User:Nishidani/Mohammad Amin al-Husayni's ties with the Axis Powers during World War II

Proposal for rewriting, something along these lines The evidence both for his antisemitism and German/Nazi contacts should be reorganized from the chaotic repetitive blobs (organized by source) to allow a clear event by event, utterance by utterance, account of his war years with the Axis powers. Something like this</(BR>

• (1)Testimonies at Nuremberg and arguments he was a key figure in Holocaust programme, down to Arendt and others

Then an ordered list of the main evidence =

• (2)Husayni's role in Farhun-Nazi uprising in Iraq
• (3) Flight to Italy and Germany
• (4)Encounter with Italian fascists and German Nazis, Hitler, Himmler
• (5) Chronological list of occasions where he made utterances, or intervened to stop Jews from being sent in swaps to Palestine.
• (6(Chronological list of strategies involving plans to enlist Nazi help in attacking Jews in Palestine (3 of them).(a) poisoning water supplies (b) (c)
• (7)Organisation of Bosnian brigades
• (8) Postwar attempts to have him put on trial for war crimes

al-Husayni is a Muslim leader, Muslim teachings and Fascist teachings don't go along. al-Husayni says in his diaries[13] "I have considered Germany a friendly country because the enemy of your enemy is your friend" and "I sought cooperation with Germany not for the sake of Germany, and not believing in Fascism that I don't believe in its principles, but because I believe that if Germany wins the war, Zionists will not stay in Palestine." Imad marie (talk) 11:54, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

De Felice on period writes that a certain tradition of sympathy for Germany existed since WW1, since Germany was then an ally of the Ottomans and then notes that in recurring to German assistance one should not interpret this as in itself a sign of fascist tendencies

'E questo, sia ben chiaro, non -come pure è stato sostenuto da vari autori - per una presunta affinità della loro ideologia con quelle nazista e fascista, che non esisteva, ma in forza della logica tutta politica che vede nei nemici (in atto o potenziali) dei propri nemici i propri amici, specie se essi hanno già dato prova - e questo era appunto il caso della Germania ed ancor più dell'Italia - di essere interessati, nella stessa logica politica, a sostenere la loro causa'

'It should be quite clear that this relation (arose) not, as a number of authors have nonetheless argued, because of a presumed affinity of their ideology with that of the Nazis or Fascists, no such thing existed, but by virtue of the wholly political logic (of events) that saw in the enemies (in deed or potentially) of their own enemies their own friends, particularly if the latter have already provided evidence - and this was, precisely, the case with Germany, and all the more so, with Italy -of being interested, in terms of the same political logic, in giving support to their cause'(Renzo de Felice, Mussolini l'alleato. L'Italia in guerra 1940-1943, vol.1., Einaudi, Turin, 1990 pp.212-213.

There's a good account and weighing of the evidence in Robert Fisk's, The Great War for Civilisation, Harper Perennial ed.2006 ch.11 pp.436-448

There is some useful information in al-Husayni's memoirs [15] that can be included in this article: His view of Nazism (page 164):

• (A)واعتبرت المانيا بلدآ صديقآ لأنها لم تكن دولة مستعمرة ولم يسبق لها أن تعرضت بسوء لأية دولة عربية أو اسلامية, ولأنها كانت تقاتل أعداءنا من مستعمرين و صهيونيين, ولان عدو عدوك صديقك, و كنت موقنآ, أن انتصار المانيا سينقذ بلادنا حتمآ من خطر الصهيونية و الاستعمار
  • I have considered Germany to be a friendly country, because it was not a colonizing country, and it never harmed any Arab or Islamic country, and because it was fighting our colonialist and Zionist enemies, and because the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And I was certain that Germany's victory would definitely save our countries from the danger of Zionism and colonization.
• (B)

وفي المانيا سعيت جاهدآ لتقديم العون المتواضع الذي استطيعه لقضيتنا الفلسطينية و لسائر الأقطار العربية و بعض الأقطار الاسلامية, و لدعوة كافة المخلصين لقضية فلسطين و القضايا العربية, الى التعاون مع المانيا, لا من اجل المانيا و لا ايمانآ بالنازية التي لا اعتنق مبائدها و لم تخطر لي ببال, بل لأني كنت, و لا ازال, على يقين بأن لو انتصرت المانيا و المحور لما بقي للصهيونيين من أثر في فلسطين و البلاد العربية

• • And in Germany I worked hard to provide my humble assistance to our Palestinian cause and to all Arab countries and some Islamic countries, and to call on all those sincerely committed to our Palestinian and Arab causes to cooperate with Germany, not for the sake of Germany and not believing in Nazism, whose principles I don't subscribe to and never thought of, but rather because I was, and still am, certain that had Germany and the Axis countries won, then Zionists would not have remained in Palestine and the Arab countries.

