Why is Benjamin Netanyahu trying to whitewash Hitler?

Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly asserted that Adolf Hitler had no intention of exterminating Europe’s Jews until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it.

The Israeli prime minister’s attempt to whitewash Hitler and lay the blame for the Holocaust at the door of Palestinians signals a major escalation of his incitement against and demonization of the people living under his country’s military and settler-colonial rule.

It also involves a good deal of Holocaust denial.

In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Netanyahu asserted that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to carry out the killings of 6 million Jews.

Al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest clerical authority dealing with religious issues pertaining to the Muslim community and holy sites during the 1920s and ‘30s, when Palestine was under British rule.

He was appointed to the role by Herbert Samuel, the avowed Zionist who was the first British High Commissioner of Palestine.

In the video above, Netanyahu claims that al-Husseini “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 all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. ‘Burn them!’”

There is no record of such a conversation whatsoever, and Netanyahu provides no evidence that it ever took place.

The Mufti did meet Hitler, once, but their 95-minute conversation took place on 28 November 1941. Husseini used it to try to secure the Führer’s support for Arab independence, as historian Philip Mattar explains in his book The Mufti of Jerusalem.

By then, Hitler’s plans to exterminate the Jews were already well under way.

Hitler’s orders

In her classic history The War Against the Jews, Lucy Davidowicz writes about the preparations among Hitler’s top lieutenants to carry out the genocide: “Sometime during that eventful summer of 1941, perhaps even as early as May, Himmler summoned Höss to Berlin and, in privacy, told him ‘that the Führer had given the order for a Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ and that ‘we, the SS, must carry out the order.’”

She adds: “In the late summer of 1941, addressing the assembled men of the Einsatzkommandos at Nikolayev, he [Himmler] ‘repeated to them the liquidation order, and pointed out that the leaders and men who were taking part in the liquidation bore no personal responsibility for the execution of this order. The responsibility was his alone, and the Führer’s.’”

Davidowicz also explains that “In the summer of 1941, a new enterprise was launched – the construction of the Vernichtungslager – the annihilation camp. Two civilians from Hamburg came to Auschwitz that summer to teach the staff how to handle Zyklon B, and in September, in the notorious Block 11, the first gassings were carried out on 250 patients from the hospital and on 600 Russian prisoners of war, probably ‘Communists’ and Jews …”

According to Netanyahu’s fabricated – and Holocaust denialist – version of history, none of this could have happened. It was all the Mufti’s idea!

The Mufti in Zionist propaganda

Why would Netanyahu bring up the Mufti now and in the process whitewash Hitler?

The bogus claim that the Mufti had to persuade reluctant Nazis to kill Jews has been pushed by other anti-Palestinian propagandists, notably retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.

As Columbia University professor Joseph Massad notes in his 2006 book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, Haj Amin al-Husseini has long been a favorite theme of Zionist and Israeli propaganda.

Husseini “provided the Israelis with their best propaganda linking the Palestinians with the Nazis and European anti-Semitism,” Massad observes.

The Mufti fled British persecution and went to Germany during the war years.

Massad writes that al-Husseini “attempted to obtain promises from the Germans that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Documents that the Jewish Agency produced in 1946 purporting to show that the Mufti had a role in the extermination of Jews did no such thing; the only thing these unsigned letters by the Mufti showed was his opposition to Nazi Germany’s and Romania’s allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine.”

Yet, he adds, “the Mufti continues to be represented by Israeli propagandists as having participated in the extermination of European Jews.”

Citing Peter Novick, the University of Chicago history professor who authored The Holocaust in American Life, Massad notes that in the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, sponsored by Israel’s official memorial Yad Vashem, “the article on the Mufti is twice as long as the articles on [top Nazi officials] Goebbels and Göring and longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined.”

The entry on Hitler himself is only slightly longer than the one on Husseini.

In a 2012 article for Al Jazeera, Massad explains that “Zionism would begin to rewrite the Palestinian struggle against Jewish colonization not as an anti-colonial struggle but as an anti-Semitic project.”

Keystone of Zionist mythology

The story of the Mufti has thus become a keystone for the Zionist version of Palestinian history, which leaves out a basic fact: the Zionist movement’s infamous agreement with Hitler’s regime as early as 1933 .

The so-called Transfer Agreement facilitated the emigration of German Jews to Palestine and broke the international boycott of German goods launched by American Jews.

