Zionism, Haj Amin and the Jewish Holocaust
By Yossi Schwartz, Internationalist Socialist League in Israel / Occupied Palestine, 15.11.2021. www.thecommunists.net
During WWII the Zionists in Palestine and North America who did not send a single bullet to the Jews fighting the Nazis, like in the famous rebellion of the Warsaw Ghetto have learned how to manipulate the memory of the Jewish Holocaust for their political aims. The manipulations have various aspects. The first one is to get the UN’s and the US’s recognition for the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine even when most people in Palestine were native Palestinians. The Zionists of course did not rely only on the fresh memory of the Jewish holocaust.
“Universal sympathy for the distress and suffering of Europe’s displaced persons heightened the emotional appeal of Zionism, although its opponents pointed out that only a portion of them were Jews. They questioned further whether Palestine, or such countries as Brazil, Australia, or the United States, could best provide homes for these refugees. They argued that there was no necessary connection between the humanitarian problem of succoring the displaced persons of Europe and the political problem of creating a new nationalist state in Palestine. Finally, they asked whether it was just to make the Arabs atone for Europe’s sins. However, the Zionists were not to be balked in their aims…” On the eve of the UN decision the Zionists could not get the majority of states to support the creation of a Zionist state: “By Wednesday, November 26, when the vote was taken in committee, the result was 25 to 13 – one vote gained for partition, three lost to its opponents, and the abstentions increased by two. That was still not enough for the two-thirds majority needed for passage.” [i]
“So, the Zionists took the fight into their own hands. Rallying a group of influential Americans and selecting their targets with care, they exerted all possible influence-personal suasion, floods of telegrams and letters and political and economic pressure… What happened at the United Nations was a repeat performance of what had already happened in the United States. Using the same methods that had been so successful here and having the United States Government to assist in their use there, the Zionists succeeded in getting what they want” [ii]
The second aspect is getting the control of the American Jews and getting their political support for Israel.
After WWII most American Jews did not want to deal with the holocaust: “In the current period – when books and films about the Holocaust abound, and the United States has a memorial museum dedicated to the genocide adjacent to the nation’s other venerated monuments – it’s difficult to imagine the public’s disinterest in the Holocaust during the early postwar years. In his autobiography, for instance, Raul Hilberg recalls how difficult it was to find a publisher for The Destruction of European Jews, his ground-breaking account of the bureaucracy that implemented the Final Solution” [iii]
“It’s hard, too, to imagine Jewish Americans embracing the Holocaust as a constitutive element of their ethnic identity… A key turning point in this disconcerting view of survivors was the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, the Nazis’ leading expert on Jewish affairs and a key architect of the Final Solution, had been apprehended by the Israelis in Argentina and taken to Israel for criminal prosecution. In the minds of Israeli officials, however, the purpose of the trial was not simply to punish Eichmann but to impress upon the rest of the world their moral obligation to support the Jewish state” [iv]
“Increasingly, as Novick (a Jewish historian) suggests, the Holocaust as much as Judaism per se was what gave Jews their sense of common identity, united in the “knowledge that but for the immigration of near or distant ancestors, they would have shared the fate of European Jewry” [v]
A third aspect is to forge a racist Anti-Arab Islamophobic and in particular Anti-Palestinian consciousness among the Israeli Jews and among Jews everywhere. For this, it has been necessary to blame the Arabs and the Muslims and especially the Palestinians for the Holocaust.
It began with the blood libel in Damascus on February 5, 1840. Father Tommaso, the Franciscan Capuchin monk who headed a monastery in Damascus, Syria, disappeared, along with his servant. This event led to what became known as the Damascus Affair, in which a group of Jews in the city found themselves falsely accused of murdering the priest. Acting on claims from the Capuchins that the priest had been killed by Jews who intended to use his blood for the upcoming Passover holiday, Ratti-Menton began rounding up residents of the Jewish Quarter. One of those arrested implicated eight other Jews under torture; they were arrested and also subjected to terrible physical abuse. Two died and a third converted to Islam, in order to have his life spared. The Egyptian governor of Syria, Sherif Pasha, accepted the French findings and approved of the sentence issued to the Jewish defendants. A local crowd attacked and ravaged a Damascus synagogue. In the meantime, local authorities arrested 63 Jewish children, in an effort to force their parents to reveal where the blood of Tommaso was being stored.
