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Trump

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="http://www.pmo.gov.il/English/MediaCenter/Speeches/Pages/speechcongress201015.aspx" target="_blank">delivered an address</a> to the World Zionist Congress in which he made the very controversial claim that the Holocaust was instigated by a leading Palestinian cleric.

Netanyahu cited a well-known 1941 meeting between Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to Germany and was colluding with the Nazis. My colleague William Booth <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/21/netanyahu-says-palestinian-gave-hitler-idea-for-the-holocaust/" target="_blank">reported</a> on Netanyahu's speech, which hinged on this key statement:

“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.’"

Netanyahu said the Mufti of Jerusalem had “a central role in fomenting the Final Solution.”

The point of this history lesson was simple: Netanyahu has frequently sought to characterize Palestinian hostility and violence toward Israel not as a product of current political conditions — which he would then have to reckon with — but of a somehow innate, ancient Arab hatred of Jews.

[<em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/22/the-murky-story-behind-netanyahus-claim-of-a-palestinian-role-in-the-holocaust/" target="_blank">The murky story behind Netanyahu's Holocaust claim</a></em>]

The backlash to the speech has been both swift and prolonged. The Israeli opposition <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/21/netanyahu-says-palestinian-gave-hitler-idea-for-the-holocaust/" target="_blank">panned</a> Netanyahu's contention as "dangerous historical distortion." Others have likened it to <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.681790" target="_blank">a form of Holocaust denial</a>, which is technically a crime in Israel. A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel was compelled to remind the world that, indeed, the Holocaust was Germany's fault: "All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust," <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/21/netanyahu-says-palestinian-gave-hitler-idea-for-the-holocaust/" target="_blank">said</a> Steffen Seibert.

And the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.681718" target="_blank">deemed</a> the Israeli leader's revisionism as "completely erroneous, on all counts."

"Hitler did not need anyone to encourage the Final Solution," Dina Porat, who is also a senior historian at Tel Aviv University, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.681718" target="_blank">told</a> the Israeli daily Haaretz. "In terms of the facts, there’s no debate ... all these actions, Hitler’s obsessions, have no link to the mufti." Porat told the Israeli newspaper that the mufti's alleged remarks are not in the recorded minutes.

There is, to be sure, a fair amount of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/21/netanyahu-faitytale-hitler-mufti-holocaust" target="_blank">historical research</a> into the mufti's ideological proclivities and his abhorrent views toward Europe's Jews. He helped the Nazis with wartime propaganda directed toward Muslims and <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007667" target="_blank">called</a> for the destruction of Jewish settlements in Palestine in radio broadcasts. But there is <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.681718" target="_blank">scant evidence</a> that he encouraged the Final Solution or that Hitler even asked the mufti for his advice.

Nevertheless, the meeting has accrued a special political valence now: It's the seminal moment for the advent of "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/10/defending_islamofascism.html" target="_blank">Islamofascism</a>," a concept sometimes invoked by Netanyahu, his supporters and American neoconservatives when speaking of the evils of Islamist extremism.

While a convenient ideological scarecrow, it totally obscures the real forces that drew someone like Husseini into the Nazi orbit around World War II.

At the time, Palestine was under British mandate, a colonial context that Palestinians feared would lead to their dispossession. The British were themselves well aware of Arab grievances in the face of Jewish migration.

"An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country," reported the 1937 Peel Commission, which proposed a partition of the territory that would give the new Jewish state most of the coastline and the country's most fertile agricultural lands. "About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews. There is no common ground in between them."

The mufti's meeting with Hitler was mostly about Husseini's own desire to secure national status for his people and be recognized as a future Arab leader. On both counts, he would be disappointed, as the <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007667" target="_blank">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</a> itself explains:

He also sought public approval from the Axis powers for an independent Arab state or federation to "remove" or "eliminate" the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. He made this declaration a condition for the awaited general uprising in the Arab world. The Germans, and Hitler in particular, repeatedly denied al-Husseini's request for legitimization. They were reluctant to initiate unnecessary disputes with Italy or Vichy France, harbored doubts about the extent of al-Husseini's actual authority in the Arab world, and had reservations about making long-term statements regarding areas of the world beyond the reach of German arms.

As the Israeli historian Tom Segev <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/21/netanyahu-faitytale-hitler-mufti-holocaust" target="_blank">writes</a>, Husseini wanted a "kind of German Balfour declaration for the Arabs," referring to the 1917 British decree that sanctioned the creation of "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.

"Hitler refused to sign such a document. Foolishly, Husseini agreed to have his picture taken with Hitler, which has haunted the Palestinian cause ever since," Segev concludes.

It's also important to note that Husseini was just one of many political figures from parts of the colonial world who saw political gain in allying with the Axis powers.

[<em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/" target="_blank">Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler</a></em>]

In hindsight, World War II lends itself to a simple, stark binary as a conflict between genocidal fascists and their opponents. But for myriad communities that experienced the invasions of the Germans and Japanese, the war offered something else — the prospect of liberation from other occupying empires.

This led to all sorts of brief alliances: Bosnian Muslim regiments in the Waffen SS; Romanians, Hungarians, Ukrainians and other Eastern European nationalists <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.681790" target="_blank">collaborating</a> with the Nazis; Indian freedom fighters <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/my-days-in-the-indian-national-army-by-lakshmi-sahgal-493887" target="_blank">taking up arms</a> against the British with Japanese aid.

Hoping to maintain support in parts of the world still occupied by Britain, the Nazi propaganda apparatus specifically tried to avoid offending Arabs while denouncing Jews, their fellow Semites. In 1943, the Nazis <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/hitler-and-muslims/" target="_blank">printed</a> a million copies of this rather laughable pamphlet to Muslim Arabs, calling on them to rise up and defeat Dajjal, a supposedly evil false prophet:

O Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dajjal has come? Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?… O Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He [Hitler] has already appeared in the world and already turned his lance against the Dajjal and his allies…. He will kill the Dajjal, as it is written, destroy his places and cast his allies into hell.

It's a document that historians now see less as proof of some fundamental connection between the Nazis and the Islamic world than as yet another example of how <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/hitler-and-muslims/" target="_blank">world powers play geopolitics abroad</a>. Indeed, when you consider the United States' own <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/the-taliban-indoctrinates-kids-with-jihadist-textbooks-paid-for-by-the-u-s/" target="_blank">anti-Soviet propaganda efforts</a> in Afghanistan not so long ago, there are immediate and rather chilling echoes.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/21/netanyahu-says-palestinian-gave-hitler-idea-for-the-holocaust/" target="_blank">Netanyahu says Palestinian mufti gave Hitler idea for the Holocaust</a>

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/08/dont-forget-how-the-soviet-union-saved-the-world-from-hitler/" target="_blank">Don't forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler</a>

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/03/the-dark-side-of-winston-churchills-legacy-no-one-should-forget/" target="_blank">The dark side of Winston Churchill</a>

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/19/netanyahus-awkward-relationship-with-the-two-state-solution/" target="_blank">Does Netanyahu really believe in the two-state solution?</a>

Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary, 2021

Yale University, BA, honors in history and ethnicity, race and migration

Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary from the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Ishaan Tharoor

The Washington Post

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