Antisemitism Page 96:

• (C)

ولما قلت له: ان مقاومتنا للوطن القومي اليهودي لم تكن بحافز من التعصب الديني بل كانت دفاعآ عن كياننا, و ذودآ عن بلادنا,

• • Then I told him (Mussolini): our resistance to the "Homeland for the Jewish people" was not motivated by our religious fanaticism, but was rather (a matter of) defending our existence and countries"

Page 147:

• (D)

وأن معركتنا مع الصهيونيين ومن يدعمهم و يؤيدهم من المستعمرين هي معركة مفروضة علينا فرضا, وليس لنا فيها خيار, فلا مناص لنا من قبول تحدي الأعداء

• • Our battle with the Zionists and the colonialists who support them is a battle that was forced upon us, we had no choice in it, and we have no choice but to accept the challenge of the enemies.

Holocaust

• (E)Page 127, al-Husayni's reaction after Himmler tells him that they have killed 3 million Jews:

فاستغربت هذا الرقم و لم أكن أعلم شيئآ عن ذلك من قبل, وقد سألني هملر, لهذه المناسبة, كيف تفكرون في تصفية القضية اليهودية في بلادكم؟ فأجبته: اننا لا نريد منهم الا ان يعودوا الى البلاد التي جاؤوا الينا منها, فقال: لن نسمح لهم بالعودة الى ألمانيا أبدآ.

• • I was surprised to hear this number, and I knew nothing about it before. Then Himmler asked me: by the way, how do you plan to solve the Jewish case in your country. I answered: we want nothing from them but to return to the countries they came from. Himmler said: we will never allow them to get back to Germany.

• aaa

• (F) Page 197, al-Husayni talking about himself sending letters to Nazi leaders and other leaders in the years 1943/1944 asking them to stop the Jewish immigration to Palestine:

فالواقع اني عندما أرسلت تلك المذكرات الى المسؤولين من رجال الرايخ الألماني, والدول المشار اليها, لم أكن ابتغي ابادة اليهود, لكني كنت أسعى جاهدآ لمنع طوفان الهجرة اليهودية العدوانية الرامية الى اغراق فلسطين و اخراج أهلها منها, كما حدث بعد ذلك فعلآ بمساعدة بريطانيا و الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية.

• • The fact is, when I sent those letters to the Nazi leaders, and to the referred to countries, I did not intend to exterminate the Jews, but I was trying hard to stop the flooding of the offensive Jewish immigration that was aiming to flood Palestine and expel its people. Which did happen later on with the help of Britain and USA.

Imad marie (talk) 13:26, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Passage E.::The whole passage is translated by Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, vol.2 Fayard, Paris 2002 p.469. Laurens regards it as having all the appearance of an authentic memory and sums up.

'En revanche, il est clair qu'il identifie progressivement son combat en Palestine à celui de l'Allemagne contre le judaisme mondial. La lecture de l'ensemble des passages de ses Mémoires consacrés à son séjour en Europe montre une assimilation du contenu de l'antisémitisme européen, avec les deux grandes thématiques de l'identification du judaisme avec le capitalisme financier (les Anglo-Saxons) et du coup de poignard dans le dos (les Juifs sont les responsables des deux conflits mondiaux). En revanche, une visione raciale de l'histoire du monde est totallement absente de sa perspective générale. Il a été reçu avec honneurs dans les milieux dirigeants du nazisme et il en fait un récit nettement complaisant. Il n'exprime aucun regret sur son attitude et sur ses choix, mais rappelle que l'extermination des Juifs d'Europe a été le fait des Allemands et qu'il ne porte aucune responsabilité dans la prise de décision comme dans ses modalités d'exécution. Dans l'ensemble de ses écrits postérieurs à 1945, il n'a pas d'attitudes négationnistes, alors qu'è l'époque du procès Eichmann (1960) des hommes politiques arabes de première importance adopteront ce type de discours.' pp.469-470

Laurens therefore argues that the overall cast of his memoirs shows Husayni did gradually assimilate his antizionist battles in Palestine with Germany's challenge to (the specious threat of (a) world Jewry, in that he associated Judaism with financial capitalism as embodied in the English and (b) with the 'stab in the back' theory in Nazi propaganda that Jews were behind both world wars. But his perspective lacks any touch of a racial vision of world history (fundamental to Nazi and Fascist ideology). In the postwar period, he, unlike many prominent Arab leaders, never denied the Holocaust. He had nothing to do with it, it was something Germany did, and he did not regret the choices he made. No one is under an obligation to accept al-Husayni's views. One is obliged to register them correctly, and then annotate them with whatever judgements historians made (Schwanitz says he 'feigns' to be surprised, Laurens thinks this an authentic expression of Husayni's experience at the time Nishidani (talk) 14:05, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Novick re post-war Zionist historiography on al-Husayni