Yet the Zionists are using this event to accuse the protesters against the Zionist state’s crimes, of blood libel.
“Yet accusations of Jews performing ritual murder have not disappeared. It is popular in the Islamic world and we are facing a modern blood libel, especially on college campuses, in false attacks on the Jews of Israel for murdering Palestinian children in a campaign of genocide” [vi]
From the claim that protesting the Zionist crimes and their supporters are evil anti-Semites who spread blood libel against the Jews to the accusation that the Palestinians are responsible for the holocaust is only a single step. This step has been taken with the accusation of the Mufti Haj Amin for the Holocaust. On November 13 an article by Mark Regev who was a political adviser to former Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared in the Jerusalem Post. We will present his arguments and then deal with the different levels of half-truths and lies used by him to cover up for the crimes of the Zionists against the Palestinians.
How the Zionists portray the Mufti
The mainline of his argument is the role of the Mufti from 1941 when he escaped to Nazi Germany. The history of the Mufti is of two periods. The first one is between 1920 to 1941 and the second period is from 1941 to his death. Before we deal with Regev’s arguments, let’s have a few lines about the credibility of the Zionist portraying of the Mufti between 1920 and 1941.
According to the Zionist narrative the Mufti: “Under the British Mandate in Palestine, due in part to the power and prestige of his family, Hajj Amin al-Husseini served as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Supreme Muslim Council.” [vii]
What the Zionists hide is the fact that the Mufti won this position because the Zionist British high commissioner Herbert Samuel nominated him to this position even though in the elections to this position, he came the fourth. This is because the British assumed that he would serve the British rule. [viii]
The Zionist claims that he first rose to prominence during the annual religious festival of Nabi Musa in April 1920 by successfully inciting violence against Jews, thereby increasing his popularity among the Palestinians. [ix]
This is another lie as the Zionist military historian general Elipeleg writes: “Indeed he paid the price demanded of him by the British because he needed them.” [x]
Elipeleg does not write that the Mufti was the one behind the clashes in April 1920 and he would not miss such a detail.
The Zionist claim “that in 1928-9, the Mufti again appealed to Islam in order to oppose Jewish efforts to bring benches and partitions to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He repeated his accusation that the Jews were trying to destroy the Muslim holy sites, and, as in 1920, his words incited violence against Jews.” [xi]
Elipleg writes that the Mufti preferred to work with the British and was not behind the clashes. [xii]
According to the Zionist’s claim he wanted to kill all the Jews. “His position would have meant either the expulsion or the slaughter of the majority of the Jews living in Palestine in the late 1930” [xiii]
As a matter of fact, the Mufti accepted the Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the British occupation of Palestine. According to historian Benny Morris, Husseini “consistently rejected territorial compromise and espoused a solution to the Palestine problem that posited all of Palestine as an Arab state and allowed for a Jewish minority composed only of those who had lived in the country before 1917” [xiv]
The Zionists claim that during the Arab Revolt of 1936-9, al-Husseini received German funds and weapons and that Nazi funding enabled him to continue the revolt in Palestine until 1939. [xv] Ellen who wrote 3 chapters on the 1936-9 uprising wrote that the Mufti tried to keep good relations with the British and for this reason he did not call for Jihad and at the same time he tried not to lose his popularity among the rebels. He does not say one word about any support by Nazi Germany and it is impossible that if this allegation was true, he would not mention it. [xvi].
Regev’s arguments
First argument: In 1942 at El Alamein in the North African desert, the German blitzkrieg into the Middle East was halted by the British General Bernard “Montgomery. Had the Axis military advance not been stopped in Egypt, Sinai and Mandatory Palestine would have been next, and there can be little doubt what Nazi occupation would have meant for the half a million Jews living in Palestine.
Had Rommel been victorious at El Alamein there can be little doubt that upon occupying Mandatory Palestine the Germans would have found a collaborationist leadership eager to enlist the local population in the mass killing of the Jews.
Second argument: After the outbreak of the Second World War, The Mufti Amin Husseini helped orchestrate the April 1941 pro-Nazi Rashid Ali coup in Iraq and the subsequent Farhud massacre of Baghdadi Jews. When the British retook the Iraqi capital, Husseini relocated to Berlin where he remained until the German defeat, becoming Hitler’s most outspoken Arab advocate, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Middle East while recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen-SS.
