Israeli PM 'inventing history'

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of distorting history and defaming Palestinians over his claim on Holocaust.

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Jerusalem -

Benjamin Netanyahu was accused on Wednesday by leading Israeli Holocaust historians of engaging in “invention” of history after he claimed that Adolf Hitler was persuaded by a Second World War-era Palestinian leader to carry out genocide against the Jews.

Speaking to Jewish leaders on Tuesday night, the Israeli Prime Minister, in an effort to prove that Palestinian incitement against Jews has deep historical roots, referred to attacks by Muslims against Jews in the 1920s which he said were fomented by the then mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Mr Netanyahu recalled that Husseini, an ardent Nazi supporter, flew to visit Hitler in Berlin in 1941.

He told his audience that at that meeting, Husseini convinced Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

“Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Mr Netanyahu said.

“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. “He said 'Burn them.”'

The remarks came amid angry recriminations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders over who is responsible for the violence that erupted early this month and threatens to escalate into an all-out Palestinian uprising.

They mark a continuation of Israeli efforts to portray the Palestinians as being motivated by sheer hatred of Jews, rather than by grievances against Israeli occupation.

Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of “lying”, most recently after the Palestinian leader said in a speech that Israelis had executed a 13-year-old Palestinian “in cold blood”.

The youth, who had been wounded while carrying out a stabbing attack, was in fact alive and recuperating in an Israeli hospital.

But on Wednesday it was Mr Netanyahu who stood accused of distorting history and defaming Palestinians. “I don't know where he got that crazy idea from,” said Yehuda Bauer, academic adviser to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. “The development towards what the Nazis called the final solution was a purely German affair; nobody outside Germany had any influence whatsoever on it. Hitler certainly did not need a religious fanatic from the Middle East to tell him what to do. It's pure invention.”

Mr Bauer, a laureate of Israel's highest honour, the Israel Prize, said: “It's true the mufti was a murderous anti-Semite who fully supported the most radical policies the Nazis were developing, and he was very worried the Nazis would leave the Jews of the world alive when they finished with Europe and the Middle East. But it wasn't the mufti who presented things to Hitler, it was Hitler who told the mufti what the policy would be.”

Mr Bauer stressed that the mass murder of Jews started with Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941 and estimated that by November that year, when Hitler met Husseini, about a million had already been murdered.

More than two years earlier, in January 1939, Hitler had addressed the Reichstag, Nazi Germany's parliament, and spoke clearly about his determination to exterminate the “Jewish race”.

While Mr Netanyahu said in his speech that Husseini “had a central role in fomenting the final solution”, Moshe Zimmerman, a Hebrew University scholar of German history, charged that Mr Netanyahu was “inventing something totally unfounded” in order to discredit the Palestinians. “The role of Husseini in the whole story of Nazi Jewish policy was a marginal one,” he said.

Mr Zimmerman said a “protocol” of the Husseini-Hitler meeting written by Hitler's translator, Paul Schmidt, contains “no quotation like the one Netanyahu made - Netanyahu just invented a dialogue of which there is nothing in the protocol.”

In fact, he said: “The protocol says there is a unity of aims of Germany and the Arabs concerning the fate of the Jews in the Middle East. This is an allusion to something we can interpret as killing the Jews, but there is no indication of an initiative taken by the mufti in order to make Hitler change his decision about how to solve the so-called Jewish question.”

Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestine Liberation Organisation spokeswoman, said Mr Netanyahu had made “an absurd and bizarre claim” and invented a “fictitious conversation”. The Israeli leader, she said, “absolves the worst criminal in modern history for the sake of maligning and defaming the Palestinians once again”.

In Berlin, Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Mr Netanyahu's remarks were “no reason to change our view of history. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”

Israeli opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog said Mr Netanyahu's statements “fall like a ripe fruit into the hands of Holocaust deniers” by minimising Hitler's role. His Labour party colleague, MP Itzik Shmuli, added: “This is not the first time Netanyahu has distorted historical facts, but a lie of this magnitude we haven't seen before. Netanyahu must personally ask forgiveness from all the Holocaust survivors.”

But Mr Netanyahu said before leaving for Germany to meet John Kerry, US Secretary of State, for talks on the violence, that he had not meant to detract from Hitler's responsibility. “Hitler is responsible for the final solution and he made the decision,” he said. He criticised “certain researchers” for “apologetics about the central role” of Husseini”.

“My goal wasn't to free Hitler of responsibility but rather to show that the father of the Palestinian nation then, without a state and what is called 'occupation', without territories and settlements, already then sought through systematic incitement to destroy the Jews,” he said.

The Independent