Massad explains: “Despairing from convincing Britain to stop its support of the Zionist colonial project and horrified by the Zionist-Nazi collaboration that strengthened the Zionist theft of Palestine further, the Palestinian elitist and conservative leader Haj Amin al-Husseini (who initially opposed the Palestinian peasant revolt of 1936 against Zionist colonization) sought relations with the Nazis to convince them to halt their support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, which they had promoted through the Transfer Agreement with the Zionists in 1933.”

Indeed, the Mufti would begin diplomatic contacts with the Nazis in the middle of 1937, four years after the Nazi-Zionist co-operation had started.

Ironically, Massad adds, “It was the very same Zionist collaborators with the Nazis who would later vilify al-Husseini, beginning in the 1950s to the present, as a Hitlerite of genocidal proportions, even though his limited role ended up being one of propagandizing on behalf of the Nazis to East European and Soviet Muslims on the radio.”

It should be kept in mind that many Third World nationalist movements colonized by the British were also sympathetic to the Nazis, including Indian nationalists. This was primarily based on the Nazis’ enmity toward their British colonizers, and not based on any affinity with the Nazis’ racialist ideology. It was certainly on this basis that India’s Congress Party opposed the British declaration of war on Germany, as Perry Anderson notes in The Indian Ideology.

Indeed, the Mufti made it clear to the Germans as well as to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in Italy, as Mattar states, that he sought “full independence for all parts of the Arab world and the rescue of Palestine from British imperialism and Zionism. He stressed that the struggle against the Jews was not of a religious nature, but for Palestinian existence and for an independent Palestine.”

That Husseini met Hitler and had relations with the Nazis is no secret. But the fabrications of Netanyahu and other Zionists should be seen for what they are: an attempt to falsely blame Palestinians for Europe’s genocide of Jews and in the process erase from memory Zionism’s own collaborationist history with Hitler’s genocidal regime.

This vile propaganda can have no other purpose than to further dehumanize Palestinians and justify Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and murder.

Netanyahu’s attempt to blame Palestinians for the Holocaust is itself a form of genocidal incitement.




Uri Avnery: (Adolf Hitler, who took his racism seriously, applied it to all Semites.
He could not stand Arabs either. Contrary to legend, he disliked the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled to Germany.
After meeting him once for a photo-opportunity arranged by the Nazi
propaganda machine, he never agreed to meet him again.)

Meanwhile, it is well documented that the Zionists are the ones who collaborated with the Nazis:

1- Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany by Faris Yahya
Second Printing, Palestine Distribution Centre, Vancouver, Canada, October, 1980
(Original Printing: Palestine Research Center, Beirut, Lebanon, January 1978)

2- 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis
by Lenni Brenner (Editor)/ Paperback/ September 2009

Internet Resources:

3- Zionism in the Age of Dictators http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran...
Copyright 1983 by Lenni Brenner

4- The Holocaust Victims Accuse
Copyright1977 by Reb Moshe Shonfeld


I would urge a word of caution regarding the last book - the Holocaust Victims Accuse. It is unreliable and it consciously distorts many episodes, not least the record of Rabbi Weissmandel. It also allows its anti-communism to blind it.

I also wrote a critique of Lenni Brenner's book for the Journal of Holy Land Studies a year ago http://www.euppublishing.com/d...

In the forthcoming issue of the renamed Journal of Holy Land and Palestinian Studies there is a debate between Lenni & myself concerning this critique.

I also wrote a series of 4 articles for Weekly Worker on the issue of Nazi-Zionist collaboration.



A good book, which is downloadable free on the Internet is

Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial - A Study of the Factors That Caused the Mistakes Made by the Zionist Movement During the Holocaust by a Zionist,
S. B. Beit Zvi. www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres...

there is also Ben Hecht's Perfidy on the Kasztner trial. The best standard reference book is Raul Hilberg's masterly Destruction of European Jews.


Many thanks for Hanna Kawas' reply.

I would add two additional vital resources:

Lenni Brenner: THE IRON WALL


Brenner's THE IRON WALL is elucidating and easy reading.

Mosse's study is intense but necessary to a comprehension
of the Third Reich. As you are reading, keep believing
"It's more than worth it!" It is. Although you may not
believe in every single point of the late Dr. Mosse,
the information will undoubtedly affect your assessment.
His basic ideas have found their way into many other
sources (eg Brenner's THE IRON WALL) as they
must do.

