by Caroline Glick
The Israeli left, the European Union and the Biden administration have a shared interest in repressing the Nazi roots of Palestinian Arab nationalism.
Last Wednesday, a spat between Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch
and Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan caused an international uproar.
Dayan
was appointed by the Bennett-Lapid government. He is a member of Gideon
Sa’ar’s party of former Likudniks and an outspoken hater of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It might thus have been expected that when
Kisch sent a letter to Dayan on Wednesday listing a series of
allegations of mismanagement of Yad Vashem that have been leveled
against Dayan, the opposition would respond that Kisch was waging a
political witch hunt against their guy.
Harder to explain was the
letter from several dozen Holocaust researchers affiliated with the left
who voiced their support for Dayan. Why would they side with a man with
no background in Holocaust scholarship and against whom multiple,
apparently substantive allegations of mismanagement and incompetence
have been submitted?
And it’s much harder to understand why the
Biden administration’s State Department and the European Union both
issued statements of support for Dayan. What’s it to them if a political
apparatchik stays or goes?
To begin to understand what is actually happening, we need to turn our attention to Ramallah.
On Aug. 24, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gave a virulently anti-Semitic speech
at a Fatah conference that was broadcast on the P.A.’s television
station. Among other things, Abbas blamed the Jews for the Holocaust.
“They
say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated
the Jews because they were Jews,” he began. “Not true. It was clearly
explained that [the Europeans] fought [the Jews] because of their social
role, and not their religion… The [Europeans] fought against these
people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury,
money, and so on and so forth."
“Hitler… said he fought the Jews
because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were
engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make
this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.”
Abbas
said as well that the Nazis weren’t anti-Semites because “Ashkenazi
Jews aren’t Semites.” Indeed, he explained, “There are those that say
that they aren’t Jews.”
Abbas went on to say that it was David
Ben-Gurion, in cahoots with Winston Churchill, who was responsible for
anti-Jewish violence in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco. “The Jews” of those
lands, he insisted, “did not want to emigrate, but they were forced to
do so by means of pressure, coercion and murder.”
Abbas attacked
the United States and the British. “America was a partner to the Balfour
Declaration. Who invented that [Jewish] state? It was Britain and
America—not just Britain,” he said. “I am saying this,” he explained,
“so that we know who we should accuse of being our enemy, who has harmed
us and took our homeland away, and gave it to the Israelis or the
Jews.”
Abbas’s appalling statements weren’t novel. He has made
similar anti-Jewish diatribes throughout his career. Indeed, Holocaust
denial, Holocaust projection, conspiracy theories, Nazi apologetics,
Islamic jihadist anti-Jewish epithets, denial and appropriation of
Jewish history and Soviet anti-Semitic gaslighting have all been major
features of his long career as a Palestinian Arab terrorist and
political warrior against the Jewish state.
Abbas’s statements
make him an anti-Semite. But they also make him a faithful disciple of
the founder of the Palestinian Arab national movement and the Arab war
against the Jewish state, the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el Husseini, a
Nazi agent whom Abbas has praised as a “pioneer.”
Husseini was a pioneer, in the war against the Jews.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini visits a Galilee villageThe IDF and Defense Establishment Archive
Beginning
in the 1920s, Husseini began fusing European race-based anti-Semitism
with Islamic Jew hatred when he translated into Arabic and published
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Husseini, like his friend Muslim
Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was an early supporter of the
Nazis. Through Nazi funding, in 1936 he launched the Arab terror war
against the British and the Jews of pre-state Israel which continued
until 1939.
In June 1941 Husseini incited a pro-Nazi coup
in Baghdad, and the Farhud, a massive pogrom against Iraqi Jewry, in
the city. Ahead of a pursuing British force, Husseini made his way to
Berlin, where he met with Hitler in
November 1941 and set up shop. Husseini was an active supporter of and
participant in the annihilation of European Jewry. He blocked the rescue
of thousands of Jewish children in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. He
drafted thousands European Muslims to an SS division that engaged in the
annihilation of Yugoslavian Jewry. He was a close associate of Adolf
Eichmann and other top Nazis.
Just as significantly,
Husseini operated a short-wave radio station that broadcast throughout
the Arab world from Berlin. Husseini’s broadcasts fused Islamic Jew hatred with Nazi anti-Semitism
to create a hybrid form of genocidal Jew hatred directed at the Jews of
the Islamic world, including especially, the Zionist Jews in pre-state
Israel.
Husseini was arrested as a war criminal after the war and
held in France, pending trial at Nuremberg. But the French allowed him
to escape to Egypt in 1946, thus enabling him to start a new chapter in
his war against the Jews.
Here we come to another important aspect
of Husseini’s legacy. Before becoming a Nazi agent, Husseini sometimes
worked with the British and the French.
In Mandatory Palestine,
Husseini’s allies were the often anti-Semitic British officers who
dominated Britain’s military government. It was at the urging of these
officers that the Zionist but feckless High Commissioner Herbert Samuel
appointed Husseini to serve as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and enabled
him to become the sole leader of the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate.