The claims of Palestinian complicity in the murder of the European Jews were to some extent a defensive strategy, a preemptive response to the Palestinian complaint that if Israel was recompensed for the Holocaust, it was unjust that Palestinian Muslims should pick up the bill for the crimes of European Christians. The assertion that Palestinians were complicit in the Holocaust was mostly based on the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem, a pre-World War II Palestinian nationalist leader who, to escape imprisonment by the British, sought refuge during the war in Germany. The Mufti was in many ways a disreputable character, but post-war claims that he played any significant part in the Holocaust have never been sustained. This did not prevent the editors of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from giving him a starring role. The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goering, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann--of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler. Peter Novick The Holocaust in American Life, pp.157-8

Ali Hassan Salameh Ali Hassan was the son of Hassan Salameh, one of the leaders of the Palestinian Arab guerrilla war against the Jews during the late 1930s and the 1940s. Hassan Salameh’s hatred of the Jews, and of the British, led him to join his patron, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, in Germany during World War 11. When towards the close of the war the mufti proposed a plan he hoped would wipe out a large part of the Jewish community in Palestine, Salameh was chosen to carry it out. Early on the morning of November 5, 1944, the Luftwaffe parachuted Salameh, another Palestinian, three German officers, and several large creates into the rocky, cave-pocked wastes of the Jordan Valley not far from Jericho. The crates held bags of poison intended for Tel Aviv’s water supply. The team’s mission was to kill the population of Tel Aviv.

The British mandate police learned of the air drop within a day after it took place. They quickly tracked down and arrested two of the Germans and the other Arab and seized the poison. Salameh, however, got away.’ David A.Korn, Assassination in Khartoum, Indiana University Press, 1993pp.,43-44

The first bone of contention concerns British policy in Palestine between 29 November 1947 and 14 May 1948. Zionist historiography, reflecting the suspicions of Zionist leaders at that time, is laden with charges of hostile plots that are alleged to have been hatched against the Yishuv during the twilight of British rule in Palestine. The central charge is that Britain armed and secretly encouraged her Arab allies, and especially her client, King Abdullah of Jordan, to invade Palestine upon expiry of the British Mandate and do battle with the Jewish state as soon as it came into the world. For Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government headed by Clement Attlee, is reserved the role of chief villain in this alleged conspiracy. Ilan Pappé, using English, Arabic and Hebrew sources, has driven a coach and horses through the traditional Zionist rendition of British policy towards the end of the mandate, and I tried to follow along the trail that he had blazed[25] The key to British policy during this period is summed up by Pappé in two words: Greater Transjordan. Bevin felt that if Palestine had to be partitioned, the Arab area could not be left to stand on its own but should be united with Transjordan. A Greater Transjordan would compensate Britain for the loss of bases in Palestine. Hostility to Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had cast his lot with the Nazis during the Second World War, and hostility to a Palestinian state, which in British eyes was always equated with a Mufti state, were important and constant features of British policy after the war. By February 1948, Bevin and his Foreign Office advisers were pragmatically reconciled to the inevitable emergence of the Jewish state. What they were not reconciled to, was the emergence of a Palestinian state. Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate About 1948,’ in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27:3, 1995, 287-304. Reprinted in Ilan Pappé, ed., The Israel/Palestine Question (London: Longman, 1999). Israel’s propaganda war

Blame the Grand Mufti Many Israelis and Palestinians would like peaceful coexistence, but myths, propaganda and denial have a habit of getting in the way by Gilbert Achcar Israel’s propaganda war with the Palestinians and the Arab world has intensified in recent years, and partisans of both sides in Europe and the US have been active in this. Israel needs to cultivate the support of the West to survive, so this aspect of the conflict has always been of crucial importance.

Israel’s image in the West first suffered significantly during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The long siege of Beirut, the massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, perpetrated while Israel looked on, shocked the world. The impact of these events, comparable to that of the Vietnam war on the US, is still felt even in Israel (1).

Between the invasion of Lebanon and the start of the first intifada (at the end of 1987), Israel’s “new historians” (2) re-examined the central myths of Zionist ideology critically, and their rewriting of the story of Israel’s origins gave rise to the small but significant movement of “post-Zionism”. But it failed to prevent a gradual ideological shift to the right in Israeli society, the premature collapse of the Oslo accords and the emergence of an aggressive “neo-Zionism”. According to the Israeli sociologist Uri Ram, “post-Zionism is citizen-oriented, supporting equal rights, and in that sense favouring a state of all its citizens within the boundaries of the Green Line [the border between Israel and the West Bank prior to the 1967 war], universal and global. Neo-Zionism is particularist, tribal, Jewish, ethnic nationalist, fundamentalist and even fascist on the fringe” (3).