---Peter Loeb, Boston, M, USA


Another book, in fact 2 books, are
The Third Reich and the Palestine Question and
Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.

Both by Francis Nicosia. He is a pro-Zionist historian from the US and he rejects the idea that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis but the evidence he digs up in various archives suggests otherwise. His research is very thorough although he has a mental block against drawing the appropriate conclusions. E.g. he writes that of the welcome that German Zionism gave to the Hitler regime that:

“So positive was its assessment of the situation that, as early as April 1933, the ZVfD announced its determination to take advantage of the crisis to win over a traditionally assimilationist German Jewry to Zionism” p.146 ZANG

'Some Zionists, he (Friedlander) observes even believed that the Nazi triumph represented, as Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. p.91 ZANG


That’s the great thing about Zionist versions of history: you never quite know what’s going to happen yesterday, as they simply invent things which simply never happened while attempting to expunge the history of actual events.
Netanyahu says al-Husseini was indicted at the Nuremberg war crime trials, which is simply untrue. He also claims he urged Hitler to “burn” the Jews and it was this which prompted the Holocaust. Again, there is absolutely no evidence that any such discussion took place.
However what is an historical fact is that the Zionists entered into negotiations with the National Socialist government in 1933, when the rest of the world was imposing a stringent boycott on the Nazis. The negotiations, which were led by Hayyim Arlosoroff, resulted in the ‘Transfer Agreement’, signed in 1933, whereby goods expropriated from German Jews could be sold by agencies of the Zionist movement with part of the proceeds used for Zionist state-building purposes in Palestine. In other words, the Zionists assisted in and benefitted from the theft by the Nazis of property from Jews in Germany.
Another uncomfortable fact which Zionists prefer to sweep under the carpet is that during the war the Zionist terrorists, the Stern Gang, made contact with both the Nazis and the Italian fascists, seeking their assistance in order to kill British soldiers and civil servants in Palestine and they continued to attack British targets throughout the war, thereby aiding the Nazi war effort. Of course one of the leaders of the Stern Gang who was involved in making contact with the Nazis was Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Prime Minister of Israel.


There is a little confusion about the Transfer Agreement. It wasnt that goods confiscated from German Jews could be sold in Palestine by Zionist organisations but that the wealth of the Jews was converted into what were termed frozen marks, in one of 2 special bank accounts in Germany which were controlled by the Palestine Trust Office Paltreu. It would primarily have consisted of the sales of property liquidated by Nazi decree . The Zionist organisation, Ha'avara Ltd. in Palestine could then use these marks to buy German goods which were then exported to Palestine where they were sold, part of the proceeds (often as little as 20%) going to the people whose proceeds they were. This resulted in the development of whole new industries in Palestine, such as Printing and Brewing.

In addition those benefitting from Ha'avara could take £1,000 out of the country and thus qualify for automatic entry into Palestine. The advantage of Ha'avara for the Nazis was two fold. It meant that German workers were employed on making goods and the Jewish and International Boycott of Nazi Germany was fatally undermined. Although economically it was of little significance to Germany, being a major industrial power, it was of enormous significance to the Zionist economy. Some 60% of capital investment in the Yishuv (Jewish community) economy between 1933 and 1939 came from Ha'avara. It totalled some £100 RM.

The Stern Gang didn't so much make contact with the Nazis to seek their assistance in killing British soldiers etc. but they twice during 1941 offered a military pact with the Nazis. It was spurned by the Nazis but the details were left in documents seized by the Americans in the German Embassy in Istanbul.


Thanks for very interesting details about the Zionist Transfer Agreement. Not sure you're right about the Stern Gang however. For example see Avi Shlaim about Stern Gang's efforts to gain Nazi support for attacks on British personnel in Palestine. Also see Wiki profile of Avraham Stern which states that "In January 1941, Stern attempted to make an agreement with the German Nazi authorities, offering to "actively take part in the war on Germany's side" " i.e. this Zionist group was willing to join with the Nazis in military action against British forces and civilians.


I agree with this in its entirety.

If it's true then Netanyahu should hang his head in shame because it was the Zionists who made Haj al Amin Husseini the Mufti after he came 4th in the election to the post of Grand Mufti in 1921. The British High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel, who had been instrumental in lobbying for the Balfour Declaration, appointed him because the Zionists loved this chauvinist and feudal Arab leader.