Husseini knew of the “Final Solution” and supported the genocide. From Husseini’s perspective, it was better to murder a million and a half Jewish children than to have those children immigrate to Mandatory Palestine.
Third Argument: Even unabashed anti-Zionist Lebanese intellectual Gilbert Achcar (author of The Arabs and the Holocaust), who sees political logic in Arab nationalists finding common cause with Britain’s axis enemies, regards Husseini’s anti-Semitism and enthusiasm for mass murder totally inexcusable.
Fourth argument: Palestinian historical revisionism includes the contention that the Palestinians are themselves Holocaust victims, claiming that they were forced to pay for Europe’s crimes, losing their homeland so that the West could atone for its sins against the Jews.
Fifth argument: In 2019, Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, herself of Palestinian heritage, seemed to endorse this tortuous argument when she stated that “it was my ancestors – Palestinians – who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence… in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews,” conveniently omitting the Palestinian leadership’s behavior during those fateful years.
Our response
As to the first argument: We do not know what the Palestinians would do to the European settler-colonialists who steal their land. One thing is sure the Zionist state would not be created and 700,000-900,000 Palestinians would not be expelled by the ethnic cleansing of 1947-8.
As to the second argument: the Farhud massacre in Iraq 1941. Jews lived in Iraq for 2000 years. During this long period, the Muslims and the Jews had a friendly relationship. British imperialism occupied Iraq during WWI. Their cruel rule created a nationalist Iraqi movement opposing British imperialism. Towns and villages that resisted the imposition of the British super-exploitation found them subjected to brutal punishment, most notably from the most advanced weapons technology of the day: bombs dropped from airplanes. As the rebellion spread, British warplanes carried out further bombing in late May 1920. Thousands, mostly civilians, were slaughtered. One of the RAF (Royal Air Force) squadron leaders in Iraq was Arthur Harris – who in 1942 would lead the bombing of German cities. During the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden, and scores of other German cities around 600,000 Germans, mostly civilians, perished. The rebellion was crushed and in July 1921 the British declared a puppet government of Fayṣal as king of Iraq. Between 1921 and 1941, there were other rebellions in Iraq. During the rebellion of the Kurds in 1931, the British bombed in February 1931 the villages of Kani Kermanj, Shawazi, and Bagh Anaran on March 28, 1931.
On paper, Iraq won its independence by 1932 but in reality, the British imperialists were the real rulers. In April 1941 a new nationalist movement led by Ali Rashid Gaylani took power. They remained in power from April 3 to the end of May 1941.
The government of Rashid Ali received arms and political support from Nazi Germany and Italian fascism. However, it was not controlled by the Nazis or Italian fascism. The Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Amin al-Husseini escaped from Palestine to Iraq, after the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-9 was crashed with the helped of the Zionists who collaborated with the government of Ali Rashid.
There is no question that the government of Ali Rashid was pro-Nazi along the line of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend“.
The Jews of Iraq belonged to three different groups. The religious, the middle and lower upper class, and members of the communist party that became a Stalinist party. The middle and upper-class Jews supported the British imperialists. On June 1st and 2nd, a pogrom against the Jews took place in Bagdad. The Zionist lie that the government of Ali Rashid and the Mufti of Jerusalem are responsible for the pogrom is proven by the dates. The pogrom was not the responsibility of the government of Ali Rashid that as matter of fact protected the Jews because the pogrom took place after the government of Ali Rashid was not in power by the end of May.
But what about the fact that the government of Ali Rashid received weapons from Nazi Germany and Italian fascism? Does it not prove they were war criminals?
Trotsky replied to this question long ago:
“Let us assume that rebellion breaks out tomorrow in the French colony of Algeria under the banner of national independence and that the Italian government, motivated by its own imperialist interests, prepares to send weapons to the rebels. What should the attitude of the Italian workers be in this case? I have purposely taken an example of rebellion against democratic imperialism with intervention on the side of the rebels from a fascist imperialism. Should the Italian workers prevent the shipping of arms to the Algerians? Let any ultra-leftists dare answer this question in the affirmative. Every revolutionist, together with the Italian workers and the rebellious Algerians, would spurn such an answer with indignation. Even if a general maritime strike broke out in fascist Italy at the same time, even in this case the strikers should make an exception in favor of those ships carrying aid to the colonial slaves in revolt; otherwise, they would be no more than wretched trade unionists – not proletarian revolutionists. At the same time, the French maritime workers, even though not faced with any strike whatsoever, would be compelled to exert every effort to block the shipment of ammunition intended for use against the rebels. Only such a policy on the part of the Italian and French workers constitutes the policy of revolutionary internationalism.