Israel’s sabotage of the peace talks, its rapid colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories and its deadly incursions into Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008-9) worsened the deterioration of its image. In an attempt to halt this decline, the Israeli authorities, and their unconditional supporters in the West, continue to invoke the memory of the Holocaust in the hope that it will legitimise their actions (4).

They have also attempted to implicate the Palestinians and the Arabs in the Nazi genocide. The Zionist authorities started accusing the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini (5) soon after 1945. A figurehead of Palestinian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, he was exiled from Palestine by the British in 1937. After a short time in Iraq, he joined the Axis cause in 1941 and spent the war in Berlin and Rome, contributing actively to the propaganda efforts of the Axis powers, helping to set up Bosnian Muslim units of the German Waffen-SS – which did not, however, commit any acts of anti-semitic violence.

A propaganda puppet Even before his exile, Husseini had been discredited in the Arab world, if not in Palestine, and his exhortations to join the Axis cause made little impression. According to a US military historian, only 6,300 soldiers from Arab countries passed through German military organisations – 1,300 from Palestine, Syria and Iraq, the rest from North Africa. The British army was able to recruit 9,000 Arab soldiers from Palestine alone while 250,000 North African troops served in the French Army of Liberation and accounted for the majority of its dead and wounded (6).

But the Zionists claimed the mufti was an official representative of the Palestinians and Arabs and in 1945 demanded (without success) that he be handed over to the international military tribunal at Nuremberg, as if he had been a key part of the Nazi genocide machine. Articles, pamphlets and books were produced to present Husseini as a candidate for prosecution. The mufti served a symbolic purpose, allowing the Zionists to claim that the Palestinians shared responsibility for the genocide, and justify the creation of a “Jewish state” on the territory of their homeland.

This motive became a constant in the propaganda of the state of Israel. It explains the extraordinary importance accorded to the mufti in the Holocaust memorial museum, in Jerusalem. Tom Segev observes that the wall dedicated to al-Husseini gives the impression of a convergence between the Nazis’ genocide plans and Arab hostility towards Israel. Peter Novick points out that the entry on the mufti in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in association with Yad Vashem (the Holocaust remembrance authority), is much longer than those on Himmler, Goebbels or Eichmann, and only a little shorter than that on Hitler (7).

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 there have been many publications claiming that Jews in Palestine in 1948 faced the threat of genocide. They suggest that the Arabs were (and still are) moved by the same hatred of Jews as the Nazis, meaning that the expulsion of the Palestinians when the state of Israel was created – and their continued subjugation by Israel – should be regarded as legitimate acts of self-defence.

Two books, by Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers (8), and by Jeffrey Herf (9), appear to be serious works as they are based on studies of Nazi, American and British archives, but the authors know very little about the Arab world and do not speak Arabic. An excellent collection of critiques of Mallman and Cüppers’ work appears in the Auschwitz Foundation’s review Témoigner: Entre Histoire et Mémoire (Bearing Witness: Between History and Memory), in which Dominique Trimbur observes that their book is part of “a historic trend marked by the spirit of the time in which it was written – the early 2000s. The whole argument lacks subtlety, especially when the authors refer to ‘the Arabs’ and ‘the Muslim world’, generalisations typified by the reproduction, or deliberate appropriation of the expression ‘clash of civilisations’.”

In response, two contradictory trends have emerged on the Arab side: one is the comparison of Israel’s actions to Nazism, the other is Holocaust denial.

Sign of exasperation That many Arabs can hold these contradictory positions is a clear indication that they are trying to compensate for an inability to respond effectively to real violence by resorting to symbolic violence. Iran is attempting to use this tide of reactive and emotional denial in vying with Saudi Arabia for the affections of Sunni Arab Muslims.

In reality, those in the Arab world who seriously support the arguments of western Holocaust denial – “the anti-Zionism of fools”, to paraphrase August Bebel’s famous remark that anti-semitism was “the socialism of fools” – are a tiny minority. In most cases, denialist attitudes stem from exasperation. This much is suggested by opinion polls among Palestinians in Israel, the Arab population best informed about the Holocaust, a subject thoroughly covered by the school syllabus in Israel (10). A first poll conducted by the University of Haifa in 2006 found, to general surprise, that 28% of all Arabs in Israel denied the Holocaust, the percentage being higher among the best educated (11). Two years later, against escalating violence, the same poll found a denial rate of 40% (12).

