Haj Amin al-Hussein (Left) in conference with Adolf Hitler
Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments made before
a gathering at the 37th Zionist Congress of the World Zionist Organisation
on October 20th which effectively blamed the Palestinian nationalist
leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem for instigating the Holocaust
have been met with widespread incredulity. The Israeli prime minister has been alternately
ridiculed and condemned.
This is not surprising since Netanyahu
was attempting to twist the largely accepted narrative of the development of the holocaust in order to suit the contemporary agenda of demonizing the cause for
Palestinian self-determination as well as suggesting a malignant link between
Islam and fascist-Nazi ideology.
But while Netanyahu’s comments have led
to plausible accusations of his falling foul of what often is referred to as
‘holocaust denial’, they also invite an examination of Zionism’s collaborations
and even affinities with fascist movements and the Hitlerian regime itself.
His comments also provide insight into
the mindset of the man as well as offering clues as to how he might see an
ultimate resolution of the seemingly intractable conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians.
Benjamin
Netanyahu’s words, delivered in his distinctive Philadelphian drawl, were
enunciated with the now familiar casual intonation. But the
conversational-style of oratory did not disguise the import of the point that
he was attempting to get across.
Beginning
with a reference to the Mufti’s alleged role in directing violence against
Jewish settlers in British-ruled Palestine, Netanyahu, said that al-Husseini
had been sought for “war crimes in the Nuremberg Trials because he 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 come (to Palestine).” “So what should I do with them?”
he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
What
Netanyahu was claiming was that but for the intervention of the Palestinian
Mufti, the Nazi’s would not have had the idea to physically eliminate the Jews.
This
astounding thesis was asserted by Netanyahu as historical fact. It is astonishing
given Netanyahu’s light treatment of Adolf Hitler’s role in the genesis of what
many historians believe to be the planned extermination of European Jewry.
A
question arises. If any other person had presented such a thesis before the
public in a published book, an academic paper or in a speech at a public
gathering, would they be subjected to criminal investigation in the
jurisdictions of a number of Western European countries for an egregious
instance of holocaust revisionism?
There
are, of course, those such as the writer David Irving, prosecuted and convicted
in Austria of holocaust denial laws, who claim that Hitler himself had no hand
in any planned extermination of Europe’s Jews. There is, he argues, no signed
official document containing Hitler’s personal order to embark on the
systematic murder of Jews.
Netanyahu,
himself the son of a renowned historian, is compromised in terms of the
chronology that he presents. He may need to be reminded of two key speeches
given by Hitler; one in 1939, and the other in 1941.
Standing
before the Reichstag in January of 1939, Hitler declared that if what he termed
as “international finance Jewry” were to plunge the nations of Europe into
another war, the result would not be what he termed the “Bolshevization” of
Europe and thereby the “victory of Jewry”, it would, he predicted, lead to the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
The
word ‘annihilation’, in German, ‘Vernichtung’, was again used by Hitler in a
speech two years later before an audience at Berlin’s Sportpalast. Delivered in
his characteristic firebrand style, Hitler stated that the war would not end as
the “Jews imagined”, that is, in the extermination of the European Aryan
peoples because others would not “bleed to death alone”. There would, he
exploded, be an application of the ancient Jewish law: “Auge um auge, Zahn um
zahn!” Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. He explicitly declared that the resulting war would lead to the
annihilation of Jewry.
The first speech occurred in 1939 before the Mufti met Hitler in November of 1941, and there is no evidence that the latter, effectively a restatement of the former, was prompted by the meeting.
While Netanyahu seeks to delegitimize the Palestinian cause by association with Nazism, the history of the Zionist movement has not been without controversial connections with both Fascism and Nazism.
Indeed,
Netanyahu as a die-hard Zionist with antecedents in the movement will need no
reminder of the fact that his father, Benzion, served as the personal secretary
of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader of the Zionist Revisionist movement,
who forged ideological links with the Italian fascist party led by Benito
Mussolini.
His
Betar Movement, a youth wing of the revisionist Zionists, established the Betar
Naval Academy in the Italian port city of Civitavecchia in 1934. That Betar
operated along a similar ideological construct is not in doubt. The following
appeared in Bollettino del Consorzio
Scuole Profesionali per la Maestranza Martima, the official publication of
the Italian professional maritime schools:
In
agreement of all the relevant authorities it has been confirmed that the views
and the political and social inclinations of the revisionists are known and
that they are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine. Therefore, as
our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.
Netanyahu
may or may not appreciate the reminder that Zionists entered into a pact with
Adolf Hitler’s regime via the Ha’avara Agreement of August 1933. Also known as
the ‘Transfer Agreement’, it was opposed by the vast majority of world Jewry
who at the time favoured an economic boycott of Germany.
The
agreement was predicated on the mutual desire of both Nazi party and Jewish
Zionists to rid Germany of its Jewish population. A German Jew wishing to
immigrate to Palestine would deposit money into a specified German bank
account. These funds would then be used to buy German goods for export, usually
to Palestine. The final phase of the transaction would have the Jewish émigré receiving
payment for the goods they had previously purchased after their final sale.
