Netanyahu's Blood Libel Against Palestinians
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/netanyahus_blood_libel_against_palestini
ans_20151023/
Posted on Oct 23, 2015
By Juan Cole
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting with U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin on Thursday. (Carlo Allegri / AP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in remarks in Jerusalem at the
World Zionist Conference, blamed the former mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, for putting Hitler up to the Holocaust. Netanyahu is, of
course, wrong on the history. But the real intent of his outrageous
assertion is to create a blood libel that all Palestinians bear
responsibility for the killing of 6 million Jews by the National Socialist
state. He asserted that al-Husseini's animus was rooted simply in irrational
Jew-hatred, which he alleged characterized the Palestinian masses then and
now, without regard to the issues of the Jewish ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians or of occupation.
In other words, Palestinians, in his view, are genetically disposed to want
Jews dead regardless of context. This essentialization of Palestinians as
mass murderers mirrors the false mythology of medieval and early modern
European Christianity that Jews stole Christian babies and used their blood
in their rites-a myth that lay in part behind the Holocaust.
Netanyahu said:
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
[Hitler] asked. He [al-Husseini] 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.
Amin al-Husseini was a bitter man and a Nazi collaborator, and there are no
excuses for his evil. But he did have a historical context. In 1917 in the
infamous Balfour Declaration, the British colonialists pledged to give
geographical Palestine, with its own indigenous population of nearly a
million, away to Jewish settlers for their "national home." The British
conquered Palestine, and under the terms of the Versailles peace conference,
created it as a "class A Mandate." Unlike the other mandates, such as
British Iraq and French Syria, the charter for the Palestine Mandate did not
focus on British responsibility to stand up a Palestinian government to
which the territory could eventually be turned over. Rather, it was all
about facilitating Jewish settler colonialism.
By 1930, some 200,000 Jews had settled with British blessings and help. The
Jewish National Fund ultimately bought up some 6 percent of Palestinian land
and made a proviso that once bought by Jews, this land could never again be
sold to Palestinians. This policy resembled the "covenants" that American
whites put into their mortgages forbidding resale to African-Americans or
Japanese-Americans.
Palestine, like much of the Middle East, was in the midst of a population
explosion. Because in Muslim practice all children inherit property,
Palestinian farms were becoming smaller and smaller in each generation. It
was an agrarian society with little industry and little absorptive capacity
for the newcomers. Alienating a significant further percentage of the land
from these farmers was bound to cause tensions, and it did. Mandate
populations often rose up, as in Iraq in 1920 and Syria in the late 1930s,
against the colonial overlords. The uprising in Palestine was complicated by
the condition of dual colonialism-the administrative colonialism of Britain,
which pushed Palestinians around, and the settler colonialism of Zionist
Jews, which encroached on their resources. In 1936-39 the Palestinians, fed
up, launched a major uprising against the British, in which some targeted
Jews as well, an uprising that was brutally crushed by the British colonial
army.
Al-Husseini, originally a British appointee as Muslim jurisconsult or mufti
of Jerusalem, supported the uprising, was defeated and had to flee. He found
refuge in Nazi Germany and helped organize a unit of Bosnian Muslims, then
being targeted by Serbian Chetnik death squads, to fight on the German side.
He lobbied against allowing European Jews to immigrate to Palestine, lest
his homeland be overwhelmed. In the 1930s, an additional 200,000 Jews had
successfully fled the rising Jew-hating fascists of Europe to Palestine,
making them about a third of the population. Al-Husseini's attempt to
prevent further such flight was a great evil in the circumstances.
But al-Husseini did not put Hitler up to the Holocaust. In a careful journal
article, University of Chicago scholar Michael Sells laid out the story from
the archives of how this urban legend got started. There is no historical
evidence that al-Husseini toured concentration camps or tutored Adolf Hitler
(who had a low opinion of Arabs and would hardly have taken his cues from
one) in killing Jews. Al-Husseini did meet Hitler, but their encounter was
not that important, and the state murder of the Jews had already begun by
that time.
Al-Husseini's collaboration with the Nazis, moreover, was atypical for Arabs
and Palestinians of that era. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski have
demonstrated that the Egyptian political elite tended toward liberalism and
roundly condemned Hitler and his ideas. In my book "Engaging the Muslim
World," I showed that even the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan
al-Banna, strongly condemned Hitler and Nazism because of their racism,
despite his own hatred of the Zionist movement. I have also debunked the
allegation of widespread Iraqi sympathy for the Axis in the 1930s and early
1940s, an allegation that comes in part out of British wartime propaganda.
The British ambassador in Baghdad wrote back to London in 1939 that the
Iraqis were appalled at the German invasion of Poland and saw Germany as a
new colonialist.
Likewise, Hitler's alliance with Mussolini dismayed most Arabs, given their
hatred of Italian colonialism in Libya and Mussolini's known plans to expand
the Italian empire at Arab expense. Obviously, some Arab politicians were
attracted to Hitler's Germany as an offset to British power, but they seldom
had any real notion of Nazi ideology or of plans for extermination of Jews.
They were a small minority, and there is no evidence at all for popularity
of Nazism among the masses. The Egyptian masses were positively in terror of
the joint German and Italian assault on their country from Libya, which was
stopped at al-Alamein. Some Egyptian pilots and the Egyptian navy actively
joined in the war effort against the Germans.
