October 25, 2015
NO, YOU'RE A NAZI!:
The Dangerous Motivation Behind Netanyahu's Holocaust Revisionism (Jeet Heer, 10/25/15, New Republic)
Husseini hoped to work with the Nazis to thwart the creation of a Jewish state in Israel. To that end, he raised an army of 6,000 Arabs. This stands in contrast to the tens of thousands of Arabs who fought against the Nazis, including the 9,000 Palestinians who fought with the British. As Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, noted in an article for The National, "The record is a complex, mixed and nuanced one, but the overarching fact is that Arab and Muslim involvement in the war was overwhelmingly on the Allied side, and was a significant factor in fighting on the ground. The overwhelming majority joined the cause voluntarily, despite British and French colonialism." [...]Reviewing a biography of Husseini in The New York Times, historian Tom Segev acutely described the problem of over-emphasizing Husseini's importance in the history of the Holocaust.[O]ne can question whether Husseini "played an important role" in the Holocaust. For as Bernard Lewis wrote in "Semites and Anti-Semites": "It seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from outside."...The mufti's support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister.The second thing to say about Netanyahu's statement is that he's trying to smear Palestinian nationalism as being intrinsically anti-Semitic, indeed genocidal. Netanyahu's fanciful excursion into Holocaust historiography comes in the context of the larger argument of his speech: that the current outbreak of violence in Israel has nothing to do with Israeli management of the Temple Mount or the on-going occupation.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2015 9:23 AM
Tweet