And
would Netanyahu need reminding of Avraham Stern’s proposed alliance with the
Nazis during the Second World War? While most Zionists suspended hostilities
against the British who they perceived as frustrating their efforts to
establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the leader of Lohamei Herut Yisrael had the objective of forging a relationship
with the Hitler government in order to give birth to what he termed a
Volkish-national Hebrium. This would establish, he hoped, “the historical
Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis”.
Both
Jabotinsky and Stern serve as ideological heirs of the modern Likud Party which
Netanyahu leads. Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of Likud was a key figure in
the ‘Stern Gang’ which waged a war of terror against both British and Arabs.
Netanyahu’s
ideological antecedents also includes the figure of Menachem Begin. Begin, like
Shamir a former leader of Likud, was the founder of the Herut Party in 1948. It
was a development which prompted a group of far-sighted Jewish academics
including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt to write an open letter to the New York Times declaring that Israel
would eventually head down a path which legitimized “ultra-nationalism,
religious mysticism and racial superiority.”
This
prophecy of sorts is arguably not far behind the prevailing mood of
contemporary Israel which has lurched to the political Right during Netanyahu’s
terms as prime minister. Netanyahu himself has no problem declaring that the
phenomenon of African migrants, who are referred to as ‘infiltrators’,
threatened Israel’s “social fabric” and needed to be expelled.
He was
also clearly observed to be pandering to anti-Arab sentiment during the Israeli
general election last March when he claimed that “Arab voters are heading to
the polling stations in droves”.
Netanyahu’s
assertions regarding the Mufti’s meeting with Hitler fall into a similar hue.
His comments again show the opportunism he is apt at indulging. His distortion
of history fits into Nicolas Sarkozy’s opinion, confided to US President Barack
Obama, that he is a “liar”.
Netanyahu
continually incites hatred for Palestinians and solicits perpetual gentile
guilt for the tragedy suffered by the Jewish people in the middle part of the 20th
Century.
While
Netanyahu’s comments fit into a narrative of Islam and fascism continually spun
by those wishing to promote the idea of ‘Islamo-Fascism’, they are ultimately
aimed at discrediting Palestinian hopes of securing a state of their own.
The
two-state solution to the enduring conflict remains as intractable as it has
ever been. The increase in Jewish settler communities in the West Bank dampens
any chances that a Palestinian state would ever be allowed to exist. The belief
that the West Bank is part of Eretz Israel; component parts of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Judah and Israel that today are referred to as Judea and Samaria, is not limited to religious
Jews.
By
seeking to single out a Palestinian nationalist figure as the author of the
Jewish holocaust, Netanyahu is attempting to indoctrinate the world with the idea
that the Jewish state can never exist side-by-side with a Palestinian one.
It
is part and parcel of preparing the ground for the solution which Netanyahu
will not publicly disclose; namely that continued Israeli actions of land
acquisition, settler colonisation, economic strangulation as well as punitive
military expeditions will convince the Palestinians of the utter hopelessness of
their situation and force them to migrate out of the territories in which they reside.
Failing
this and at the prompting of some future extraordinary conflict, it is not
difficult to imagine that the likes of Netanyahu would use the cover of such
crisis to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians begun in 1948, by purging
the inhabitants en masse from the West Bank.
Before
his death in 1940, Jabotinsky claimed that “the world has become accustomed to
the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them”, adding later that “Hitler
–as odious as he is to us- has given this idea a good name in the world.”
From
an historical perspective, the leaders of Zionism have been remarkably shrewd
at masking their true intentions which are then revealed at later, opportune
moments.
For
instance, a few days after the conclusion of the inaugural Zionist Congress held in at the end of
August of 1897 in Basel Switzerland, the president of the congress and the man
seen as the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, recorded
the following in his diary:
Were
I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against
pronouncing publicly – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.
If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five
years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.
Chaim
Weizmann, who later would become the first president of the Israeli state, once
assured an Arab leader that “the Jews did not propose to set up a government of
their own but wished to work under British protection to colonize and develop Palestine
without encroaching on any legitimate interests.”
Benzion
Netanyahu once admitted that his son had no genuine intention of offering
Palestinian leaders any conditions they would feel able to accept as a
pre-condition to the establishment of a state. Indeed, when earlier this year
Netanyahu had stated, “If I am elected, there will be no Palestinian state”, he
was admitting what he and his predecessors of every political stripe knew to be
the case but would not utter in public.
His
support for the proposition that Israel adopt a basic law designating it as “the
nation-state of the Jewish people” offered clarification of his true goals and
intentions.
Severe
criticism of Netanyahu, while tolerated over the years by many Israelis and
Jews as somewhat inevitable because of the perception of arrogance in his
personal style and complex political personality, is nonetheless beginning to
be seen in these times of rising anti-Israel sentiments, by an increasing
number of Israelis and Jews as a convenient tool by which anti-Semites may
express their views.
Yet,
many of his supporters would be hard pressed to defend the matter of his
historical revision. Not if, as some including Israeli opposition leader Isaac
Herzog have claimed that his words effectively gave succour to ‘holocaust
deniers’.
The
statement issued by Saeb Erekat, the Secretary General of the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation, sums things up fairly accurately:
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.
A
sad day indeed, but also one symptom of a political philosophy that thrives on
the projection of victimhood, the perpetuating of Gentile guilt and which continues
to harbour its long-term aim of replacing what had been the land of Palestine
with a purely Jewish state.
(C)
Adeyinka Makinde (2015)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
