|
 In a speech to the Zionist Congress late on Tuesday, Netanyahu
referred to a series of attacks by Muslims against Jews in Palestine
during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then Mufti of
Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Husseini famously flew to visit Hitler in Berlin in 1941, and
Netanyahu said that meeting was instrumental in the Nazi leader's
decision to launch a campaign to annihilate the Jews.
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted
to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said in the speech. "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?'" Netanyahu said Hitler asked the
mufti, who responded: "Burn them."
Netanyahu, whose father was an eminent historian, was quickly
harangued by opposition politicians and experts on the Holocaust who
said he was distorting the historical record.
 Palestinian officials said Netanyahu appeared to be absolving Hitler
of the murder of six million Jews in order to lay the blame on
Muslims. Twitter was awash with criticism.
"It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli
government hates his neighbor so much that he is willing to absolve
the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the
murder of six million Jews," Saeb Erekat, the Palestine Liberation
Organisation's secretary general, said.
"Mr Netanyahu should stop using this human tragedy to score points
for his political end," said Erekat, the chief Palestinian
negotiator with the Israelis.
Even Netanyahu's defense minister, close ally Moshe Yaalon, said the
prime minister had got it wrong.
"It certainly wasn't (Husseini) who invented the Final Solution,"
Yaalon told Israel's Army Radio. "That was the evil brainchild of
Hitler himself."
It is not clear what sources Netanyahu was relying on for his
comments. A 1947 book "The Mufti of Jerusalem" and a newspaper
report at the time said a former Hitler deputy had testified at the
Nuremberg war crimes trials that Husseini had plotted with the Nazi
leader to rid Europe of its Jews.
Husseini was sought for war crimes but never appeared at the
Nuremberg proceedings and later died in Cairo.
[to top of second column] |
HISTORICAL RECORD
But the point several historians made was that Netanyahu was
distorting timelines and drawing false conclusions.
The meeting between Husseini and Hitler in Berlin took place on
November 28, 1941. More than two years earlier, in January 1939,
Hitler had addressed the Reichstag and talked clearly about his
determination to exterminate the Jewish race.
"To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea
to kill or burn the Jews is not correct," Dina Porat, a professor at
Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's
Holocaust museum, told Israel Radio.
"The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in
Hitler's ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti."
Porat and others pointed out that the murder of the Jews began in
June 1941. Even if the mufti wanted the Final Solution to be
expanded, he wasn't the one who came up with the idea.
"For somebody who knows something about history and grew up in the
house of historian Professor Benzion Netanyahu, he should know
well," Porat said of the prime minister. "But in my humble opinion,
to say that the mufti gave Hitler the idea is wrong."
(Additional reporting by Jeffrey Heller and Ori Lewis; Writing by
Luke Baker; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