The current situation makes dialogue and communication seem more impossible than ever. Yet anyone familiar with the irreconcilable differences that separated Israelis and Arabs in the decades leading up to 1948 and 1967, will realise that many more Arabs and Palestinians today are able to contemplate peaceful coexistence with their Israeli neighbours, and far more Israelis acknowledge that their country is guilty of persecuting the Palestinians. We must hope that the region will avoid a new catastrophe – the common meaning of shoah and nakba.' See bibliography as added to by Roland

Begin here

Political Activities 1930-1935

In 1931 Al-Husayni founded the World Islamic Congress, on which he was to serve as president.

Shai Lachman suggests the Mufti may have helped finance attacks by Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who had been appointed, with Al-Husayni's approval, imam of the al-Istiqlal mosque in Haifa. Whatever their relations, the latter's independent activism appears to have led to a rupture between the two. . By 1935 al-Husayni did take control of one clandestine organization, of whose nature he had not been informed until the preceding year , which had been set up in 1931 by Musa Kazim al-Husayni's son, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and recruited from the Palestinian Boy Scout movement, called the 'Holy Struggle' (al-jihad al-muqaddas). This and another paramilitary youth organization, al-Futuwwah, paralleled the clandestine Jewish Haganah. Rumours, and occasional discovery of caches and shipments of arms, strengthened military preparations on both sides.

Arab revolt of 1936-1939

On April 19 1936, a wave of protest strikes and attacks against both the British authorities and Jews was unleashed in Palestine. Initially, the riots were led by Farhan al-Sa'di, a militant sheik of the northern al-Qassam group, with links to the Nashashibis. After Farhan's arrest and execution, al-Husayni seized the initiative by negotiating an alliance with the al-Qassam faction. Apart from some foreign subsidies, including a substantial amount from Italy, he controlled waqf and orphan funds that generated annual income of about 115,000 Palestine pounds. After the start of the revolt, most of that money was used to finance the activities of his representatives throughout the country. To Italy's consul-general in Jerusalem Mariano de Angelis, he explained in July that his decision to get directly involved in the conflict arose from the trust he reposed in Mussolini's backing and promises. Upon al-Husayni's initiative, the leaders of Palestinian Arab clans formed the Arab Higher Committee under the mufti's chairmanship. The Committee called for nonpayment of taxes after May 15 and for a general strike of Arab workers and businesses, demanding an end to the Jewish immigration. The British High Commissioner for Palestine Sir Arthur Wauchope responded by engaging in negotiations with al-Husayni and the Committee. The talks, however, soon proved fruitless. The mufti issued a series of warnings, threatening the 'revenge of God Almighty' unless the Jewish immigration were to stop, and the general strike began, paralyzing the government, public transportation, Arab businesses and agriculture.

As the time passed, it turned out that those were the Arabs deprived of their usual sources of income who bore the brunt of the cost of the strike; . Under these circumstances, the Mandatory government was looking for an intermediary who might help persuade the Arab Higher Committee to end the rebellion. Al-Husayni and the Committee rejected King Abdullah of Transjordan as mediator because of his dependence on the British and friendship with the Zionists, but accepted the Iraqi foreign minister Nuri as-Said. As Wauchope warned of an impending military campaign and simultaneously offered to dispatch a Royal Commission of Inquiry to hear the Arab complaints, the Arab Higher Committee called off the strike on October 11. When the promised Royal Commission of Inquiry arrived in Palestine in November, al-Husayni testified before it as chief witness for the Arabs.

In July 1937 British police were sent to arrest al-Husayni for his part in the Arab rebellion, but, tipped off, he managed to escape to the Haram where the British deemed it inadvisable to touch him. He stayed there for three months, directing the revolt from within. Four days after the assassination of the Acting District Commissioner for that area Lewis Yelland Andrews by Galilean members of the al-Qassam group on September 26, al-Husayni was deposed from the presidency of the Muslim Supreme Council, the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal, and six warrants for the arrest of its leaders were issued, as being 'morally responsible'. Of them only Jamal al-Husayni managed to escape to Syria: the remaining five were exiled to the Seychelles. Al-Husayni was not among the indicted but, fearing imprisonment, on October 13-14, after sliding under cover of darkess down a rope from the Haram's wall, he himself fled via Jaffa to Lebanon, disguised as a Bedouin, where he reconstituted the committee under his leadership. Al-Husayni retained the support of most Palestinian Arabs and used his power to punish the Nashashibis. The revolt did not only involve intercommunal violence between Arab Palestinians and Jews. Vendettas within the ranks of the former were not infrequent, and many Palestinians were strongly opposed to al-Husayni's line. Although few Palestinians supported Zionism, not all Palestinians supported al-Husayni. Some differed strongly with his attempt to monopolize Palestinian nationalism, and his dismissal of competing versions of this as 'treasonous', and their supporters as traitors. A local leader, Abu Shair, meeting an emissary from the rebel headquarters in Damascus, who bore a list of people to be assassinated during the uprising, told Da'ud al-Husayni:

’I don’t work for Husayniya (‘’Husayni-ism”) but for wataniya (nationalism)’

Many Palestinian Arabs refused to fight in 1948 because of their hatred for al-Husayni.

