These sources are vehemently disputed by most serious scholars.
Advertisement
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is, to put it gently, a theatrical speaker.
Kirby declined to characterize Netanyahu’s comments as potentially inciting, but he said scholarly evidence on the Holocaust does not support the prime minister’s view.
There’s no video or audio, not even a transcript, that can definitively prove Netanyahu’s account of the conversation between Hitler and Husseini, who as grand mufti oversaw Muslim sites in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu’s statement came in an address to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, in which he described a 1941 meeting between former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler – who, Netanyahu said, “didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews”. Haaretz said Netanyahu was “widely ridiculed”.
Indeed, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated with Nazi Germany, lived in Berlin since 1941 and was a rabid anti-Semite. If anything, they said it was the Nazis who were trying to use al-Husseini for their own propaganda interests and that Hitler didn’t need any outside inspiration. Even Netanyahu’s defence minister, close ally Moshe Yaalon, said the prime minister had got it wrong. Details of the Hitler-mufti pact, presented against the mufti in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, state that Hitler would exterminate the Jews in Europe, while the mufti would enlist Nazi aid to exterminate Jews in Palestine. He has repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. “He considered this as a comfortable solution for the Palestine problem”.
While there is no dispute that the mufti did indeed meet Hitler, historians say it was well after the Final Solution began.
This is not the first time Netanyahu has made made such a claim.
“He told the Nazis to prevent the fleeing of Jews from Europe and he supported the final solution”, insisted Netanyahu.
Mr Netanyahu is right not to allow the world to ignore a vicious stream of antisemitism that has always been rife within what is risibly called the “Arab world” but which extends to non-Arab Muslims too, from Iran to Pakistan.
Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s preeminent Holocaust scholar, is a prominent case in point. “So what should I do with them?” he asked. I doubt it, but it’s doesn’t matter.
“The final goal must be the removal of Jews”, Hitler wrote, according to the letter found in the Nazi Archives in Nuremberg and now at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
“This is a risky historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimises the Holocaust, Nazism and…”
Palestinian officials accused Netanyahu of distorting history.
There are a few scholars who are willing to believe Wisliceny’s testimony.
Details of the meeting between al-Husseini and Hitler are sketchy.
By then, Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews were already well under way. “In other ways, the mufti contributed actively to the Holocaust”. But Hitler met the Mufti in November 1941. “Rubin and Schwanitz are historians with a political agenda: They want to show that eliminationist anti-Semitism animates the Islamic Middle East, and so they paint al-Husaini as so devilishly anti-Semitic that he can contend with Hitler himself”.
Bauer, the Israeli Holocaust historian, echoed the critique that the book makes unconvincing assertions based on “unreliable sources”.
Holocaust experts and survivors slammed Netanyahu’s comments as historically inaccurate and serving the interests of Holocaust deniers by lessening the responsibility of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Advertisement
As Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer pointed out on Twitter, Netanyahu’s controversial statement whitewashed Hitler to pin the blame of the holocaust on the Palestinian leader. Despite having converted, they secretly lived a Jewish life – what scholars call Judaizing.
