As for the second auther, please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20120111)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20141125)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20151006). (Lily)
1.Government of Israel（http://www.pmo.gov.il/English/MediaCenter/Speeches/Pages/speechcongress201015.aspx）
PM Netanyahu’s Speech at the 37th Zionist Congress
20/10/2015
יום שלישי ז' חשון תשע"ו
- Transcription-
We've witnessed a lot of changes since the last Congress, great challenges and great opportunities for Israel and the Jewish people. We are now, despite our desires and our efforts for peace and for tranquility, we are now in the midst of a campaign, an assault, and not the first one, that seeks to murder Israelis wherever they are. And this campaign is incorporating medieval ideology with modern technology. It’s a unique combination.
I am seeing it primarily on the social networks. I'll talk about it in a minute. And we know for example that the various attackers are using their Facebook pages to indicate what they are, to absorb messages of incitement. I appreciate the fact that Facebook is trying to find the balance between free speech and the safety of the public. I think that warrants special attention in this case.
Now let me try to put in perspective what it is we're fighting: We're fighting not only a campaign of physical assaults on the Jewish state – the Jewish people have experienced that throughout the centuries - but as we've experienced in our history, the physical assaults on the Jews is always preceded and accompanied by an assault on the truth, campaign of defamation and slander. And what I would like to examine with you today are the ten big lies that are hurled at us. And the only way that you can fight lies, and especially big lies, is to puncture them with the simple truth.
So here's the first big lie: Israel is trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount. No, we're not. We haven't changed the status quo on the Temple Mount in years. There's a simple arrangement: Muslims visit the Temple Mount and they pray there. Others, Jews, Christians and other denominations, secular people, they come – secular people pray too by the way - they visit the Temple Mount but they don’t. Sunday to Thursday, 7:00 to 11:00, the non-Muslims visit. Muslims visit the rest of the time. How many Muslims have visited and prayed on the Temple Mount, on average, last year? Anybody know? No, not 300,000, three and a half million. Eighty thousand Christians and other denominations and 12,000 Jews. That hasn’t changed.
Though the Temple Mount is our holiest site – it was built there by king Solomon 3,000 years ago, 1,500 years before the birth of Islam – though we've been attached to it for 3 millennia, we in no way deny the sacred sites or the rights or the free access for other denominations, and Israel has not and will not change the status quo. This is one huge lie.
The second is not only that we seek to change the prayer arrangements on the Temple Mount and the non-prayer arrangements on the Temple Mount, which we don’t, is that we seek to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque. Now this is particularly farcical. It would be farcical if it weren’t tragic. My grandfather came to this land in 1920 and he landed in Jaffa, and very shortly after he landed he went to the immigration office in Jaffa. And a few months later it was burned down by marauders. These attackers, Arab attackers, murdered several Jews, including our celebrated writer Brenner.
And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, 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." And he was sought in, during the Nuremberg trials for prosecution. He escaped it and later died of cancer, after the war, died of cancer in Cairo. But this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini said. He said, ":The Jews seek to destroy the Temple Mount." My grandfather in 1920 seeks to destroy…? Sorry, the al-Aqsa Mosque.
So this lie is about a hundred years old. It fomented many, many attacks. The Temple Mount stands. The al-Aqsa Mosque stands. But the lie stands too, persists.
First lie: Israel seeks to change the status quo – false. Second lie: Israel seeks to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque – false. It's particularly onerous because Israel is the only country that protects the holy sites in the Middle East. You see Muslims, the militant Shi'ites and the militant Sunnis, blowing each other's mosques to smithereens across Iraq, Syria, you name it, churches – of course, synagogues – don’t even talk about it. And ancient shrines of great world heritage – blown up. The only place where the holy shrines of all are absolutely guaranteed is in Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty and of course in the rest of Israel.
Here's lie number three – the reason you have this surge of violence is because there has been a surge in settlement construction. Did you hear this? Yeah, all the time. Well, here are the numbers – some of you are not going to like them. In my first term in office, we built an average of 3,000 units annually in Judea and Samaria. In Barak's single year, he built 5,000. In Sharon, it was down to 1,900. In Olmert, it was down to 1,700. And given the circumstances, in my successive terms it's down to 1,500.
There are reasons for that. We can discuss that some other time but facts are facts. These numbers are exact. So, far from seeing a settlement surge, there's actually been a decline in construction. I raise that because this is raised again and again and again. The Palestinians are protesting because of a surge in settlement activity. Sorry, not true. And I put the facts forward before the world. Some surge.
The fourth big lie is that we are executing Palestinians- executing Palestinians. When our people are fighting back against these knife-wielders, meat-cleaver-wielders, people who try hack to death our citizens and our soldiers and our policemen, they're executing people. And what was the example? Ahmed Mansara, this boy that Abu Mazen put forward. He held his picture and he said we're executing this innocent boy. He's not innocent, he nearly stabbed to death, he stabbed nearly to death a 13-year-old Israeli boy riding on a bicycle.