The Mufti met Hitler in November 1941 but the final solution began with Operation Barbarossa the previous June when the killing squads, Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos and Order Police, operated in the wake of the Wehrmacht in White Russia and Ukraine. At the beginning of December 1941 the first extermination camp Chelmno had opened and Belzec started in March 1942. Experimentation with murder by gas had taken place in September 1941 in Auschwitz when 850 Russian prisoners of war and Poles had been murdered. So of course it is a lot of nonsense but it is also an attempt to paint the Palestinians as accomplices to the Nazis,, something Yad Vashem also does.

E.g. in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust the Mufti has the second longest entry, longer than Goebbels and Goering combined and only slightly shorter than Hitler's. In fact he was a minor war criminal and the Muslim SS divisions he recruited in Bosnia didn't take part in the deportations of Jews. That was left to the SS and Croatian SS. Indeed so 'bad' was their attitude to the Jewish question that they were sent for 'retraining' to France where they promptly deserted to the Resistance. The only known example of a rebellion amongst the SS. This was primarily because they only joined up because they thought it was a gendarme and as a means of attacking Serb nationalists.


Hitler had as early as Mein Kampf spoken of killing by gas thousands of Jews and in his 'Prophecy' speech on January 30 1939, repeated at least 3 times, he spoke explicitly about annihilating the Jewish race. And Goebbels in his diary made it clear that this wasn't rhetoric.

What led to the final solution was the so-called Euthenasia programme whereby thousands, some estimate over 1/2 million, mentally and physically handicapped Germans were murdered in 6 killing centres in Germany itself (Brandenburg, Hartheim etc.) before the Catholic Bishop Galen of Munster spoke out and Hitler was forced to end it, though it continued as the Wild Euthenasia in the concentration camps.

Zionism is however good at rewriting history though Netanyahu just demonstrates what a pig ignorant racist he is.


Unfortunately, this isn't new. Israeli propaganda is so bent on demonizing Palestinians that even Hitler's genocide can be watered down in the interest of the State. In 2004, Malcolm Hoenlein (of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations) told an audience in Toronto that the Mufti, not Hitler, initiated the idea of murdering Jews, and "Hitler followed the wishes of the Mufti." I've even heard this whopper repeated by other religious Zionists. If you want to go where Israel goes, you've got to check your mind at the door, along with your conscience.

It's true that the Mufti opposed sending more Jews to Palestine, but if that was genocidal, what can be said about all the other countries that barred or limited Jewish immigration during the same period (and had far less to lose than Palestinians did)? And what about Avraham Stern, who openly sought an alliance with the Germans during World War II? Does that make his lieutenant Yitzchak Shamir an author of the Final Solution?

One thing this proves is how little Israeli leaders and apologists really care about Jews. As Norman Finkelstein has said for years, people who make such claims whitewash Nazism and, in the end, foment anti-Semitism as their listeners recoil from the vulgar falsification and manipulation of Jewish suffering by powerful Jews in the service of Israeli expansionism.


In general, this web-site misses the point of what it is attempting to report on, but this piece is a new low. Netanyahu is not, and never would suggest that the grand mufti was the architect of the final solution. Netanyahu is however saying that the grand mufti was not only supportive of hitler's plans, but that he encouraged the killing if all Jews both in Europe and everywhere else - which is true. The "purpose" of Netanyahu's comments are not to "further dehumanize" Palestinians, but to demonstrate a historical precedence within the attitudes of Palestinian leadership towards Jews, and also show distinct commonalities with today's Palestinian leadership.

You won't publish this.


Netanyahu fabricated a conversation between Hitler and the Mufti that never happened and that many established Holocaust historians have denounced. His political purpose is clear: to vilify Palestinians. Of course you are free to defend his Holocaust revisionism.

From The New York Times today:

Prof. Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, called the speech “a lie” and “a disgrace.” Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, a specialist of German history at Hebrew University, said, “With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people that we would call Holocaust deniers.”



This is your web-page, so I cannot tell you what to post on it; I can only comment on what is provided, and even then they are only displayed if you feel they are acceptable.

But in the interest of this nytimes link you provided, it does corroborate that some within Israel contend that what Bibi is saying is tantamount to a new form of Holocaust denial. I disagree. It was a stupid insinuation, and one that is below the office of Prime Minister, but to me, denying the Holocaust has two sinister forms: 1 - denial of the political and military events that took place between 1933 and 1945, in whole or in part, with the expressed purpose of eliminating all Jews of the World, starting in Europe; and 2 - trying to draw distinctions between contemporary people and events to those who participated in the political and militaristic events that began in earnest in 1933 and and culminated with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Such asinine comparisons would include likening the Gaza Strip (in whole or part) to the Warsaw Ghetto, or Bibi to Hitler himself.

