Who’s Really Denying History?
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
In recent weeks, two Middle East leaders have been guilty of saying things that they shouldn’t have. One concocted a dialogue that he claimed took place between two important 20th Century figures and distorted the record about a key episode that helped define the history of the Holocaust and the Middle East. The other spewed hate and cynically circulated what amounts to a blood libel that might incite a religious war and certainly must be considered to have incited a wave of terrorism that has taken many lives. Guess which one is in more trouble?
Of course, I am referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. It was Netanyahu who, in a speech earlier this week to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, invented a dialogue between Adolf Hitler and Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, that he claimed occurred when the two met in Berlin in 1941. By suggesting that it was the Mufti who first suggested the mass extermination of the Jews to Hitler, Netanyahu committed a grave error. While there is little doubt that the Mufti did probably urge Hitler to “burn” the Jews (something he frequently did throughout the war in his broadcasts to the Arab and Muslim world on behalf of the Nazis), there is no reason to suppose that plans for the genocide of the Jews were not already well in place. Nor is there any reason to think that Hitler needed the Mufti to instruct him in Jew hatred.
The worst part of this was that many people interpreted Netanyahu’s statement as somehow absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. This led some historians to denounce him as a conducting a “defense of Hitler,” calling him a “Holocaust revisionist” and even a “Holocaust denier” as one Hebrew University professor told the New York Times. That some of those using those terms are his political enemies doesn’t diminish the damage this incident has done to Netanyahu. At a time when anti-Semites and other enemies of Israel are doing their best to delegitimize Israel’s government and libeling the Jews as the new Nazis, this wasn’t what the Jewish state needed. Moreover, by making what must be acknowledged to be a clear error, the Mufti’s not insignificant role in the Holocaust and the widespread Arab support for the Nazis has been downplayed if not completely forgotten. That’s a point that Holocaust historian Jeffrey Herf makes in a piece that discusses the Mufti’s record. Suffice it to say that it is bad enough without Netanyahu or anyone else adding on to his misdeeds. Unfortunately, instead of being executed for war crimes, al-Husseini escaped from Germany to the Middle East where he helped incite the war to stifle the newborn state of Israel.
There is no existing transcript of the conversation between Hitler and the Mufti, though there are records of subsequent dealings that al-Husseini had with Adolf Eichmann. But there’s no need to exaggerate the Mufti’s influence. The prime minister later corrected his statement to make it clear that he was not seeking to paint Hitler as blameless but the damage was already done. Given the magnitude of this subject, any sort of error of any kind in discussing the facts about the Holocaust is simply unacceptable, no matter what the prime minister’s intentions might have been. And there really is no excuse for a person as versed in this history as Netanyahu to make such a blunder.
Yet a scrupulous devotion to the historical record is not the only factor that is motivating many of those who are piling on Netanyahu. For some, the prime minister’s main fault was not so much exaggerating the Mufti’s undoubted yet secondary role in the Holocaust as much as his decision to invoke this chapter of history at all. J.J. Goldberg spoke for them in theForward when he wrote that the main sin here was not Netanyahu’s claims over what the Mufti did or did not say to Hitler, but his intent to “to draw a straight line between the Final Solution and today’s Palestinian national movement and its leader.” Goldberg’s point, which was echoed elsewhere on the political left, was that by linking the Mufti to the current incitement being conducted by the Mufti’s successors today undermines the already dim chances for peace and eventual coexistence. And that brings us to what Abbas has been doing.
Though Abbas has been lauded as a champion of peace by President Obama, his role in spreading hate in recent weeks was the key element in inciting the current surge in terrorism that some have dubbed a third intifada. By repeatedly claiming that Israel is planning on desecrating Muslim holy places in Israel with, as he put it, “stinking Jewish feet,” Abbas has helped convince Palestinians that their faith is under attack. But what is particularly reprehensible about this is that the Palestinian leader is operating straight out of the same playbook written by the Mufti. It was, after all, al-Husseini who spread the same lies in 1920, 1929 and 1936 about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that set off anti-Jewish pogroms that took many Jewish lives.