He remained in Lebanon for two years, under French surveillance in the Christian village of Zouk, but his deteriorating relationship with the French and Syrian authorities led him to withdraw to Iraq in October 1939.

The rebellion itself lasted until 1939, when it was finally quelled by British troops. It forced Britain to make substantial concessions to Arab demands. Jewish immigration was to continue but under restrictions, with a quota of 75,000 places spread out over the following five years. On the expiry of this period further Jewish immigration would depend on Arab consent. Besides local unrest, another key factor in bringing about a decisive change in British policy was Nazi Germany's preparations for a European war, which would develop into a worldwide conflict. In British strategic thinking, securing the loyalty and support of the Arab world assumed an importance of some urgency. While Jewish support was unquestioned, Arab backing in a new global conflict was by no means assured. By promising to phase out Jewish immigration into Palestine, Britain hoped to win back support from wavering Arabs.. Al-Husayni nonetheless felt that the concessions did not go far enough, and he rejected the new policy. See also Peel Commission, White Paper of 1939.

Ties with the Axis Powers during World War II

Pre-war

right|thumb|222px|November 2, 1943 Himmler's telegram to Mufti: 'To the Grand Mufti: The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world. In this spirit I am sending you on the anniversary of the infamous Balfour declaration my hearty greetings and wishes for the successful pursuit of your struggle until the final victory.' Reichsfuehrer S.S. Heinrich Himmler Early post-war historiography made much of al-Husayni's contacts with Nazi leaders, exploited the testimonies of one witness at Nuremberg, Dieter Wisliceny, taking them at face value, and interpreted his role within the Palestinian conflict to be one motivated almost exclusively by anti-Semitism. Al-Husayni in this genre of books is seen almost exclusively as a founding figure in the rise of Islamic fanaticism. This tradition has been largely redimensioned towards a more nuanced account, and survives only in minor works, such as the recent book by Dalin and Rothsmann.

In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the German Consul-General in Palestine, the pro-Zionist Heinrich Wolff, sent a telegram to Berlin reporting al-Husayni's belief that Palestinian Muslims were enthusiastic about the new regime and looked forward to the spread of Fascism throughout the region. Wolff met Al-Husayni and many sheiks again, a month later, at Nabi Musa. They expressed their approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked Wolff not to send any Jews to Palestine.. Wolff subsequently wrote in his annual report for that year that the Arabs' political naïvity led them to fail to recognize the link between German Jewish policy and their problems in Palestine, and that their enthusiasm for Nazi Germany was devoid of any real understanding of the phenomenon.. The various proposals by Palestinian notables like al-Husayni were rejected consistently over the years out of concern to avoid disrupting Anglo-German relations, in line with Germany's policy of not imperilling their economic and cultural interests in the region by a change in their policy of neutrality, and respect for English interests. Hitler's Englandpolitik essentially precluded significant assistance to Arab leaders . Italy also made the nature of its assistance to the Palestinians contingent on the outcome of its own negotiations with England, and cut off aid when it appeared that the English were ready to admit the failure of their pro-Zionist policy in Palestine.. AL-Husayni's great adversary, Ze'ev Jabotinsky had at the same time cut off Irgun ties with Italy after the passage of antisemitic racial legislation.

Though Italy did offer substantial aid, some German assistance also trickled through. After asking the new German Consul-General, Hans Döhle on the 21 July 1937 for support, the Abwehr briefly made an exception to its policy and gave some limited aid. But this was aimed to exert pressure on England over Czechoslovakia. Promised arms shipments never eventuated This was not the only diplomatic front on which Al-Husayni was active. A month after his visit to Döhle, he met with the American Consul George Wadsworth (August 1937), to whom he professed his belief that America was remote from imperialist ambitions and therefore able to understand that Zionism 'represented a hostile and imperialist aggression directed against an inhabited country’. In a further interview with Wadsworth on Aug 31, he expressed his fears that Jewish influence in the United States might persuade the country to side with Zionists.. In the same period he courted the French government by expressing a willingness to assist them in the region.