It was dumb for Bibi to suggest that the interactions between Hitler and the Grand Mufti were the deciding factors in Hitler's decision to murder Jews, made all the more stupid in saying that Hitler didn't want to do so until these two had chatted about it. Had your commentary discussed that only, I wouldn't have said anything as I would have been in complete agreement. But you have ignored the Grand Mufti's and Hitler's shared vision of a world without Jews, and the fact that he did meet Hitler to discuss their common hatreds as well as to show Hitler support. You also ignored the rest of the video where Bibi not only illustrates how Israel is not undermining the status-quo on the Temple Mount, but that any spurious conspiracy suggesting otherwise stems from an anti-Jewish fanaticism that goes back as far as the aforementioned Grand Mufti.

Again, I doubt you will make this visible.


Your comments indicate that your source material is one-sided and a critical, ethical debate with opposing thinking is unusual.
I would like to point out that an enormous amount of research and cross-checking is quite clearly part of the Electronic Intifada's journalistic work. I have never been able to fault their reporting of events, nor their admirable ethical standards. They are scrupulous in curbing any drift towards, for instance, equating Jews with Zionism, or tendencies in justifiable criticism of Israel's policies with antisemitism.
I think, if you read a bit more widely, you would recognise this yourself.
However, to say that Netanyahu's comments were simply "dumb" is outrageously naive. There are few people with a grain of common sense who would not see Netanyahu as deliberate and dangerous.


It often happens that when Zionist/Israel's PR is being questioned
in the world, Israel NEEDS to highlight once more the European
holocaust which then becomes the prime reason for their
existence (and immunity etc.).

One analyst (Michael Prior) once asked in jest that had there
been no holocaust, would there have been any reason
at all for Israel? (in THE BIBLE AND COLONIALISM)

Thanks again to A.A.

---Peter Loeb, Boston, Mass, US


There was only one meeting between Hitler and the Mufti in November 1941. There is no evidence that the Mufti even knew about the extermination of Jews or the final solution. The Wannsee conference which in essence extended the exterminations from the East to West Europe and which primarily discussed the question of the Mishlinge (mixed-race Jews) did not occur till January 1942, having been postponed because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Chelmno extermination camp started operating on 8th December 1941. Clearly the Mufti's meeting with Hitler had no connection with the final solution. The final solution was a consequence of the T4 Euthenasia programme and war with Russia, not a one-off meeting with Hitler concerning a German declaration in support of Arab independence, which the Mufti never received.

The Mufti didn't know of the final solution till the summer of 1943 when Himmler told him. (Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust p.147). He lobbied against sending Jews to Palestine in the knowledge of what was happening and undoubtedly he was a minor war criminal but the suggestion that he was responsible for the holocaust is too absurd to contemplate. This is really just letting Hitler off the hook. He was talked into it! In his prophecy speech in January 30 1939 Hitler stated:
Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race throughout Europe.'

And since the Zionist High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel was responsible for appointing the al-Husseini despite him coming 4th in the election for Grand Mufti, then it is the Zionist movement that bears the real responsibility as it always preferred working with the reactionary Mufti.


re Tony Greenstein writing: "There was only one meeting between Hitler and the Mufti in November 1941." Were there other meetings outside of November '41? Or should I read "There was only one meeting between Hitler and the Mufti (it was in November 1941)"?


Anonymous: "...show distinct commonalities with today's Palestinian leadership." etc

here in the US, a statue of Junipero Serra was decapitated just after Columbus Day in California. "distinct commonalities"? Israel will have these problems for hundreds of years, and you will never think of the original people as human, and you will blame them as you commit your ethnic cleansing of them.
some of you will be haunted by the ghosts of children who will never be born and never play with your own. that's the loss, and your comments are the guilt. you are committing the atrocity. they never did.


To the moderator and perchance Mr. Abunima himself:

I know you are in favor of selective-inclusion of comments on your web-site which are by and large supportive of the commentaries that you feature, and leverage what is considered "alternative" media as source material. The reasons some poster-comments make it through and some don't are entirely yours, but can you tell us what your policy is? You are not obligated to do so, as I am sure you are aware, I can only find the "mollom policy" which has more to do with "privacy" rather than how some make it though and some don't.

