Last week, responding to international criticism of Israeli plans to build new Jewish homes in an Arab neighborhood of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman "ordered embassies abroad to use a photo of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric."
The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, [an Israeli] official told AFP.
Appointed "grand mufti" in 1921 by the British mandate authorities as a means to dividing and controlling competing Palestinian factions (the title and position itself was a British creation), Husseini eventually fled Palestine and attempted to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Husseini hoped that, by collaborating with the enemy of the British, who he believed were facilitating the takeover of Palestine by Zionist settlers, he might be able both to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and establish himself as a regional power.
There is little doubt that Husseini had extreme, racist views of Jews, and that he gave support to the Nazis in hopes of gaining advantage against the British and Zionist forces in Palestine. What this specifically has to do with Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem, however, is less clear.
Doing his part to push the Israeli line, yesterday Alan Dershowitz took it even further. In his Jerusalem Post column -- which, in a bit of unintentional irony, is called "Double Standard Watch" -- Dershowitz questioned whether the Palestinian people, collectively, bore any responsibility for the Holocaust. "The truth," wrote Dershowitz, "is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler's Holocaust."
This claim is preposterous. And, needless to say, Dershowitz utterly fails to prove it, managing only to establish the already known facts that a Palestinian leader, Husseini, had a relationship with the Nazis, and that many Palestinians still consider Husseini something of a nationalist hero. The idea that Husseini, let alone the Palestinians as a whole, played a "significant role in Hitler's Holocaust" is laughable, as if the Nazis required one of the sub-human races to sign off on their plans for mass murder.
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