When Monsters Fight: Benjamin Netanyahu Blames a Palestinian Cleric for the Holocaust

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WRITING ABOUT ISRAEL is never easy. Always there is the shadow of the Shoah. The attempted genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis interposes itself between the Israeli people and their critics. The Holocaust is a crime so vast in scope, so horrendous in execution, that the crimes of the Israeli state seem small and petty by comparison. Whatever Israel does risks being absorbed in, and absolved by, the Jewish people’s unique historical tragedy.

A cynic might even go so far as to suggest that the Shoah is Israel’s most precious possession. Those grainy black and white images, recorded by the liberators of the death camps at the end of World War II, are seared upon humanity’s collective memory. The mechanisation – no, the industrialisation – of mass murder marked a definitive break in the supposedly upward trajectory of civilisation. In Auschwitz and Treblinka humankind was presented with an abysmal mirror, into which most people did not care to look.

That the victims of the Holocaust were Jews contributed an inescapably religious dimension to the horror. God’s chosen people, reviled and persecuted across the centuries, had finally become the playthings of pure evil. Who dared object to the traumatised survivors being allowed to return to their ancient homeland? How could the West, who worshipped a crucified Jew, possibly say “No.” to the State of Israel? Hadn’t the Jews earned it?

The answer, of course, is “No. They had bought, borrowed and (in the end) stolen it from the people who had lived in the land the Roman’s called “Palestine” from the Second Century to the late Nineteenth Century, when Theodor Herzl and his Zionists began buying up Palestinian farms and businesses. The encroachment of these Jewish settlers, and their settlements, gathered pace through the early decades of the Twentieth Century, to the point where the Palestinians and their religious leaders rose in angry revolt. One of those leaders, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was to become an implacable enemy of the Zionist project.

Palestinian protests and uprisings against the unceasing encroachments of Israeli settlers and settlements continues to this very day. In its latest manifestation, the resistance takes the form of what amount to suicidal knife attacks on Israelis as they walk the streets of Old Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s belligerent Prime Minister, has taken steps to quell these attacks – by any means necessary!

Few would have predicted, however, that in his determination to rouse the passions of his people, Netanyahu would have seized upon the single most important – and certainly the most sacred – talisman of the Israeli state: the Shoah.

So intense is the Israeli PM’s hatred of the Palestinians that, in a speech to the World Jewish Congress, he claimed that the responsibility for the mass murder of European Jewry lay not with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi co-conspirators, but with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

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“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time”, Netanyahu told the Congress, “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’.”

Historians from all over the world, and many within Israel, responded to Netanyahu’s words with a mixture of fury and disbelief. The Nazi’s genocidal project was commenced long before al-Husseini met with Hitler on 28 November 1941. The infamous Wannsee Conference, held outside Berlin in January 1942, brought together for final approval plans and specifications demanded several months earlier, as the massive logistical implications of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish Question became clear. The Mufti of Jerusalem was little more than a Nazi catspaw in the complex military and diplomatic equation that was the Middle East. For anyone to suggest that he, and, by some curious Zionist variant of the “blood libel”, the Palestinian people, were responsible for the Holocaust would be outrageous. But for the Prime Minister of Israel to make such a statement, in the midst of serious sectarian strife, is beyond outrageous – it is criminal.

It also marks an important, and quite possibly fatal, deterioration in the intellectual and moral condition of Zionism. That a Zionist leader is willing to publicly exonerate Adolf Hitler for the extermination of six million Jews, and place the blame, instead, upon a Palestinian cleric, indicates how abysmal are the depths into which the defenders of Israel have fallen.

The Nineteenth Century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Have we not just seen the abyss swallow up the monster called Netanyahu?

 

20 COMMENTS

  1. By the way, Chris, re your reference to this;

    They had bought, borrowed and (in the end) stolen it from the people who had lived in the land the Roman’s called “Palestine” from the Second Century to the late Nineteenth Century, when Theodor Herzl and his Zionists began buying up Palestinian farms and businesses.

    That is a lesson all New Zealand should take, whether the purchasers of our farms and houses be from Berlin, Boston, or Beijing…

  2. There is no doubt that the Shoah can and has been used as a “Get-out-of-Gaol-Free” card. And yes, this has always posed an ethical dilemma for me. This is because I was brought up in a very left wing British family, whose contribution to “The Great Patriotic War” was sundry grandparents and uncles. From age talk onwards in answer to my “why?” it was always 1) to defeat Hitler, 2) to rescue the jews. Taken daily like mother’s milk this has left me with a very pro-Israel outlook most unusual in a left winger.