I ask this because I am concerned that someone can suggest posting messages on a comment board that do not conform to the editorial slant of the web-site itself, can be considered the same as an "atrocity" akin to the Holocaust or any other form of crime and/or murder?


Here we go again: as the onslaught on Palestinians continue unabated and Zionist society begins to show its ugly face, Bibi comes up with a hat trick-lie...and the world falls for it by giving it credence through the printed word, which, I am sure, will be followed by TV and Radio discussions.


as an average American (not a historian), I have been told to believe:
1) there were no such thing as Palestinians
2) Palestine did not have a gov't so it didn't exist in '48 (still doesn't)
3) Palestine did not have weapons/army, so zionists won fair & square
4) Palestinians self-deported, so zionists moved in peacefully
and now, I'm supposed to believe that there was a powerful Palestinian who stood over Nazi Germany and made them undertake a massive ethnic cleansing, but couldn't manage to accomplish diddly in Palestine with far far fewer people...?

at least I'm clear on what's happening today in Israel, and - btw - my own country is looking more and more like Germany did.


Thanks Ali.
Makes me not feel so bad for getting kicked off the Guardian for posting a Winston Churchill quote from 1921...
From Churchill's Karma "Britain’s Denial of Democracy and the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" which is an interesting site if you don't know it.
Keep up the good fight.


I am glad Netanyahu exposed himself for the psychopath that he is. Maybe this will wake up more people to the evil sick country that Israel is, and the fact it is led willingly by a madman.


Abunimah is right, the Israeli PR machine's purpose here is to shift blame for the persecution of Jews away from Europe to Palestine. A brilliant PR move! Since the persecution of Jews happened in Europe (decades before Hitler's taking power) and was done by Europeans, it is blatantly unfair to build the Jewish safe haven on the backs and in place of the innocent Palestinians. If this move is given even the thin credence of having been uttered by Netanyahu, it moves Zionism closer to being able to say that the Jewish state is justified IN PALESTINE, at the cost of Palestinians.
As it stands, the historical facts show that the Palestinians had zero, nothing, to do with the European persecution, and therefore, even if one believes a safe have for Jews in their own state somewhere is a legitimate idea, its establishment against the will of the indigenous IN PALESTINE is blatantly wrong and illegitimate.
By resurrecting Hajj Amin al-Husseini's brief connection with Hitler's Germany - explained so well by Abunimah and Massad - many casual readers will say Yes, the Palestinians have paid, but it serves them right. Brilliant PR.


This article was so badly needed today, when history is being re-written by Netanyahu to such an alarming extent.

When Netanyahu makes such despicable comments, no wonder "settlers" feel they have been given full permission by the State to illegally seize Palestinian land or, worse, to kill their indigenous neighbours.

It's frightening that a Prime a Minister would even consider trying to get away with such a preposterous theory, he's guilty of the kind of propaganda once associated with the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

With words like these at a time of such strife and turmoil, 'Bibi' has yet more blood on his hands.

And people wonder why Palestinians struggle to negotiate with the Zionists who have stolen their land?


According to the History Channel Bibi is right. I just saw the entire History on the History Channel two nights ago; And AL-Husseini was in cahoots with Hitler according to History.
Of course, the anti-Israel haters will still deny this.


A good account of what is happening is described in Idith Zertal’s book ‘Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood’ (Cambridge University Press). (p.102) This attitude of equating the Mufti's behaviour, which wasn't particularly different from that of Subra Chandra Bose, the leader of the Indian National Army who fought the British alongside the Japanese or the leaders of the Burmese Independence movement. They operated on the basis that the enemy of their colonial enemy was their friend.

Contrary to the Zionists' campaign there was relatively little support for the Nazis in the Arab countries during the war, since Hitler's racial theories weren't particularly appealing nor was his regime. In addition it was obvious that it was Hitler's anti-Semitism which was driving Jewish emigration to Palestine. Support such a regime was particular madness.

A good book on this is 'Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism' by Israel Gershoni ed. of Tel Aviv University, which is totally unlike the usual hasbarist attempts to label Arab nationalism as being equivalent to German nationalism.

Ive done a post on Netanyahu's speech which can be found at Netanyahu Exonerates Hitler of Responsibility for the Holocaust http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2....

The Mufti was a war criminal, albeit a minor war criminal. However no Palestinian ever voted for him. He was appointed by the British and the Zionists and was rightly seen as a collaborator. His actions, the radio broadcasts, the attempts to prevent the emigration of Jewish children from Nazi occupied territories and his recruiting of Muslim SS Divisions (even though they rebelled and weren't involved in the Jewish question) are still indefensible.