Though in the ensuing war, the Mufti was strongly pro-Axis, this did not reflect the position of the entire Palestinian leadership. Al-Husayni's cousin Jemal, for example, was in favour of cutting a deal with Britain for Palestine.

In May 1940, the British Foreign Office declined a proposal from the chairman of the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council in Palestine) that they assassinate al-Husayni, but in November of that year Winston Churchill approved such a plan. In May 1941, several members of the Irgun, (a break-off faction of which, Lehi, was at the time feeling out the Nazis in Beirut about a possible collaboration between the Jewish underground and Germany to throw the British out of Palestine), including its former leader David Raziel were released from prison and flown to Iraq on a secret mission which, according to British sources, included a plan to 'capture or kill' the Mufti. The Irgun version is that they were approached by the British for a sabotage mission and added a plan to capture the Mufti as a condition of their cooperation. The mission was abandoned when Raziel was killed by a German plane.

In the Middle East

In April 1941 the Golden Square pro-Nazi Iraqi army officers, led by General Rashid Ali, forced the Iraqi Prime Minister, the pro-British Nuri Said Pasha, to resign. From his base in Iraq, al-Husayni issued a fatwa for a holy war against Britain a month later, in May. Forty days later, British troops occupied the country, and al-Husayni fled to Iran where he was granted legation asylum first by Japan and then by Italy. On October 8, after the occupation of Iran by Britain and the Soviet Union and the severance of diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, al-Husayni fled to Italy with the Italian diplomats who provided him with an Italian service passport. To avoid recognition, al-Husayni changed his appearance by shaving his beard and dying his hair.

Throughout the war, al-Husayni repeatedly made requests in Berlin to 'the German government to bomb Tel Aviv.'

In Nazi-occupied Europe

Al-Husayni arrived in Rome on October 11 1941 and immediately contacted Italian military intelligence. The mufti claimed to be head of a secret Arab nationalist organization with offices in all Arab countries. On condition that the Axis powers "recognize in principle the unity, independence, and sovereignty, of an Arab state of a Fascist nature, including Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan", he offered support in the war against Britain and stated his willingness to discuss the issues of "the Holy Places, Lebanon, the Suez canal, and Aqaba". The Italian foreign ministry approved the mufti's proposal, recommending to give him a grant of one million lire, and referred him to Benito Mussolini, who met al-Husayni on October 27. According to the mufti's account, the meeting went amicably with the Italian leader expressing his hostility to the Jews and Zionism.

Back in the summer of 1940 and again in February 1941, al-Hussayni submitted to the German government a draft declaration of German-Arab cooperation, containing a clause:

Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.

Now, encouraged by his meeting with the Italian leader, al-Husayni prepared a draft declaration, affirming the Axis support for the Arabs on November 3. In three days, the declaration, slightly amended by the Italian foreign ministry, received the formal approval of Mussolini and was forwarded to the German embassy in Rome. On November 6, al-Husayni arrived in Berlin, where he discussed the text of his declaration with Ernst von Weizsäcker and other German officials. In the final draft, which differed only marginally from al-Husayni's original proposal, the Axis powers declared their readiness to approve the elimination (Beseitigung) of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

On November 20, al-Husayni met the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28. He asked Hitler for a public declaration that "recognized and sympathized with the Arab struggles for independence and liberation, and that would support the elimination of a national Jewish homeland". Hitler refused to make such a public announcement, saying that it would strengthen the Gaullists against the Vichy France, but asked al-Husayni to 'to lock . . .deep in his heart' the following points, which Browning summarizes as follows, that

‘Germany has resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time, direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well'. When Germany had defeated Russia and broken through the Caucasus into the Middle East, it would have no further imperial goals of its own and would support Arab liberation. . . But Hitler did have one goal. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. (Das deutsche Ziel würde dann lediglich die Vernichtung des im arabischen Raum unter der Protektion der britischen Macht lebenden Judentums sein). In short, Jews were not simply to be driven out of the German sphere but would be hunted down and destroyed even beyond it,.’

This conversation took place two months before the Wannsee Conference settled on the Final Solution and the systematic annihilation of the European Jews. The Mufti's own diary, seized after the war, and his later recollectionsrecall the encounter in slightly different terms.

The Holocaust

The Mufti was in Berlin during the war, but later denied knowing of the Holocaust. One of Adolf Eichmann's deputies, Dieter Wisliceny, stated after the war that he had actively encouraged the extermination of European Jews, and that he had had an elaborate meeting with Eichmann at his office, during which Eichmann gave him an intensive look at the current state of the “Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” by the Third Reich. This testimony was denied by Eichmann at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann stated that he had only been introduced to the Mufti during an official reception, along with all other department heads. In the final judgement, the Jerusalem court stated: "In the light of this partial admission by the Accused, we accept as correct Wisliceny's statement about this conversation between the Mufti and the Accused. In our view it is not important whether this conversation took place in the Accused's office or elsewhere. On the other hand, we cannot determine decisive findings with regard to the Accused on the basis of the notes appearing in the Mufti's diary which were submitted to us.".