The Mufti sought to exploit Muslim religious sensitivities by making false claims about Jewish intentions toward the mosques on the Temple Mount in order to solidify his control of Palestinian Arab politics. He also hoped to convince the British rulers of the Palestine Mandate to close the country off to Jewish immigration. He succeeded there helping to seal the fate of countless Jews who might have escaped Hitler’s Europe to Palestine. Abbas is playing the same game in order to compete with his Hamas rivals and influence the West to further isolate Israel. Indeed, the Mufti can only envy Abbas’s ability to use the official television and radio of the PA to spread his lies as well as to make false charges about Israel “executing” innocent Palestinians who were stopped while trying to kill Jews. That included one Palestinian that Abbas claimed Israel had “executed” who turned up alive and well in a Jerusalem hospital and admitting his guilt the next day.
All of which is to say that while Netanyahu was dead wrong to exaggerate the Mufti’s role in the Holocaust, he is very much in the right to remind us that there is a precedent for what Abbas is doing. But some like Goldberg (who ignores Abbas’s record of incitement) claim Netanyahu is the one who is making peace impossible. As blogger Elliot Jager writes, for some people “it is almost too painful to imagine that the Palestinian Arabs today really want what the Palestinian Arabs of 1933 or 1929 wanted.” Unfortunately, as Abbas’s conduct, and that of the terrorists he has inspired proves, that is sadly the case.
It’s clear that the usual double standard that applies to Israel has influenced coverage of the two leaders. Washington and most of the mainstream press have turned a blind eye to Abbas’s incitement and treat Israeli self-defense as the moral equivalent of a Palestinian murder campaign. The talk of a “cycle of violence” is part of an effort to absolve Abbas of his role in rejecting peace, something he has done repeatedly in the course of negotiations when Netanyahu and his predecessors offered major territorial concessions and statehood. Rather than Abbas being called to account for his vile rhetoric and cynical attempt to incite holy war, it is instead Netanyahu who finds himself in the crosshairs of the international press. He deserved criticism for what he said, but is what he did really more egregious than inciting terror? Only if you are prepared to falsify recent history in ways that are far worse than anything Netanyahu has done in discussing the Holocaust.
Commentary Magazine
October 23, 2015
In recent weeks, two Middle East leaders have been guilty of saying things that they shouldn’t have. One concocted a dialogue that he claimed took place between two important 20th Century figures and distorted the record about a key episode that helped define the history of the Holocaust and the Middle East. The other spewed hate and cynically circulated what amounts to a blood libel that might incite a religious war and certainly must be considered to have incited a wave of terrorism that has taken many lives. Guess which one is in more trouble?
Of course, I am referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. It was Netanyahu who, in a speech earlier this week to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, invented a dialogue between Adolf Hitler and Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, that he claimed occurred when the two met in Berlin in 1941. By suggesting that it was the Mufti who first suggested the mass extermination of the Jews to Hitler, Netanyahu committed a grave error. While there is little doubt that the Mufti did probably urge Hitler to “burn” the Jews (something he frequently did throughout the war in his broadcasts to the Arab and Muslim world on behalf of the Nazis), there is no reason to suppose that plans for the genocide of the Jews were not already well in place. Nor is there any reason to think that Hitler needed the Mufti to instruct him in Jew hatred.
The worst part of this was that many people interpreted Netanyahu’s statement as somehow absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. This led some historians to denounce him as a conducting a “defense of Hitler,” calling him a “Holocaust revisionist” and even a “Holocaust denier” as one Hebrew University professor told the New York Times. That some of those using those terms are his political enemies doesn’t diminish the damage this incident has done to Netanyahu. At a time when anti-Semites and other enemies of Israel are doing their best to delegitimize Israel’s government and libeling the Jews as the new Nazis, this wasn’t what the Jewish state needed. Moreover, by making what must be acknowledged to be a clear error, the Mufti’s not insignificant role in the Holocaust and the widespread Arab support for the Nazis has been downplayed if not completely forgotten. That’s a point that Holocaust historian Jeffrey Herf makes in a piece that discusses the Mufti’s record. Suffice it to say that it is bad enough without Netanyahu or anyone else adding on to his misdeeds. Unfortunately, instead of being executed for war crimes, al-Husseini escaped from Germany to the Middle East where he helped incite the war to stifle the newborn state of Israel.
