in his contribution to Nazi propaganda policy toward North Africa and the Middle East, the region he cared and knew most about. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World draws upon German archives and on the files of the United States Department of State and US intelligence agencies to present the most extensive documentation available about the vast Arabic language propaganda radio broadcasts and printed leaflets that the Nazi regime sent to the Arab societies during World War II. Husseini played a central role in those broadcasts both through his occasional broadcasts on the radio himself and through his influence on the texts of other broadcasts. At that time, he became internationally famous for his incitement on the radio to “kill the Jews” in the summer of 1942 as Rommel’s Afrika Korps threatened to overwhelm the British at El Alamein, occupy Egypt and capture the Jews of pre-state Palestine, and again, in 1944. On March 1, 1944, in response to support in the United States Congress for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Husseini made the following statement in Arabic on a Berlin radio broadcast.

The wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clearer, and there remains no doubt that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400,000,000 Arabs oppose this criminal American involvement…Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor, God is with you.”(emphasis in original)40

With statements such as these, Husseini joined Goebbels as one of the first political actors to use means of mass electronic communications to support genocide. Article III, Clause D of the United Nations 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” stated that “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” was included as part of the crime that would be subject to indictment. Under those terms, Husseini’s appeals to “kill the Jews” should have led to his indictment for the crime of genocide. As German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have documented in Nazi Palestine: Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, had the Germans won the Battle of El Alamein, an SS Einsatzgruppe was prepared to come to Egypt to carry out mass murders with techniques that had been perfected on the Eastern Front in Europe.41Husseini and his unnamed colleagues working on Nazi Germany’s Arabic broadcasts in the summer of 1942 were cheering the Germans on from Berlin and urging Arabs to support the Axis forces as liberators from Britain protectors and against the Jews.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

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[Sixties Fan]

In 2002, in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 carried out by an Al Qaeda cell based in Hamburg, German political scientist Mathias Kuentzel published Djihad und Judenhaß: Über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg. In 2007 it appeared in English under the title Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11.[xlii] Küntzel draws upon German archives to reveal the importance of Nazi Germany’s Arabic short wave radio broadcasts to North Africa and the Middle East. In light of that finding, I decided to examine the files of the American Embassy in wartime Cairo to find possible further evidence about what the Nazis were saying to Arab audiences. It was the renewed interest in the link between radical Islam and terror in the aftermath of 9/11 that led to revival of scholarly examination of Nazi Germany’s efforts to influence Arab opinion during World War II and the Holocaust. That is the reason why scholars of modern German history gained access to some of the most important documents of the political career of Haj Amin-al Husseini only in 2007.

Until the publication of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World in 2009, evidence of Husseini’s most important activity in Nazi Berlin remained fragmentary and incomplete. That work draws partly on several thousand pages of English translations of Nazi Germany’s Arabic language broadcasts. From 1941 to 1944, Alexander Kirk, Ambassador of the United States in Cairo, sent weekly reports about “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” to Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington. In 1944 and 1945, Kirk’s successor Pinckney Tuck continued to do so. It is regrettable that these translations of then famous public broadcasts remained classified until 1977. The transcripts of the “Axis Broadcast in Arabic” document the depth and passion that Husseini and his fellow collaborating Arab exiles brought to Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda. These documents are inconvenient evidence for those who view the Arab anti-Zionist campaigns since the 1930s primarily as expressions of a global, leftist anti-colonial campaign and who wish to deny or obscure elements of continuity and cultural affinity with the Nazi hatreds they reveal. The texts of “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” expose Husseini along with unnamed Arabic-speaking broadcasters as profoundly reactionary figures. In the early years of the Cold War, as the attention of the United States and Western Europe turned toward the containment of Communism and insuring regular supplies of oil from the Arab states, Husseini and other Arabs who collaborated with the Nazis were able to avoid punishment for their role in inciting others to kill Jews during World War II either under the terms of the Nuremberg trials or the UN Genocide Convention.

As British historian David Motadel recently has shown in his important work, Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, Husseini and other Muslim clerics did play an important role in German policy in Europe but not by exerting an influence on Holocaust decision-making. Instead, his primary focus in Europe was to recruit imams who preached to the tens of thousands of Muslims who fought along with the Wehrmacht, especially on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. He was one of a number of Muslim leaders who contributed to what Motadel calls “the Third Reich’s pro-Islamic stance” and the related efforts of the German military and the SS to mobilize Muslims on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union and the Jews.43

Motadel writes that the previous

biographical research on the Mufti tends to overestimate his influence in Berlin. In the end, his impact was strictly limited. His plan to gain concrete concessions and to secure guarantees for Arab and Palestinian independence—his main concern—failed. His proposals were successful only insofar as they coincided with German interests. The most dramatic example was his intervention to hinder the emigration of Jews from Germany’s southeastern European satellite states to Palestine. Instead of putting the Mufti at the center of the narrative, it seems more reasonable to see him as part of a more general German policy directed toward the Islamic world. German officials used him as a propaganda figure when circumstances necessitated. He received a monthly salary of no less than 90,000 Reichmarks and was provided with several residences for himself and his entourage.44

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

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[Sixties Fan]

The enormous size of Husseini’s monthly salary indicates the importance the Nazi regime attached to him and his entourage. 90,000 Reichmarks a month was a fortune at the time. In his study of the Nazi economy, Adam Tooze writes that in 1936 “62 percent of all German taxpayers reported annual incomes of less than 1,500 Reichmarks.” Another 21 per cent reported annual incomes of between 1,500 and 2,400 Reichmarks. “Only 17 percent of all taxpayers recorded incomes of more than 2,400 Reichmarks, or 50 Reichmarks per week.”45 A monthly salary of 90,000 Reichmarks was paid only to the very wealthiest persons in the German economy. It was designed to support both Husseini’s luxurious life-style as well as his considerable political entourage. While Husseini’s influence on Nazi decision-making was limited, his importance to the Nazi regime was considerable.

