Addressing the 37th annual Zionist Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu said this:
And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he 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. He said, "Burn them." And he was sought in, during the Nuremberg trials for prosecution. He escaped it and later died of cancer, after the war, died of cancer in Cairo. But this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini said. He said, ":The Jews seek to destroy the Temple Mount." My grandfather in 1920 seeks to destroy…? Sorry, the al-Aqsa Mosque.
The statement was picked up immediately by the Israeli press,
he said something similar in 2012. Netanyahu got
immediate flak from other Israeli politicians:
"This is a dangerous historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimizes the Holocaust, Nazism and…Hitler's part in our people's terrible disaster," [opposition head and Zionist Union leader Isaac] Herzog wrote on his Facebook page. He said Netanyahu's statement – which was made Tuesday in a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers.
[...]
Meretz leader Zehava Galon also criticized Netanyahu's comments: "This is not a Jörg Haider speech. It's not a part of [Mahmoud] Abbas' doctorate. It's a real quote from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," she said. "Maybe the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar in September 1941 – two months before the Mufti and Hitler met - should be exhumed and updated that the Nazis didn't mean to destroy them." Those who can't change the future, she said, "are left with rewriting the past."
[...]
Arab Joint List leader Ayman Odeh said Netanyahu "is rewriting history in order to incite against the Palestinian people. The victims of the Nazi monster, among them millions of Jews, have become cheap propaganda in the service of peace rejectionism. Netanyahu proves every day how dangerous he is for both peoples, and how far he's willing to go to cement his rule and justify his disastrous policies."
The secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Saeeb Erekat,
had this to add:
"On behalf of the thousands of Palestinians that fought alongside the Allied troops in defense of international justice, the State of Palestine denounces these morally indefensible and inflammatory statements," Erekat said.
In a response today, Netanyahu
stuck to his guns.
Thoughts below the orange dome:
There were other intriguing claims in the speech, including:
The only place where the holy shrines of all are absolutely guaranteed is in Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty and of course in the rest of Israel.
which ignores, for instance, the
arson attack on the church of Loaves and Fishes this summer by Jewish extremists.
The fourth big lie is that we are executing Palestinians- executing Palestinians. When our people are fighting back against these knife-wielders, meat-cleaver-wielders, people who try hack to death our citizens and our soldiers and our policemen, they're executing people. [...]
The fifth point is that Israel uses excessive force in general. That's not true either. What do you think would happen on the streets of New York? Let's just imagine the NYPD and people are rushing in the streets trying to knife down their police or innocent passers-by. What would the police do in New York City or in Paris or in Moscow or anywhere else? You know exactly what they would do.
Videos of a
number of incidents have
brought these claims into
question, with officers shooting Palestinians who have their
hands up, and crowds
encouraging soldiers to shoot a 13-year old boy bleeding from being hit by a car after an alleged stabbing attack. Israeli officials have
encouraged officers to shoot rather than arrest attackers and encouraged
civilians to carry arms.
The broader context is that policies, recriminations, footage from incidents and statements from both sides are inflaming sentiments. Netanyahu left unmentioned that Palestinians and other people of color have been attacked by mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere, this includes stabbing attacks, and settlers in the West Bank have launched attacks on Palestinian villages, under the protection of Israeli armed forces. In a speech earlier this week to the Knesset, Netanyahu said:
Today we will advance further severe measures in our battle against those who stir up incitement and terrorism. They will be put into practice as quickly as possible. Israel will act against the murderers, against those attempting to murder innocent civilians and anyone assisting them. Not only that they will not enjoy their rights, we will make them pay a heavy price. Anyone who raises their hand to harm us – that hand will be cut off. We will use – and I do not hesitate to use all measures at our disposal to restore the quiet to Israel's cities.
Editorial commentary has been universally denounciatory, but the discussion forums in many newspapers are
littered with statements supporting Netanyahu's claims.
With respect to the holocaust theories, Bibi seems to be stealing a line from Pamela Geller who has said similar things, though it may be they're both reading from Dershowitz's script.
But these claims are not new, Bernard Lewis, Rafael Medoff and Hannah Arendt called this interpretation into question decades ago:
Rafael Medoff concluded that "actually there is no evidence that the Mufti's presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution" (Rafael Medoff, "The Mufti's Nazi Years Re-examined," Journal of Israeli History, 17, no. 3, 1996). Bernard Lewis also called Wisliceny's documentary testimony into doubt: "There is no independent documentary confirmation of Wisliceny's statements" (Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 156).
In
reviewing the book Icon of Evil, Tom Segev wrote:
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 authors fail to mention this episode.
The book had been inspired by a visit to The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum by the authors, who saw a photograph of Al-Husseini with Hitler prominently displayed there. Tom Segev concluded:
In spite of all this, the book is worth noticing, as it belongs to a genre of popular Arab-bashing that is often believed to be “good for Israel.” It is not. The suggestion that Israel’s enemies are Nazis, or the Nazis’ heirs, is apt to discourage any fair compromise with the Palestinians, and that is bad for Israel.
To a great extent, this is about the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa. Al-Husseini's official role was custodian of al-Aqsa and other Islamic sites in Jerusalem, a post to which he was appointed by the British colonial administration. The mosque and the Temple Mount complex remain a dangerous flashpoint. In
November last year, I noted controversy over the site could spark a third, bloody Intifada.
Netanyahu's claims that the Israeli government does not intend to change the status of the site may well be true, but they ignore numerous statements to the contrary. Senior Israeli politicians have continued to inflame sentiment by talking about Israeli sovereignity over the site for months now, in the past, this has included calls for building a third temple on the site. There is a history of attempts to damage or destroy al-Aqsa which has fueled the flames. Jewish extremists from the settler Gush Emunim movement planned to blow up the mosque in the 1980s (along with Palestinian buses). In 1969, an Australian man set fire to the mosque, claiming he wanted to hasten the "coming of Christ and the Messiah". In surveys, a significant majority of Palestinians believe Israel intends to destroy the mosque.
All this reminds me of the environment prior to the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, India in 1992. The right-wing BJP led a mass effort to to build a temple to Ram on the site, which they believe marks his birthplace. An enormous mob over 100,00 strong overwhelmed security forces and tore down the mosque. Part of that campaign was a series of statements by BJP leaders alluding to past atrocities and dismissing the significance of the Babri masjid.
Mon Oct 26, 2015 at 8:54 AM PT: Assaf's diary on the same topic had a lot more comments: Israel's PM: Hitler Didn't Want to Exterminate Jews - Palestinian Leader Gave the Idea