He's not dead. He's been released, I think he's about to be released, from the Hadassah Hospital where his victim is struggling for his life. This is a big lie that we punctured right on the spot. Because here's the thing about the lies that I'm describing: If left unchallenged, they continue to expand like a cloud and by dint of constant repetition, these lies assume the cache of self-evident truth. And I think it's vital to put the facts before the world.
The fifth point is that Israel uses excessive force in general. That's not true either. What do you think would happen on the streets of New York? Let's just imagine the NYPD and people are rushing in the streets trying to knife down their police or innocent passers-by. What would the police do in New York City or in Paris or in Moscow or anywhere else? You know exactly what they would do. And this is what our police force is doing. To those who question our use of force, I would ask: How would you respond to it? How would your police respond to it? And our instructions are very clear. If there's a threat to life, either to the police officer or to innocent civilians, take action to neutralize it. Half the terrorists are killed; half the terrorists are apprehended; one terrorist escaped.
The sixth lie is that the reason we have this increase is not only a surge in settlements, it's the stagnation in the peace process. Well, some of the worst terrorism that Israel has experienced in its history occurred when the peace process was at its peak. We've had terrorism when there was a peace process. We've had terrorism when there was no peace process. We've had terrorism when there was an Israel. We've had terrorism when there was no Israel. We've had terrorism when there were settlements. We've had terrorism when there were no settlements, when we didn't even control Judea and Samaria.
The real reason we have this terrorism is not because the terrorists are frustrated in the peace process. They're frustrated because there's a State of Israel and that frustration will continue.
The seventh myth is that Abbas is a moderate. Abbas does not send his security forces to attack us, this is true. And there is ongoing cooperation; that is true too. So on one hand, Abbas does what I've just described, but on the other hand, he is a steady inciter. He incites all the time. He and his Fatah partners and the official websites of the Palestinian Authority incite day in and day out on those social networks. And to put a fine point on it, he said the other day, "I welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem." Are these the words of a moderate? He glorifies these killers.
He hasn't condemned a single one of the 30 terrorist attacks on Israelis over the last month. And I think that people who call public squares in the name of mass murderers should be condemned. I haven't heard a word of condemnation, practically not a syllable of condemnation for this irresponsible behavior of Abbas. And I think what we should tell Abu Mazen is: Stop lying, stop inciting.
The eighth big lie is that only international observers will restore calm on the Temple Mount. The last thing we have to do is to take the most explosive square kilometer on earth and put there the General Assembly of the United Nations. That is not a force for moderation. Israel enforces the status quo and we should tell the truth, affirm Israel's proven commitment to the status quo and hold President Abbas, Hamas and the Islamic Movement in Israel accountable for their lies and incitement. That is what is producing this violence.
The ninth lie is that the violence is erupted continually because there's no Palestinian state. Palestinians have repeatedly refused to accept a nation-state for themselves. They've repeatedly refused to accept it if it means accepting a nation-state for the Jewish people alongside it. That was and remains the core of the conflict – the persistent refusal to recognize Israel in any boundaries.
Now I spoke to you about my grandfather. After he came here in 1920, we had the surge of the attacks at that year. In 1921, the Jewish community in Hebron, who had been there for millennia, was massacred – no provocation, no reasons. In 1936 to 1939, massive attacks by Palestinians on the Jewish community here, throughout the coast – in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, elsewhere. There were no settlements there, no territories, no desire even for a Palestinian state. And this continued, of course, into 1947, '48, when the Palestinians rejected a partition for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state – no territories then, a state offered to them.
And then it continued in the attacks against us, terrorist attacks by the Fedayeen and others in 1956. And in 1967, those attacks, the desire to destroy Israel continued despite the fact that the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza were firmly in Arab hands. So it couldn't have been the reason for our attacks. Now we're talking about a century, half a century – from 1920 to 1967, that's 47 years – where the attacks, the attacks are going against us one after the other. Half a century and it's clearly not the core of the conflict. The core of the conflict was the desire to destroy the Jews anywhere, without a state, and with a state without the territories and without settlements.
Now, when we came into possession of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and when we came back to our ancestral homeland into these disputed lands and built some communities, some settlements, we uprooted them according to the book. They changed the narrative. After '67 what the Palestinians did is turn the result of their aggression – our presence in those territories – into its cause. And the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon made a decision with which I disagreed.
They uprooted all the Israelis from Gaza, disinterred the graves, gave the territory to Abu Mazen and he promptly handed it over to Hamas under the force of their guns. Well, we didn't get peace. We got thousands and thousands of rockets hurled into our cities. And when we asked Hamas, "Why are you firing these rockets on our cities? Is it to liberate the West Bank?" And they said, "Yeah, that too, but it's to liberate Palestine – Haifa, Akko, Jaffa, Jerusalem of course." That is what they said.