Does this not signify, however, that the Italian workers moderate their struggle in this case against the fascist regime? Not in the slightest. Fascism renders “aid” to the Algerians only in order to weaken its enemy, France, and to lay its rapacious hand on her colonies. The revolutionary Italian workers do not forget this for a single moment. They call upon the Algerians not to trust their treacherous “ally” and at the same time continue their own irreconcilable struggle against fascism, “the main enemy in their own country”. Only in this way can they gain the confidence of the rebels, help the rebellion and strengthen their own revolutionary position“. [xvii]
Responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust?
The fact that the Mufti opposed the Jewish immigration to Palestine considering the nature of the Zionist settler colonialists does not make him responsible for the Jewish holocaust. Four political factors are responsible for the Jewish holocaust. The first one is all of those forces that fought against the socialist revolution, the only thing that could prevent WWII and save among others the Jews. The second one is the Nazi regime and those who collaborated with the murder of the Jews. The third one is the imperialist countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, and Britannia that closed the gates to the Jews. The fourth one is the Zionists who apply pressure on these countries not to open the gates before the Jewish refugees. For them, a Jew who did not immigrate to Palestine did not matter.
“In the struggle for Palestine, no matter was too small to receive Ben-Gurion’s attention. Yet his response to the greatest threat to Jewish survival was strangely disengaged. “The catastrophe of European Jewry is not directly my responsibility,’ he said when asked about the work of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee, established in 1942. Segev reveals that Ben-Gurion had learned about the extermination of Polish Jews a year earlier, from a Palestinian Christian businessman in the US; he also met a woman from Poland who told him a ‘story of horrors and torments that no Dante or Poe could possibly imagine’. But his mission was to save ‘the Hebrew nation in its land’ rather than to save Jews from destruction. As he told members of Mapai in 1938, “if I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.” [xviii]
The Israeli historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein wrote on this question:
“Three reasons for the outburst of the pogrom are accepted among all researchers: 1. The anti-colonial struggle was led by the national Iraqi movement against the British. Because Jews collaborated with the pro-British regime and opposed the pro-Nazi coup, they were looked upon as traitors and the enemy of the Iraqi people. 2. The Arab-Jewish dispute in Palestine. In October 1939, Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti who was expelled from Jerusalem, arrived in Baghdad and since then had a decisive role in organizing the coup and connecting with Nazi Germany for political and military support. It’s important to point out that there had been no Zionist movement in Iraq since 1935. 3. The Nazi influence in Iraq. It included the publishing of Mein Kampf in a local newspaper, disseminating anti-Semitic ideas in a propaganda film, and in radio broadcasting. The youth movement ‘el fittuwa’, similar to the Hitler Jugend in Germany was influenced by Nazi ideology and Fascist values These groups took an active role in the pogrom ” [xix]
She goes on and says: “How was Farhud explained in Iraq? 1.The British and Iraqi regime: The British blamed Zionism for the event. The ambassador Kinehan Kornwalis claimed: ‘Unavoidably, and even if it’s not true, they [Iraqi Jews] were considered Zionists and paid the price, not only in money donations… but also with their blood’. (25.9.1941) Nuri as-Said, the Iraqi politician, told Moshe Shertok in their meeting in Cairo in July 1941: ‘For many generations, the Jews of Baghdad lived safe and secured, and if something like that happened, it happened only because of Palestine. It is true that Nazi-Arabs aroused and organized the pogrom, but they could do it only by using the subject of Palestine’. (from Shertok report in Merkas Mapai, 27.7.1941) 2. The Jewish religious leadership According to the traditional Jewish commentary, the Iraqi Jewish rabbis cast the blame on the wide secularization process in the community, claiming it was a punishment for the weakening of the traditional religious practices and customs, and as a lesson, they demanded penitence חזרה )בתשובה. (The sins noted by the rabbis were denial of the belief in payment and punishment and in the afterlife, shaving the beard, and also young women not going to the Mikveh. (Mukamal) 3. The leaders of the community It seems that the religious interpretation was not accepted by the secular leadership of the community. They (Ibrahim El Kabir, Yusuf El Kabir, the president Rabbi Sasson Khaduri and others) connected the Farhud to the colonialist system, to the cooperation between the Jews and the British, and to the hostility of the Iraqi national movement” [xx].