There is no existing transcript of the conversation between Hitler and the Mufti, though there are records of subsequent dealings that al-Husseini had with Adolf Eichmann. But there’s no need to exaggerate the Mufti’s influence. The prime minister later corrected his statement to make it clear that he was not seeking to paint Hitler as blameless but the damage was already done. Given the magnitude of this subject, any sort of error of any kind in discussing the facts about the Holocaust is simply unacceptable, no matter what the prime minister’s intentions might have been. And there really is no excuse for a person as versed in this history as Netanyahu to make such a blunder.
Yet a scrupulous devotion to the historical record is not the only factor that is motivating many of those who are piling on Netanyahu. For some, the prime minister’s main fault was not so much exaggerating the Mufti’s undoubted yet secondary role in the Holocaust as much as his decision to invoke this chapter of history at all. J.J. Goldberg spoke for them in theForward when he wrote that the main sin here was not Netanyahu’s claims over what the Mufti did or did not say to Hitler, but his intent to “to draw a straight line between the Final Solution and today’s Palestinian national movement and its leader.” Goldberg’s point, which was echoed elsewhere on the political left, was that by linking the Mufti to the current incitement being conducted by the Mufti’s successors today undermines the already dim chances for peace and eventual coexistence. And that brings us to what Abbas has been doing.
Though Abbas has been lauded as a champion of peace by President Obama, his role in spreading hate in recent weeks was the key element in inciting the current surge in terrorism that some have dubbed a third intifada. By repeatedly claiming that Israel is planning on desecrating Muslim holy places in Israel with, as he put it, “stinking Jewish feet,” Abbas has helped convince Palestinians that their faith is under attack. But what is particularly reprehensible about this is that the Palestinian leader is operating straight out of the same playbook written by the Mufti. It was, after all, al-Husseini who spread the same lies in 1920, 1929 and 1936 about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that set off anti-Jewish pogroms that took many Jewish lives.
The Mufti sought to exploit Muslim religious sensitivities by making false claims about Jewish intentions toward the mosques on the Temple Mount in order to solidify his control of Palestinian Arab politics. He also hoped to convince the British rulers of the Palestine Mandate to close the country off to Jewish immigration. He succeeded there helping to seal the fate of countless Jews who might have escaped Hitler’s Europe to Palestine. Abbas is playing the same game in order to compete with his Hamas rivals and influence the West to further isolate Israel. Indeed, the Mufti can only envy Abbas’s ability to use the official television and radio of the PA to spread his lies as well as to make false charges about Israel “executing” innocent Palestinians who were stopped while trying to kill Jews. That included one Palestinian that Abbas claimed Israel had “executed” who turned up alive and well in a Jerusalem hospital and admitting his guilt the next day.
All of which is to say that while Netanyahu was dead wrong to exaggerate the Mufti’s role in the Holocaust, he is very much in the right to remind us that there is a precedent for what Abbas is doing. But some like Goldberg (who ignores Abbas’s record of incitement) claim Netanyahu is the one who is making peace impossible. As blogger Elliot Jager writes, for some people “it is almost too painful to imagine that the Palestinian Arabs today really want what the Palestinian Arabs of 1933 or 1929 wanted.” Unfortunately, as Abbas’s conduct, and that of the terrorists he has inspired proves, that is sadly the case.
It’s clear that the usual double standard that applies to Israel has influenced coverage of the two leaders. Washington and most of the mainstream press have turned a blind eye to Abbas’s incitement and treat Israeli self-defense as the moral equivalent of a Palestinian murder campaign. The talk of a “cycle of violence” is part of an effort to absolve Abbas of his role in rejecting peace, something he has done repeatedly in the course of negotiations when Netanyahu and his predecessors offered major territorial concessions and statehood. Rather than Abbas being called to account for his vile rhetoric and cynical attempt to incite holy war, it is instead Netanyahu who finds himself in the crosshairs of the international press. He deserved criticism for what he said, but is what he did really more egregious than inciting terror? Only if you are prepared to falsify recent history in ways that are far worse than anything Netanyahu has done in discussing the Holocaust.
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