    The Shoah is not just the property of the jews; it was certainly about their extinction but the shadow it casts is over us all. We are all connected to the responsibilty for it and the elimination of it. We all had a part to play in it and I suspect the resolution of the Palestinian’s quagmire also requires all of us to pay attention and deal with it.

    The state of Israel is not simply going to go away. The dispossession and dislocation of the Palestinian people is not simply going to go away. So what is the sound of one hand clapping?

    But given that, there are a number of complicating factors as well. American and Russian (formerly Soviet) foriegn policy in the Middle East as well as western banking interests has turned a toxic stew positively thermonuclear.

    The imbalance of deaths in this conflict, Palestinians killed vs Israelis killed is a very clear and disturbing subtext which has been made visible by Israel with the erection of the wall. The Israelis may not be as far into the abyss as the Nazis were, but they are now well on their way. At least where the Soviets were with their divided Berlin. The Shoah card does not give them license for this.

    There are calls for UN intervention. Why? What good did UN intervention do in Serbia? A powerless policeman is worse than no policeman.

    Faced with this complicated recipe, simple answers seem very attractive. Eliminate Israel; Eliminate the Palestinians; Send in the US Cavalry; Send in the Spetznatz; Wipe out the Jews; Wipe out the Muslims; Seize the Suez Canal; Grab all the oil… Kinda makes me think of Donald Rumsfeld’s wish list.

    Do not think for one moment that aligning ourselves with popular causes is going to settle this business. It’s going to take something way bigger than that.

    לך לשלום

    اذهب بسلام

    • Nope. I don’t think popular movements will change business behaviour at all.

      Finance will cut the U.S. Arms trade with Isreal leaving Isreal in a very tricky position.

    • Sadly this situation is going to continue for as long as the Palestinians and the Israelis refuse to recognise each others’ right to exist. And because of the extreme power imbalance of a repressive, armed to the teeth Israeli state against disempowered, ghetto-ised, Palestinians, aided and abetted by the USA, nothing is likely to change in the foreseeable future.

      • Sorry I should clarify that. What I meant in my first sentence is that the current situation will persist as long as the Palestinians and Israelis refuse to recognise the right of the others’ STATE to exist.

        Any potential state of the Palestinians is constantly getting smaller and smaller of course. The evidence, and Netanyahu’s own words, suggest his government has no intention of ever agreeing to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

    • @ COUNTRYBOY – Yes.

      Through descent, he is very much part of the game of stealth. He’s entrenched in it!

  3. Excellent blog Chris. Thank you for speaking out on what has been one of the greatest shams of the 20/21 centuries!

    The picture of Netanyahu accompanying this blog, speaks volumes. Pure evil in almost every respect!

  4. Interesting stuff.

    I read Mien Kampf – it was pretty dark and difficult… particularly as you knew where it was all going to lead…pretty depressing to be honest…

    But I do recall part of it was repatriation of Jews and Slavs to work as slaves in the east – ie : Russia and other Slavic states under Lebenscraum.

    It didn’t say much about extermination – certainly on the scale that occurred , and I recall that it was a suggested method after the book by other individuals.

    I’m wondering if… the Mufti was a token invite to the Wannsee conference because soon into the war Germany needed oil – certainly Germany had strong interests in the middle east …so perhaps he was a kind of representative … particularly from Jerusalem and particularly from Palestine…

    Perhaps the Nazi’s wanted to tread softly there until a later date when their empire was consolidated. And then enslave whoever they chose. Perhaps also they did not want to have too many fronts – they already were being stretched…

    On the subject of the Jews and their Biblical historic homeland, expelled under Titus in the year 70 AD , and the ensuing Jewish dispersal…

    It would seem natural for different family’s and tribes to move into that region because it was left somewhat vacant ….so over two thousand years… it more or less was known as Palestine not Israel…

    Then we have the migrations of the Semite Jews themselves after that …most appeared to have traveled to places like Spain and France… whereas the Kazarkian Ashkenazi proselyte Jews migrated up from Kazakhstan into Russia , Poland and East Germany…

    In the end it matters not…millions of innocents died because of the insanity of Nazi ideology…

    The question is …how long do a race/people have to have been absent from a land before it no longer can be called their homeland?

    The difference here is the modern state of Israel was created – and not least by finance from the Rothchild family – at least in its earlier stages…the Rothchilds financed the building of the Knesset and legal chambers…and also many of the earlier migrations into Palestine and establishing the settler Kibbutz’s….

    And so it became a financed project …gaining some legitimacy with the Balfour agreement… whereby a promise was made to bring the USA into
    WW1 in return for a guarantee of the creation of a Jewish state , but Britain moderated that and that is where the concentration camps containing settlers came from…

    Ask yourselves this : if you were a prosperous Jewish European family with business interests tied up in Europe and the west…how keen would you have been to uproot?