She further says:
“Thereupon, they blamed the British who had abandoned them as a part of their ‘divide and rule policy. One of the Yishuv’s 4 soldiers who served in Iraq in the British army, wrote: ‘The Jews believe that instead of the Assyrian play ball, this year the English chose the Jews’. Practically, the leaders preferred lobbying among political figures, hoping to maintain their good connections and their ability to influence. This behavior tells us that the leadership did not interpret it as a catastrophe and did not foresee a massacre or general destruction. This conception is described by the community secretary, Shalom Darwish, some year later: ‘We have been in Iraq for two thousand years and will continue to be for more two thousand maybes, maybe until the messiah days, so we must live in peace with the Iraqi people. 4. Prof. Elie Kedourie researched British documents in the 1970s. In profound and well-documented research, he concluded that the colonial situation and the cooperation of the Jewish minority with the British were the main reason for the Farhud. ‘Baghdadi Jews’, he summarized, ‘were killed and robbed as British supporters’. (p. 91)
Unlike the Jews of Iraq the Zionists in Palestine distorted the real history and: When the first news arrived in Israel, the Zionist leadership connected the event with the anti- Semitism of Iraq’s Muslims, the Mufti, and the Nazis, and rejected any accusation that blamed Zionism for the destruction of in Arab-Jewish relations in the Arab countries. In a meeting of Merkaz Mapai on July 9th, 1941, the participants compared the Farhud with the pogrom that took place in Yassi in Rumania at the same time. How was the Farhud perceived by the Zionist-Israeli emissaries in Iraq? During World War II it was perceived mainly as a part of the exile’s distresses, in the context of anti-Semitism and the pogroms in Europe. The Farhud memory was aimed to convince Iraqi Jews with the justification and validity of Zionism” [xxi]
She also says: “The Holocaust, in the very time of its occurrence, was ‘recruited’ by the Israeli emissaries, in their struggle for Zionist achievements in Iraqi Jewish society. In these and many other texts, we see some elements connecting Iraqi Jews to the Holocaust.”
She also says: “The pogrom occurred at the end of an anti-British and pro-Nazi coup and continued for two months, April and May 1941. During these months, the pro-Nazi regime protected the Jews so the pogrom began as soon as the regime collapsed and its leaders fled from Baghdad” [xxii]
The lie that the Mufti of Jerusalem is responsible for the Jewish holocaust was used by the former Zionist Prime Minister Netanyahu more than once.
In 2015 the former Prime Minister Netanyahu: claimed that Hitler did not want to kill the Jews but the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin after he arrived in Berlin convinced him to kill the Jews: “In a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting between Husseini and Hitler in November 1941: “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here (to Palestine).’ According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”
Netanyahu made a similar claim during a Knesset speech in 2012, where he described the Husseini as “one of the leading architects” of the final solution Netanyahu was not the only Zionist to spread the vile line that the Palestinians are responsible for the Jewish holocaust. In a book by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” the authors, like Netanyahu, draw a straight line between the mufti’s support of Hitler and the policy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat.” [xxiii]
This lie was exposed as the Mufti of Jerusalem arrived in Berlin after Hitler began the mass killing of the Jews.
“Netanyahu’s lie was exposed by historians who pointed out that the Nazis began the mass killing of the Jews before Haj Amin arrived in Berlin Tom Segev, a leading Israeli historian who has conducted extensive research on the Holocaust, told The Times of Israel Wednesday that the notion that Hitler needed to be convinced to exterminate the Jews was “entirely absurd.” He stressed that “one can surely say that [Husseini] was a war criminal, but one cannot say Hitler needed his advice.”
Segev, born in Jerusalem to parents who escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, further stressed that by the time Husseini and Hitler met in 1941, the annihilation of the Jews had already begun. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators by the time of the meeting.” [xxiv]
The Mufti however by organizing Muslims to fight under the control of imperialist Germany crossed the line between the legitimate struggle for national liberation and subordination to imperialism and for this he should be condemned.