Unfortunately British actions during the mandate the crackdown on the boycott. The -arming settlers...de arming Arabs-suppression of autonomous councils for the Arabs at the same time building up proto Israel with electrification contracts....enforcing Jewish only areas...Palestinians knew their territory was going to be partitioned....they were anti Jewish immigration because of this imperial settler colonization.


It is important to note that when Netanyahu makes a speech like this in English his target audience ultimately are the financiers of Israeli brutality – the American tax payer. It is to the working men and women of the US that say: if you are so over worked and so ill informed that you don’t have the time or energy to educate yourself on the current issues of state – in this case by acquainting yourself with such seminal works as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry mentioned elsewhere in a responses to this article – then you must concede that you no longer live in a free society, and your taxes no longer represent you or what you know to be true and good.

Once again Netanyahu’s version of history, while not original, is absurd to the extent that it defies common sense. Mr. Abuunimah your article is excellent in exposing this very dangerous lie. Thank you.


i read in several of the comments that the mufti was a war criminal,
a minor war criminal. i know it's fun to repeat, but what exactly
makes him a (minor) war criminal?


There is no doubt that the Mufti is a war criminal.

1. The undoubted fact that he lobbied the Nazis against sending Jewish children out of Hungary and other countries because they would end up in Palestine. It's one thing to have lobbied and campaigned against Britain admitting anyone to Palestine when they could have allowed them to enter other colonies, e.g. Mauritius was a place which the Zionists opposed sending refugees to, but to lobby the Nazis not to send the children, knowing they would be murdered is unforgivable.W

2. Making radio broadcasts to Arab nations on behalf of the Nazis durng the war. The British hanged Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) after the war for making similar broadcasts to Britain on behalf of the Nazis and the Mufti should have also been tried on this account.

3. Recruiting Muslim SS Divisions in Bosnia and the Balkans, albeit that they didn't take part in anti-Jewish actions they were guilty of war crimes against the Serbs.

4. Acting as the spiritual mentor for the Soviet SS Divisions and giving support to recruitment for such divisions.

This is in addition to betraying the Palestinian cause by associating it with the genocidal and racist Nazi war machine thus doing damage that has lasted till this day and undermining the fact that thousands of Palestinians and Arabs served in the war against the Nazis and that many Palestinians and Arabs died in the concentration camps because they were anti-fascist.

Despite Zionist propaganda, intellectuals and the people in the Arab countries were overwhelmingly anti-fascist. I mentioned the book edited by Israel Gershoni of Tel Aviv university ' Arab reactions to Fascism and Nazism' which consists mainly of Israeli academics who took the time to study the different Arab countries. They came to the conclusion that sympathy 4 the Nazis was very small. The Communist Parties were strong in Egypt and Iraq for example. The Mufti was a traitor to the Palestinians too.


1. he lobbied? really, that's a war crime?
2. he broadcast on the radio? a war crime?
3. he recruited soldiers that didn't do bad stuff? a crime?
4. he was a "spiritual mentor"...whatever that is?

none of these qualify as war crimes. as i said, it's fun to repeat
stuff you read on the intertubes! try again.


It was in one arena, the armed forces, where Hitler's policies were never 100% consequential. When the first anti-Jewish laws were promulgated (transient) exceptions were made for Jewish veterans of WW1. Males with one or two Jewish grandparents served in the Wehrmacht until it was stopped at Moscow in the winter of 1941. However General Milch who had two Jewish grandparents was allowed to serve on. He became in charge of the "areal support" of Stalingrad. Milch was no exception. Here is a partial list of "Aryanized/Deutschbluetig" (by Hitler himself) soldiers. Ernst Bloch (colonel), Werner Maltzahn (general), Helmuth Wilberg (general), Paul Ascher (commander on the Bismarck), Johannes Zuckertort (general), Karl Zuckertort (general). Also many more of lower ranks.


won't defend Netanyahu's view, but to quote an Palestinian American historian's book to explain what has been spoken between Husseini and Hitler isn't really objective...


There is a book on this. They were basically Mischlinge - Germans with 1 or 2 Jewish grandparents and Hitler made about 300 into Aryans. Not just the army. It included a number of civil servants including Ministerialrat Killy of the Fuhrer Chancellery, who was a second degree mischlinge.