Hannah Arendt, who attended the complete Eichmann trial, concluded in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that, "The trial revealed only that all rumours about Eichmann's connection with Haj Amin el Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, were unfounded." Rafael Medoff concludes that "actually there is no evidence that the Mufti's presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution." Bernard Lewis also called Wisliceny's testimony into doubt: "There is no independent documentary confirmation of Wisliceny's statements, and it seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from the outside."

Some recent research, however, apparently argues that al-Husayni did work with Eichmann for the dispatch of a special corps of Einsatz commandos to exterminate the Jews in Palestine, if Rommel managed to break through the British lines in Egypt. Husayni did intervene on May 13, 1943, with the German Foreign Office to block possible transfers of Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, after reports reached him that 4000 Jewish children accompanied by 500 adults had managed to reach Palestine. He asked that the Foreign Minister "to do his utmost" to block all such proposals and this request was complied with.. A year later, on the 25th July, 1944, he wrote to the Hungarian foreign minister to register his objection to the release of certificates for 900 Jewish children and 100 adults for transfer from Hungary, fearing they might end up in Palestine. He suggested that if such transfers of population were deemed necessary, then:-

"it would be indispensable and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control, as for example Poland, thus avoiding danger and preventing damage."

Among the acts of sabotage al-Husayni attempted to implement, Michael Bar Zohar reports a chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. According to him, five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers." [2].

He is also said to have requested that Jerusalem be bombed by the German air force, a request that puts doubts on his religiosity, since, in Walter Laqueur's words, "It is unlikely that a truly pious Muslim would have acted this way."

In his memoirs after the war, Husayni noted that

"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours'."

Wolfgang G. Schwanitz notes that in his memoirs Husayni recalled that Heinrich Himmler, in the summer of 1943, while confiding some German war secrets, inveighed against Jewish "war guilt", and, speaking of Germany’s persecution of the Jews said that "up to now we have exterminated (in Arabic, abadna) around three million of them". In his memoirs, Husayni wrote he was astonished to hear this. Schwanitz doubts the sincerity of his surprise since, he argues, Husayni had publicly declared that Muslims should follow the example Germans set for a "definitive solution to the Jewish problem"..

In September 1943, intense negotiations to rescue 500 Jewish children from the town of Arbe in Croatia collapsed due to the objection of the Mufti who blocked the children's departure to Turkey because they would end up in Palestine.

Recent Nazi documents uncovered in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [3] by two researchers, Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers indicated that in the event of the British being defeated in Egypt by Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps the Nazis had planned to deploy a special unit called Einsatzkommando Ägypten to exterminate Palestinian Jews and that they wanted Arab support to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. In their book the researchers concluded that, "the most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem.'

Propaganda and recruitment

Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni inspecting Waffen SS recruits from Bosnia.

Throughout World War II, al-Husayni worked for the Axis Powers as a broadcaster in propaganda targeting Arab public opinion. He recruited Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces operating in the Balkans. Beginning in 1941, Al-Husayni visited Bosnia, and convinced Muslim leaders that a Muslim S.S. division would be in the interest of Islam. In spite of these and other propaganda efforts, only half of the expected 20,000 to 25,000 Muslims volunteered." Al-Husayni was involved in the organization and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th "Handschar" division of 21,065 men, which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944 and participated in the genocide of Yugoslav Jews.

On March 1, 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husayni said:

'Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.'

Ilan Pappé, using English, Arabic and Hebrew sources, has driven a coach and horses through the traditional Zionist rendition of British policy towards the end of the mandate, and I tried to follow along the trail that he had blazed[25] The key to British policy during this period is summed up by Pappé in two words: Greater Transjordan. Bevin felt that if Palestine had to be partitioned, the Arab area could not be left to stand on its own but should be united with Transjordan. A Greater Transjordan would compensate Britain for the loss of bases in Palestine. Hostility to Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had cast his lot with the Nazis during the Second World War, and hostility to a Palestinian state, which in British eyes was always equated with a Mufti state, were important and constant features of British policy after the war. By February 1948, Bevin and his Foreign Office advisers were pragmatically reconciled to the inevitable emergence of the Jewish state. What they were not reconciled to, was the emergence of a Palestinian state.' Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate About 1948,’International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27:3, 1995, 287-304. Reprinted in Ilan Pappé, ed., The Israel/Palestine Question (London: Longman, 1999).