We turned to the others, to Abbas and the Palestinian Authority and I said, "What about you? Are you willing to recognize the Jewish state? You demand a nation-state for the Palestinian people. Assuming we solve the problem of the border, of the settlements and so on, would you then be prepared to recognize a Jewish state, a nation-state for the Jewish people?" They hem and haw and basically say no because they'd have to give up the fantasy of the so-called right of return because they have to end the conflict, because they don't want a state to end the conflict because they want a state to continue the conflict and eradicate the Jewish state. This is what this conflict has always been about. That's what it's about. You can't deny the facts. You can stick your head in the sand and be an ostrich, but we Jews do not stick our heads in the sand. We see the territory, we see reality as it is and we confront that reality.
And here's the tenth, final myth – and this is a doozer for some of you. This one shows how persistent and absurd these myths are and this was common parlance for our critics, for commentators, for political leaders, for the greatest news media in the world and this was uttered day in, day out, every hour by the hour, by the international community and even some here and even by our own people. And they said this as though it was self-evident truth and here's what it said: The core of the conflict in the Middle East – conflict always in the singular – the core of the conflict in the Middle East is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Remember that one?
Now four years after the Arab Spring and the convulsions that take place, the disintegration of Syria, the disintegration of Iraq, the disintegration of Libya, the wars in Yemen, the chaos in the Sinai and everything else that convulses North Africa and the Middle East from India to the Atlantic, from the borders of India I'm happy to say to the Atlantic, there is great convulsion. What's that got to do with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? And the answer is: Nothing. Yet this was repeated over and over and over again. There were two truths – this was one of them. The core of the conflict was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were the settlements. Neither one is true.
Now it's evident. The first one is, you know, there are still true believers – not many – walking about us, but they're fairly silent about the first one because when millions are displaced, when hundreds of thousands are butchered, when every week in Istanbul now they had… in Ankara they had 100 people die in one day and thousands die every month – thousands – in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in the Sinai, in Libya. It's patently absurd. And yet people believe this. They believe this with religious fervor, I would say. I'm talking about the West. Now they believe the settlement myth even though they see it before their eyes. We left Gaza. We left every settlement – nothing. The conflict continues. We offer a deal and we say, "Okay, assuming we solve the settlement problem, what about the settlement called Tel Aviv? What about Jaffa? Give up the ghost." Nope.
The core of the conflicts in the Middle East is the battle between early medievalism, very primitive, very violent, the forces of militant Islam, and modernity. The core of the conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is the persistent refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundaries. There is no way to battle lies except to tell the truth. Any attempt to forge peace based on lies will crash against the realities of the Middle East, will crash against the rocks of reality. We look forward and we say we want a real peace, a lasting peace, a peace where our long-standing rights, the right of the Jewish people to live in their ancestral homeland as a free and secure people – those rights are guaranteed.
We have no preconditions for entering negotiations. We have foundations for a solution and we will be very firm and insistent on it. But there is no limitation on our side for entering negotiations. Yet that too is not being met by the other side. It has enjoyed a long pass, it has been given a pass by the international community, the Palestinian Authority. They are not held to their incitement. They're not held accountable for the violence that they foment all day, all night, every day, every month, on their Palestinian social networks and this has to end. My government has taken very strong steps to bolster our security, adding forces, giving them the means to do their job, punishing people who blow up houses or blow up people, murder innocent people. We do all that.
But I think the larger battle that we fight is the battle for the truth and I urge every one of you to be a soldier in that battle. We've withstood, in the last century, the many assaults on our people. We came back to our homeland. We built our state. We've overcome tremendous forces. Israel is a modern, democratic, progressive and powerful state. We've withstood the attacks of terror, Palestinian terror, over the decades and we'll overcome this one too. But I believe that the biggest battle we have to fight is the battle for the facts. The facts win over the fiction if they're repeated clearly, responsibly, firmly. This is what I ask all of you to do for the sake of the Jewish state and for the sake of the Jewish people.
Thank you.
(End)
2．Middle East Forum（http://www.meforum.org/5576/husseini-hitler）
Netanyahu, Husseini, and the Historians
by Jeffrey Herf
The Times of Israel
22 October 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comments about Haj Amin al-Husseini's impact on Hitler's decision-making about the Final Solution in Europe do not stand up to the consensus of historical research. Husseini's importance in Nazi Berlin lay far more in assisting the Third Reich's Arabic language propaganda toward the Arab world and in mobilizing Muslims in Eastern Europe to support the Nazi regime. That said, Netanayhu's comments about Husseini's lasting impact on Palestinian political culture are very much on the mark.