Jews actually served on the front in the Hungarian army, both as members of the Labour batallions and some in the Hungarian armed forces, who were decimated by the Russians at Voronezh.


Although Tony Greenstein does mention Gibert Achcar's book The Arabs and the Holocaust, I would emphasise its importance. I read it, and several others, to find out why Germans kept mentioning the 'Mufti of Jerusalem' when I spoke of the Palestinian struggle for justice (as they now introduce 'Hamas' when I speak of Gaza).
The Arabs and the Holocaust is especially valuable because Gilbert Achcar is a speaker of Arabic, who understood the material - letters, radio transcripts, newspapers, documents, etc. - available in many Arab countries regarding their relationships with Arab Jews, how the arrival of Zionism gradually changed these relationships, and conflicts that thus arose with the British. Achcar also describes the Mufti, how he was regarded by Palestinians and other Arabs, qualifying and contradicting versions disseminated by Zionists and the press in most Western countries - which has obviously coloured German's knowledge (the little they know) of Palestinian history.
I must say, however, that I am deeply shocked that Netanyahu would come to Germany and repeat such vile propaganda. I agree that this is a form of genocidal incitement. As much as I object to Merkel's constant coupling of Germany's raison d'être with Israel, I think she was also stunned and her firm rejection was good to hear. So there is a line Netanyahu cannot cross.


Yes Achcar's book is important but it also has major weaknesses, not least its analysis of Zionism and its illusion in left Zionism. it also believes that a Palestinian understanding of the holocaust is the key to a reconciliation with Zionism and the settler state of Palestine and fails to understand that the holocaust has been a key ideological prop and propaganda weapon for Zionism, as Netanyahu has just demonstrated. He also doesn't understand why the Zionist movement played down the holocaust when it happened to the point of obstructing rescue and engaging in outright collaboration.

Rather than repeating what I wrote I encourage people to read the review I did in the Journal of Holy Land Studies Gilbert Achcar’s Arabs and the Holocaust http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2... or

I would also suggest that Israel Gershoni's book 'Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism' is essential reading. When I was first sent a copy to review for JHLS I saw the number of Israeli academics contributing and told Nur Masalha, the Editor, that it seemed like it would be a rehash of the usual Mufti = Arab support for Hitler propaganda. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the articles were.

I should also add that in my opinion Netanyahus comments are a real own goal and have completely discredited him and his propagandists.


The timing of Netanyahu's ahistorical references to the Grand Mufti (who did the Palestinian struggle no favours) are no accident, but a desperate ploy to explain away the current violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank as 'anti semitism' rather than an explosive reaction of young Palestinians to decades of violence and misery inflicted on their society by a European Settler/Colonial regime intent on subjugation, land theft and apartheid.

This open and violent resistance of the young is already forcing a change to the terms of reference applied to the Palestine/Israel discourse, and this despite the continuing complicity of the European and American political elites in the settler/colonial project.



Netanyahu has successfully re-introduced the falsity that Palestinians are traditionally anti-Jewish. I think a collective PR decision was made to make the recent claims about Amin al-Husseini; it was not just Netanyahu speaking alone. The cost: embarrassment as to the historical record. The benefit: some of the dirt will stick.
The New York Times' Jodi Rudoren quotes Netanyahu: "My intention was... to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called occupation,... even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews." Many people might agree that Netanyahu is wrong on the historical details and even that his main accusation against al-Husseini in particular doesn't hold water - but the general charge of Arab anti-semitism will remain, re-asserted.
The Times then quotes Prof. Moshe Zimmermann of Hebrew University lambasting Netanyahu, but read carefully: "This is a trick intended to stain the Arabs of today because of the Arabs of the past." So even Netanyahu's harshest critics are saying Yes, Arabs of the past were anti-Jewish. This PR as unfortunately succeeded.



"But in a lengthy Facebook post on Friday, Netanyahu said he wished to “clarify [his] remarks about the connection between the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Nazis.” He said that he “did not mean to claim that in his conversation with Hitler in November 1941 the mufti convinced him to adopt the Final Solution. The Nazis decided on that by themselves.”

The prime minister wrote that, “The decision to move from a policy of deporting Jews to the Final Solution was made by the Nazis and was not dependent on outside influence. The Nazis saw in the mufti a collaborator, but they did not need him to decide on the systematic destruction of European Jewry, which began in June 1941.”

Ali Abunimah