    But after the holocaust there was a clear impetus.

    However , what we are seeing now is an overly aggressive and belligerent excuse for ‘ ensuring ‘ Israels interests …backed by the USA who also have many Jewish individuals in their political system.

    And it is interesting that there have been hundreds of public demonstration’s by Orthodox Jews against what they call ‘ Zionism ‘. They are dead against it.

    In both the USA and Israel , these Orthodox Jews are amongst Zionism’s harshest critics. They see extreme Zionism as more to do with playing global politics than a patriotic fervour for the modern state of Israel…

    And it would appear that whats going on at the moment with the atrocities against the Palestinians has far more to do with extremist Zionism globalism than Israels domestic interests…if those are Israels ‘domestic ‘ interest’s we are seeing ,… well that’s pretty darn exclusivist…tantamount to apartheid , in fact.

    Its gone well overboard now.

    It would be interesting if in future because of mounting economic and military tensions in the middle east that the U.N doesn’t temporarily set up office in Jerusalem…

    Extreme Zionism would then be complete.

    • It’s worth reading Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel’s descriptions in his book ‘Night’ to gain an insight into historic documented evidence.

      “Later, I learned from a witness that for months after the massacre, the ground did not stop trembling and that from time to time, geysers of blood spurted up out of the earth.”

      “Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load — little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it — saw it with my own eyes … Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.) “

      • Alexander Cockburn has a good piece

        http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/21/truth-and-fiction-in-elie-wiesels-night/

        This has been touted as historical truth for years.

        “Amazon.com got the message quickly enough. The site had been categorizing the new edition of Night under “fiction and literature” but, under the categorical imperative of Kakutani’s “memory as a sacred act” or a phone call from Wiesel’s publisher, hastily switched it to “biography and memoir”. Within hours it had reached number 3 on Amazon’s bestseller list. That same evening, January 17, Night topped both the “biography” and “fiction” bestseller lists on BarnesandNoble.com. “

  5. When I heard about this the other day, my first thought was “Netanyahu has officially lost all credibility and is losing his marbles”. Rewriting history for political gain is a very risky undertaking, especially one that is so well documented (mostly by Jews!).

  6. People should not be afraid to criticize the actions of the Israeli regime. It’s not for nothing that some of the most articulate, passionate and well-informed critics are Jews: Ilan Pappé, Max Blumenthal, Naomi Klein, Jeff Halper, Anthony Loewenstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Norman Finkelstein and others.
    The oppression of the Palestinians has been ongoing for decades, and is getting worse. Several powerful Israelis are openly hinting at genocide. Gideon Levy has said on more than one occasion that Israel will not change without outside pressure for 3 reasons, that is, too many Israelis: literally believe that they are chosen by God, see themselves as always the victims, don’t consider the Palestinians human. Ten years ago, Palestinian NGOs asked for outside pressure, nonviolent pressure in the form of BDS, boycott, divest, sanction.
    McCully’s most recent speech to the UN, calling for more negotiations to lead to a 2 State solution was pathetic. For how many more decades should a very weak side ‘negotiate’ with one of the most militarily powerful regimes on the planet? As for a 2 State solution, that died with Oslo (1993) actually. Netanyahu put the nail in the coffin by establishing Jewish colonies all over the West Bank. Israel is one State and always will be. Samah Sabawi talks of the One State Reality. So the issue is what kind of a State? A State in which one ethnic group is extremely cruel to the other, much crueler than apartheid South Africa was, or a secular State based on dignity and freedom and equality for all?
    New Zealand could show some moral backbone by divesting pension funds from corporations that profit from Israeli oppression: G4S, Israel Chemicals and Caterpillar are 3 examples. New Zealand could demand the lifting of the siege of Gaza. But our political leaders will do nothing without pressure from below. We, civil society around the world , have to demand an end to Israel’s impunity.
    As for Netanyahu’s history revision that Chris Trotter referred to , Norman Finkelstein says that Netanyahu has “lost his marbles”.

    • It must be desperate times for Netanyahu if he is prepared to so readily trivialise the holocaust in this way. Netanyahu needs to turn Palestinians into monsters so he could continue with brutalisation of Palestinians with impunity. But Alas,history speaks for itself and Netanyahu has already been discredited as a fear-mongering lier (think Iran deal). What truly amazes me is the audacity of the Israel Ambassador to NZ who, in his letter to The Press yesterday, accused UNESCO of “re-writing the history” when only days before his own PM sought to abuse the memory of holocaust to excuse his criminal intents in Palestine. Is there no depth to which Netanyahu and his lackeys will not sink?

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