Netanyahu is attempting to paint the Palestinians as congenital Jew-haters,
an attitude he blames on their "medieval Islam," and to reconfigure the
Holocaust as a Palestinian crime supported by all Palestinians. It is a
monstrous blood libel. It inflicts serious injury on history. But its
greatest harm lies in the future, since Netanyahu clearly means to use this
libel to cavalierly rob the Palestinians of their lives, livelihoods and
what is left of their land.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Netanyahu's Blood Libel Against Palestinians
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/netanyahus_blood_libel_against_palestini
ans_20151023/
Posted on Oct 23, 2015
By Juan Cole
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting with U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin on Thursday. (Carlo Allegri / AP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in remarks in Jerusalem at the
World Zionist Conference, blamed the former mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, for putting Hitler up to the Holocaust. Netanyahu is, of
course, wrong on the history. But the real intent of his outrageous
assertion is to create a blood libel that all Palestinians bear
responsibility for the killing of 6 million Jews by the National Socialist
state. He asserted that al-Husseini's animus was rooted simply in irrational
Jew-hatred, which he alleged characterized the Palestinian masses then and
now, without regard to the issues of the Jewish ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians or of occupation.
In other words, Palestinians, in his view, are genetically disposed to want
Jews dead regardless of context. This essentialization of Palestinians as
mass murderers mirrors the false mythology of medieval and early modern
European Christianity that Jews stole Christian babies and used their blood
in their rites-a myth that lay in part behind the Holocaust.
Netanyahu said:
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
[Hitler] asked. He [al-Husseini] 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.
Amin al-Husseini was a bitter man and a Nazi collaborator, and there are no
excuses for his evil. But he did have a historical context. In 1917 in the
infamous Balfour Declaration, the British colonialists pledged to give
geographical Palestine, with its own indigenous population of nearly a
million, away to Jewish settlers for their "national home." The British
conquered Palestine, and under the terms of the Versailles peace conference,
created it as a "class A Mandate." Unlike the other mandates, such as
British Iraq and French Syria, the charter for the Palestine Mandate did not
focus on British responsibility to stand up a Palestinian government to
which the territory could eventually be turned over. Rather, it was all
about facilitating Jewish settler colonialism.
By 1930, some 200,000 Jews had settled with British blessings and help. The
Jewish National Fund ultimately bought up some 6 percent of Palestinian land
and made a proviso that once bought by Jews, this land could never again be
sold to Palestinians. This policy resembled the "covenants" that American
whites put into their mortgages forbidding resale to African-Americans or
Japanese-Americans.
Palestine, like much of the Middle East, was in the midst of a population
explosion. Because in Muslim practice all children inherit property,
Palestinian farms were becoming smaller and smaller in each generation. It
was an agrarian society with little industry and little absorptive capacity
for the newcomers. Alienating a significant further percentage of the land
from these farmers was bound to cause tensions, and it did. Mandate
populations often rose up, as in Iraq in 1920 and Syria in the late 1930s,
against the colonial overlords. The uprising in Palestine was complicated by
the condition of dual colonialism-the administrative colonialism of Britain,
which pushed Palestinians around, and the settler colonialism of Zionist
Jews, which encroached on their resources. In 1936-39 the Palestinians, fed
up, launched a major uprising against the British, in which some targeted
Jews as well, an uprising that was brutally crushed by the British colonial
army.
Al-Husseini, originally a British appointee as Muslim jurisconsult or mufti
of Jerusalem, supported the uprising, was defeated and had to flee. He found
refuge in Nazi Germany and helped organize a unit of Bosnian Muslims, then
being targeted by Serbian Chetnik death squads, to fight on the German side.
He lobbied against allowing European Jews to immigrate to Palestine, lest
his homeland be overwhelmed. In the 1930s, an additional 200,000 Jews had
successfully fled the rising Jew-hating fascists of Europe to Palestine,
making them about a third of the population. Al-Husseini's attempt to
prevent further such flight was a great evil in the circumstances.
But al-Husseini did not put Hitler up to the Holocaust. In a careful journal
article, University of Chicago scholar Michael Sells laid out the story from
the archives of how this urban legend got started. There is no historical
evidence that al-Husseini toured concentration camps or tutored Adolf Hitler
(who had a low opinion of Arabs and would hardly have taken his cues from
one) in killing Jews. Al-Husseini did meet Hitler, but their encounter was
not that important, and the state murder of the Jews had already begun by
that time.
Al-Husseini's collaboration with the Nazis, moreover, was atypical for Arabs
and Palestinians of that era. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski have
demonstrated that the Egyptian political elite tended toward liberalism and
roundly condemned Hitler and his ideas. In my book "Engaging the Muslim
World," I showed that even the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan
al-Banna, strongly condemned Hitler and Nazism because of their racism,
despite his own hatred of the Zionist movement. I have also debunked the
allegation of widespread Iraqi sympathy for the Axis in the 1930s and early
1940s, an allegation that comes in part out of British wartime propaganda.
The British ambassador in Baghdad wrote back to London in 1939 that the
Iraqis were appalled at the German invasion of Poland and saw Germany as a
new colonialist.
Likewise, Hitler's alliance with Mussolini dismayed most Arabs, given their
hatred of Italian colonialism in Libya and Mussolini's known plans to expand
the Italian empire at Arab expense. Obviously, some Arab politicians were
attracted to Hitler's Germany as an offset to British power, but they seldom
had any real notion of Nazi ideology or of plans for extermination of Jews.
They were a small minority, and there is no evidence at all for popularity
of Nazism among the masses. The Egyptian masses were positively in terror of
the joint German and Italian assault on their country from Libya, which was
stopped at al-Alamein. Some Egyptian pilots and the Egyptian navy actively
joined in the war effort against the Germans.
Netanyahu is attempting to paint the Palestinians as congenital Jew-haters,
an attitude he blames on their "medieval Islam," and to reconfigure the
Holocaust as a Palestinian crime supported by all Palestinians. It is a
monstrous blood libel. It inflicts serious injury on history. But its
greatest harm lies in the future, since Netanyahu clearly means to use this
libel to cavalierly rob the Palestinians of their lives, livelihoods and
what is left of their land.
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