On December 18, 1942, the German Foreign Office chose Husseini to deliver the main address at a ceremony to inaugurate the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in the center of Berlin. It had been inactive for several years and was reopened with support from and control by the German Foreign Office. Husseini’s speech was approved by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. It echoed the themes he had expressed in Bludan, combined with themes of Nazi propaganda. It was broadcast both in German (in German-speaking Europe) and in Arabic across North Africa and the Middle East. The German press also gave it prominent coverage.46 He repeated the core theme of Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, namely that the Jews were responsible for starting World War II.47 “This war, which has been unleashed by world Judaism, offers Muslims the best opportunity to free themselves from persecution and oppression, if they capitalize on this opportunity properly. Such an opportunity will not arise again for a very long time.” As was the case in his address in Syria in 1937, he drew heavily on his interpretation of the religion of Islam to fan hatred of the Jews, a “labor of selected tradition,” as follows:

Among the most bitter enemies of the Muslims, who from ancient times have shown them enmity and met them everywhere constantly with perfidy and cunning, are the Jews and their accomplices…The holy Qur’an and the life story of the Prophet are full of evidence of Jewish lack of character and their malicious, mendacious and treacherous behavior, which completely suffices to warn Muslims of their ever-constant, severe threat and enmity until the end of all days. And as the Jews were in the lifetime of the great Prophet, so they have remained throughout all ages, conniving and full of hatred toward the Muslim, wherever an opportunity offered itself to them.48

Husseini added denunciations of Britain and the United States for invading Muslim lands in North Africa and the Bolsheviks for persecuting Muslims. This key text is yet another example not of Nazism’s influence on Husseini but of the commonality of interests and ideology that brought them together despite their very different cultural starting points. Ribbentrop approved the text because Husseini’s own message about the Jews coincided with that of the Nazi regime.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

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[Sixties Fan]

On November 5, 1943, again speaking at the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, Husseini delivered another version of the Bludan speech. He did so on the occasion of “Balfour Day,” marked to denounce the Balfour Declaration. The Nazis again distributed the speech in German and broadcast it on the radio in German in Germany and in Arabic abroad. The Americans in the US Embassy in Cairo recorded it.49 His Balfour Day speech in Berlin became another of the canonical texts of the Islamist tradition, but again to a far larger German and global audience than the 400 listeners in Bludan, Syria.

The Mufti again expresses his hatred of the Jews and the British for helping the Zionists. The Jews, he said, had tormented the world for ages, and have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. “They lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals yet still demand the rights of local inhabitants. All of this brought the hostility of the world down on them and nourished the Jews’ hatred against all peoples that had been burning for two thousand years.” He states that “God’s anger and the curse on the Jews mentioned in the Holy Koran” was due to the Jews’ supposed awful characteristics. The Jews had “tormented the world for ages [,] have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: ‘You will find that those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.’ They tried to poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs and Muslims.”50

As in the Bludan text, the Mufti asserted that the actions of contemporary Jews and Zionists in the Twentieth Century reflect the supposed long-standing Jewish hatred of Muslims. The Jews were “the driving forces of the destruction of the regime of the Islamic Caliphate” in the Middle East. They wanted to seize Islamic holy sites, including the Al Aqsa Mosque and “to build a temple on its ruins.” He claimed that many “official documents and statements of responsible Jewish leaders,” none of whom he cited, confirmed such plans.51

Though a Jewish state in Palestine would be a great danger for all of humanity, it would be even more dangerous and important for Arabs and Muslims. Such a state would be a barrier between the Arab-Islamic countries in Asia and those of Africa. It is a bloody stab in the heart of the Arab fatherland! The establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine would subject the Arab countries and all the countries of the Middle East to the danger of Jewish economic exploitation and to the Jewish world conspiracy.52

Husseini then refers again to “secret Zionist documents” which he does not cite.

They had proven that the Kingdom of Israel would encompass the space between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. In addition to Palestine [such a kingdom would include] Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, a part of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom, and a part of the Egyptian Kingdom. The Jews place the holy sites of the Hadj in greatest danger and rob the Arab and Islam of the fruits of their land, which they have defended for thirteen centuries with the blood of their martyrs.53

Husseini claimed that the establishment of a Jewish state would endanger not only the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem but also the holy sites of Hajj in Saudi Arabia. In so doing, as he had in Bludan in 1937, Husseini connects the secular, political conflict over territory to a theological clash between Islam and the Jews. He links the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine to a religious conflict between the million or so Jews and hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. He and his fellow exiles informed Arab listeners that a victory for the Allies was a victory for the Jews and defeat for the Arabs. Some broadcasts went so far as to blame Zionism as the cause of World War II.54 They offer clear evidence of the connection between Husseini’s understanding of Islam to his uncompromising enmity to Zionism and the State of Israel.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust

From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism. - Jeffrey Herf - JPSR - Jerusalem Center

jcpa.org