Husseini
was able to work with all sides because key figures on all sides shared
his Jew hatred, which Husseini knew how to tailor to their specific
prejudices. In this manner, both before, during and after the Holocaust,
Husseini was able to use his fervent hatred of Jews to develop Western
opposition to Zionism.
In part because the British and French
enabled Husseini to escape justice, the Arabs never had to morally
reckon with his crimes. Instead, in 1946 he was given a hero’s welcome
in Cairo by al-Banna, who made explicit then what later was deliberately
hidden. In the eyes of the Muslim world, the Arab struggle against the
Jews of Israel was the continuation of Hitler’s war against the Jews of
Europe.
As al-Banna wrote of him, “This hero challenged an empire
and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and
Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”
This
brief history in hand, we return to the rapid transformation of a
management dispute between Israeli politicians into an international
story.
Immediately after the war, the left in Europe was
pro-Zionist, and therefore willing to tell the history of Husseini’s
collaboration with the Nazis. This began to change in 1949. It was that
year when the Soviet Union turned against the Jewish state and began
relabeling Jews as “Zionists” in order to legitimize continued hatred of
them under the banner of “anti-imperialism.”
To advance this new
position, it became necessary to hide Husseini’s Nazi past. And so, as
Jeffrey Herf documented, the research on it was largely hidden in the
decades following the war.
In recent decades, in part to promote
their goal of persuading Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria and
unified Jerusalem, the Israeli left joined the effort to hide or
minimize the importance of Husseini’s role in the Holocaust and the Nazi
power structure.
Scholars and public figures, including
Netanyahu, who mention that Husseini was a Nazi are attacked for
“politicizing” or “distorting” Holocaust history. Yad Vashem has taken
the revisionist side of this argument as well. A minority of Zionist
scholars and intellectuals have insisted on maintaining allegiance to
the historical record.
This issue came to a head in 2019, when the
left ran an all-out campaign to block the previous Netanyahu
government’s plan to appoint former National Religious Party leader Effi
Eitam to serve as Yad Vashem director.
In his first interview after taking up his position as director, Dayan weighed in on the issue. The Haaretz
article ran on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, under the
headline, “We will be vigilant about the truth even if it doesn’t
advance Israel’s interest.”
Dayan complained in the interview that
since taking up his duties, he had been subjected to “a wild assault”
from forces on the right who demanded that he post the photograph of
Hitler with the Husseini in Yad Vashem’s museum.
“I won’t put this
photograph up. I won’t cave to the pressures. Anyone who wants me to
put it up doesn’t really care about the mufti’s role in the Holocaust,
which was anyway limited. He’s interested in harming the Palestinians’
image today,” he said.
Dayan added, “The mufti was an antisemite,
but even though I hold him in contempt, I won’t turn Yad Vashem into a
tool that serves goals that aren’t connected directly to Holocaust
research and remembrance.”
Dayan’s statement was absurd even by
its own standards. As the premier Holocaust research center in the
world, and Israel’s most important Holocaust museum, even if Husseini
had but a “limited” role in the Holocaust, it is Yad Vashem’s duty to
document and teach the public about that role.
And of course,
Husseini’s role was expansive, not limited, which was why he was set to
be tried as a Nazi war criminal in the Nuremberg tribunal. Moreover, his
role had everything to do with the Palestinian Arab national movement,
and for that matter with the “Palestinian image.”
This
brings us to the reason the Biden administration and the European Union
are circling the wagons on Dayan. The Biden administration has two main
pillars of its Middle East policy—hostility towards the Netanyahu
government and unflinching support for the Palestinian Arabs. Any change
in Yad Vashem’s policy of hiding Husseini’s role in
the Holocaust, and its direct relationship to the Arab war against
Israel, will discredit the administration’s adamant and unqualified
support for the Palestinians.
As for the Europeans, in 2003,
German historian Matthias Kuntzel explained their impetus for protecting
the mufti in his book “Jihad and Jew Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish
War.” In it, Kuntzel wrote that the German left’s reflexive comparisons
of Israel to the Nazis is related to the “German need for identification
and projection.”
The Nazi analogy to Israel, he explained, fulfilled an “unconscious wish for unburdening” of the German past.
“Knowledge
of the connection, embodied in the Mufti between the Palestinian
national movement and National Socialism would complicate the
identification with the Palestinians as well as the projection of the
German policy of extermination onto Israel.”
And as a consequence,
the Germans—and subsequently, the French, the British and everyone
else, including the Israeli left—buried the history.
Abbas’s
speech was nothing out of the ordinary. Nazi imagery and propaganda is a
regular feature in all areas of Palestinian Arab society. But it serves
as a reminder of what is actually at stake with Dayan’s continued
tenure at Yad Vashem.
It also shows why it is vital that Kisch fire him.
Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host
of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic
commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for
Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the
Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s
College of Statesmanship.
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/376717
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