At the same time, the Zionists who served British imperialism and oppressed the Palestinians are worse than the Mufti and are the last ones with the moral right to present the Mufti as a war criminal.
Zionists serving British imperialism
Were the Zionists only making the transfer deal with Nazi Germany for saving the Jews it could be considered a reasonable deal? However, they went further in their rotten politics and helped to destroy the boycott on Nazi Germany. They persecuted the volunteers who went to Spain to fight Franco and the Nazis. While the volunteers went to Spain, the Zionists were busy together with the British army in terrorizing the Palestinians fighting for their national liberation.
Since the Allies won the war against the Axis powers the winners were considered the good guys and the Axis the war criminals. In reality, the USA and British imperialism committed war crimes as did the German, the Italian, and the Japanese imperialists. Was the bombing of German cities different from the German bombing of British cities? Was the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities not a war crime? Was not the starving to death millions of Indians in the Bengal famine of 1942/3 by Churchill war crime? 100 million people, mostly civilians, were killed for a war over markets and colonies, is that not a huge war crime?
The Zionists love to call the Palestinians terrorists to justify their crimes against the Palestinians. However, even before the establishment of the Zionist state the Zionists settler colonialists together with the British army in Palestine committed many terrorist actions.
In 1938 the British army officer Orde Wingate, a Christian Zionist fanatical supporter of a Jewish state formed a special terrorist unit Special Night Squads (SNSs) and filled it with Zionists soldiers training for a future war against the local Palestinians. The Special Night Squads (SNSs) were created to defeat the Palestinian Arab revolt, 1936–39. This unit brutally targeted civilians and villages. Committing atrocities is the nature of such war crimes, when an imperial power collaborated with loyalist colonialist settlers against the native Palestinians. This terrorist unit included many future Zionists generals such as Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan.
British SNS brutality prompted Jewish soldiers, taught them how to deal with insurgency within a colonial legal framework of collective punishment and punitive action that normalized draconian actions.
For example, after a Palestinian guerrilla carried a sabotage action against the Iraq Petroleum Company oil pipeline “the SNAs threw grenades into the houses of the peasants. The SNSs in their five-month operational life under Wingate from June to October 1938, and then under Bredin, carried out a set of outrages at Kfar Hittin, Nin, Kufur Masr Danna, Silat al-Dahr (, Beisan (in Hebrew Beit She’an and in and around Dabburiyya, alongside cumulative acts of extra-judicial brutality in unnamed villages. These all occurred in lower Galilee in the Jezreel Valley or near Tiberias.” [xxv]
“Such actions are reminiscent of the disposal of bodies by the French army during the Algerian insurgency in the 1950s or by Latin American armies later on. At times, dead Arabs were just ‘villagers who got in the way’, caught in indiscriminate shooting by squads entering villagers suspected of harboring rebel fighters.” [xxvi]
“The terror inflicted by the SNSs was of classical proportions: one favored method used by British and Jewish soldiers alike in Galilee was that of the Roman legions—decimation, with variations on the proportion to be killed, and aimed at intelligence gathering, rifle gathering or simply to instill fear into local villagers. The Jews executed every eighth male villager in Kufur Masr (or Kafr Misr) to get them to hand over illegally held rifles. They were not forthcoming with the rifles, and the next time every eighth man.” [xxvii]
This was the training school the Zionists used in 1947-8 for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians when they committed between 30 and 40 massacres.
As to the third argument of Regev: It is clear that the Mufti was anti-Zionist and he became an anti-British imperialist. It is not at all sure that he became Anti-Semite. In 1937 he accepted that Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the arrival of the British would be citizens of the Palestinian state. He opposed those who came to Palestine with the aim of colonizing it. When he was in Iraq, he was a supporter of Ali Rashid who used his government’s power to protect the Jews. While he was in Berlin, he opposed Zionist immigration to Palestine. He was not opposed to the idea that they will be allowed to go to other countries. The argument that because he prevented the Jews from Bulgaria from immigrating to Palestine, he and the Palestinians are responsible for the death of these Jews is a false argument. It is a typical Zionist argument that the only place Jews should go to save their lives in Palestine, and no other country. In Iraq during the pro-Nazi government of Ali Rashid protected the Jews. However, by organizing Muslim soldiers under the command of the Nazis he crossed the lines separating between getting support from one imperialist against another to subordinating to one imperialist, Nazi Germany. The Mufti was asked about his political sympathy to Nazi Germany he replied that he never accepted the Zionist ideology but Germany did not kill Arabs and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
In Israel, one of the Prime ministers was Shamir who belonged during the British Mandate to Lehi. The Jerusalem Post broke a national taboo by the writing of a 1941 link between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang guerrillas and Nazi Germany.
