In light of this insecurity, 73 per cent said they were unsatisfied with Netanyahu’s performance.
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Born in the mid-1890s, and appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 (Grand Mufti in 1922), Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the most prominent nationalist Arab figures in Palestine during the time of the British Mandate. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them'”.
Unprecedented in the American media was an editorial, last Friday, in The New York Times that blasted Netanyahu’s “Holocaust blunder”, which claimed that Huseini “persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe”, calling it “outrageous”.
Netanyahu walked back the statement, saying he had “no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry”.
Netanyahu has applied in a slightly different way to his own community the technique of equating an entire ethnically or religiously defined people with something much narrower. In reality, they more often than not become worst enemies.
There can be no doubt he spoke too loosely.
How much the Mufti had to do with Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question is unfortunately a diversion from the basic issue.
While Nazi policy had officially encouraged Jewish emigration – albeit after depriving them of their property – this had never been a realistic option for the solution of the “Jewish question” after the outbreak of World War II.
All in all, the Einsatzgruppen killed more than one million Jews (plus others, such as Roma).
Rubin and Schwanitz make clear that the November 1941 meeting between Hitler and Husseini merely continued a dialogue that had started earlier that year about the mufti’s opposition to Hitler’s deportation of European Jews. After Hitler promised al-Husaini on March 11 to do so, Germany’s expulsion of the Jews was impossible and only mass murder remained. There have been a few scholarly attempts exploring the role of al-Husseiny that Netanyahu might feel support his claim, among them most recently by Middle East scholars Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz in their book Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East.
“But the specific final decision had not yet been taken”.
“To say Hitler was influenced by the mufti is far from the truth”, said Hebrew University professor Moshe Maoz. “Behind closed doors, Hitler promised al-Husaini that Arab aspirations would be fulfilled”. By 1936, he was courting the Nazis for arms and money. Even historical allies of Israel couldn’t assimilate Mr Netanyahu’s comments despite their own hostility towards Palestinians, Moqalled wrote. The Mufti came to Berlin with Jewish blood on his hands, a fact barely mentioned in the discussion of the Mufti’s role in the Holocaust.
Evidence that the mufti played a key role in the Holocaust was provided at the Nuremberg Tribunal by Eichmann’s close associate in the extermination program, Dieter Wisliceny. “The mufti’s plan was to build a huge Auschwitz-like crematorium in the Dotan Valley, near Nablus, to which Jews from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and North Africa would be imprisoned and exterminated, just like the Jews in the death camps in Europe”.
This was corroborated at the tribunal by two witnesses, Andrej Steiner and Rudolf Kasztner, who confirmed that Wisliceny had talked about Husseini in these terms during the war.
Adding to Netanyahu’s diminished status has been the reported sense of insecurity within Israel, revealed in the result of a survey by Midgam for Israel’s Chanel 2 television.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s bit of revisionist history about the origins of the Holocaust certainly deserves the outraged response it got this week.
That Husseini met Hitler and had relations with the Nazis is no secret.
It also involves a good deal of Holocaust denial.
According to Israel Hayom, Idrisi told Kanaan – whose findings were the basis for an article that appeared in Haaretz in 1970 – that the mufti “was gearing to enter Jerusalem at the head of the Muslim Arab Legion squadron he’d created for the Third Reich”.
It was a private conversation, but we know about it because it was accidentally broadcast to journalists. Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctoral thesis denied the Holocaust, hero-worships Husseini. The Palestinians long ago declared war on the Jews. The Palestinian cause likewise fuses Islamist and Nazi ambitions with Soviet psychological warfare.
In other words, through decades of abuse and the slow ethnic cleansing of simply making life unlivable, there are other ways to try to disappear a people than killing them at once, and Israel has for almost 70 years been pursuing policies meant to do just that because they believe all of the land where Palestinians have lived for generations belongs to Jews, based on a thousands-year-old claim in the Bible.
And so Netanyahu is using a similar strategy against the Palestinians.
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Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).