“The episode, known to historians, is almost never mentioned in a country that reveres the memory of 6 million European Jews, including Shamir’s entire family, killed by the Nazis during World War II. The respected English-language daily, which bitterly opposes Shamir, broke the silence in an editorial blasting “obscene attacks” by the premier and other right-wingers on the Peace Now movement’s contacts with Palestinians….” it is disturbing memory (of the Stern Gang) . . . which, with the Final Solution already underway in all but name, sought out German cooperation in the setting up here of a Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis.” The Nazis rejected the plan because it clashed with their bid for support from Arab nationalists. With the exception of a hostile statement by concentration camp survivors against Shamir when he first took power in 1983, the Israeli press virtually never mentions the episode.” [xxviii]
As to the fourth argument, it is a typical Zionist argument to silence the opposition to the Zionist crimes against the Palestinians and other Arabs.
Yes, the Mufti who was a reactionary served at first the British and then the German imperialists. The same is true for the Zionists who served the British and the German imperialists. The difference is that the Mufti was a Palestinian leader of an oppressed nation fighting against the British and the Zionist settler colonialists, while the Zionists are the oppressors who stole Palestine and expelled most of the native population. That they have been doing what they say the Mufti would do. To justify their crimes the Zionists are demonizing the Mufti of Jerusalem and rewriting history.
Endnotes:
[i] Kermit Roosevelt: The Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics Middle East Journal, Jan., 1948, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan. 1948), pp. 1-16 Published by: Middle East Institute Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4321940
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Ronald j. Berger: Jewish Americans and the holocaust, Aging Gracefully in America Sega WINTER 2010, Vol. 9, No. 1,, pp. 40-45
[iv] Ibid
[v] Ibid
[vi] Eli Kavon (rabbi of congregation Anshei Sholom in West Palm Beach, Florida): How the blood libel penetrated into the Islamic world – Accusations that Jews murdered Christians and siphoned off their blood to bake matzah for Passover were a feature of Christendom for centuries: March 20, 2021. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/how-the-blood-libel-penetrated-into-the-islamic-world-opinion-662634
[vii] Joseph S. Spoerl: Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp.14-47
[viii] Zvi Elpeleg: Grand Mufti 1990 Hebrew PP 14-15
[ix] Joseph S. Spoerl: Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp.14-47
[x] Zvi Elipeleg: Grand Mufti 1990 Hebrew p 19
[xi] Joseph S. Spoerl: Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp.14-47
[xii] Zvi Elpeleg: Grand Mufti 1990 Hebrew p 25
[xiii] Joseph S. Spoerl Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp.14-47
[xiv] Benny Morris: 1948, 408
[xv] Joseph S. Spoerl: Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2014, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp.14-47
[xvi] Zvi Elpeleg: Grand Mufti 1990 Hebrew pp 46-58
[xvii] Leon Trotsky: Learn to Think A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists (May 1938)
[xix] Esther Meir-Glitzenstein: The Farhud as History and Memory in the Writings of Iraqi-Jewish Intellectuals, https://in.bgu.ac.il/humsos/hercen/Jewish%20Thought/Shared%20Documents/Meir-Glitzenstein,%20Esther.The%20Farhud%20as%20History%20and%20Memory%20in%20the%20Writings%20of%20Iraqi-Jewish%20Intellectuals.pdf
[xx] Ibid
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] Ibid
[xxiii] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/netanyahu-absolves-hitler-of-guilt-1.5411578
[xxiv] https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-accused-of-absolving-hitler-for-holocaust
[xxv] Matthew Hughes: Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish Collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Palestine during the Arab Revolt, 1938–39 The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Volume 43, 2015 – Issue 4:
[xxvi] Ibid
[xxvii] Ibid
[xxviii] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-07-mn-330-story.html