In his now famous comments at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of expulsion to one of extermination. "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],'" continued the prime minister. "'So what should I do with them?' He [Hitler] asked," according to Netanyahu. "He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them.'"
In the Knesset in 2012, the prime minister asserted that Husseini "was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution," and that "he, more than anybody else, convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution, and not let the Jews leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would come here. Rather that they would be annihilated, burned, there."
Having spent many years working on the history of modern Germany and on the period of Nazism and the Holocaust, I was surprised to see these quotes and this interpretation. I've never seen these comments cited before in the vast literature on the subject. This interpretation of the events of November 1941 is not supported by the scholarship on Holocaust decision-making. The prime minister overreached in his effort to push back against efforts to diminish Husseini's role as a collaborator and ideological soulmate with Nazi Germany.
・Hitler and Husseini in Berlin, November 1941
As this newspaper has helpfully published the English translation of the German record of the meeting between Hitler and Husseini on November 28, 1941 in Berlin, I will place the conversation in historical context. Amidst the vast scholarship on Hitler's decisions to implement a Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, the work of two historians stands out in particular. In his 1991 study, Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, Richard Breitman drew on Himmler's appointment calendar to make a compelling argument for an "early" decision, that is, one that was emerging in spring 1941 before the invasion of the Soviet Union and became more obvious with the Einsatzgruppen murders that began immediately after that invasion in June 1941.
Subsequently, Christopher Browning, in works that are summarized in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, addressed in more detail the evolution of Hitler's thinking and decision-making. Browning's now widely accepted conclusion is that in the midst of "euphoria" over the seeming victory over the Red Army in summer 1941, Hitler took a series of decisions to implement the Final Solution at the latest by October 1941. The historical reconstruction of the decision-making process is complex and well beyond the scope of a newspaper column. There is no substitute for reading Breitman and Browning along with the synthesis of the issue in Saul Friedlander 's second volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945: The Years of Extermination.
・Husseini meets with SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, April 1943.
In my own The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, a study of propaganda within Germany, I pointed out that by summer and early fall of 1941 Hitler's fiction of an international Jewish conspiracy waging war against Germany, a fiction which Hitler had repeatedly mentioned since a speech in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, seemed in his own eyes to be taking shape in the form of the alliance of Britain with the Soviet Union following his invasion of Russia in June 1941. The anti-Hitler coalition confirmed in his mind the truth of his conspiracy theory. As "international Jewry" appeared intent on waging a war of extermination against Germany, so he would "exterminate the Jewish race" in Europe in retaliation. He had been discussing these ideas since early 1939. They reached a fever pitch in summer and early fall of 1941 before he met with Husseini.
The now widely accepted international consensus among historians of the Holocaust is that Hitler had both made the decisions to implement the Final Solution and had communicated those decisions to key actors in the Nazi regime at the latest a month before his meeting with Husseini on November 28th. Husseini owed his life to Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom aided his escape from British forces chasing him after the British overthrew the pro-Nazi government he had helped to establish in early 1941. While he agreed with Hitler about fundamental ideological issues, he was in no position to have a major influence on decision-making about German policy toward the Jews in Europe.
I examined Husseini's meeting with Hitler in my Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. As the text published by this paper yesterday indicates, Hitler told the Mufti that when the German armies drove south from the Caucuses, "Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly prepared." Hitler had referred to "the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe," a typically vague and sinister reference to his anti-Jewish policies in Europe. Yet he was very clear that he was eager to enlist Husseini in his plans to extend the final solution beyond Europe to encompass the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. It is in this effort to extend the Final Solution beyond the shores of Europe, not its implementation within Europe, that Husseini came to play a prominent role.
・Husseini was instrumental in the formation of a volunteer Nazi Waffen-SS division in Bosnia, made up mostly of Bosnian Muslims.
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World drew on German archives and on the files of the United States Department of State and US intelligence agencies to present the most extensive documentation available about the vast Arabic language propaganda radio broadcasts and printed leaflets that the Nazi regime sent to the Arab societies during World War II. Husseini played a central role in those broadcasts. He became world famous at the time for his incitement on the radio to "kill the Jews" in summer 1942 as Rommel's Afrika Korps threatened to overwhelm the British and capture the Jews of pre-state Palestine. As the German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers have documented in Nazi Palestine: Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, had the Germans won the Battle of Al Alamein, an SS Einsatzgruppe was prepared to come to Egypt to carry out mass murders with techniques that had been perfected on the Eastern Front in Europe. The record of Husseini's ranting and raving on Nazi radio was well documented by American diplomats at the Embassy in wartime Cairo. I used those thousands of pages of translations when I wrote Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. (That work is translated into French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish but for some strange reason German publishers in a country famous for "coming to terms with the Nazi past" have refused to translate the most extensive record of Husseini's fulminations against the Jews.)
As the British historian David Motadel has recently shown in his important work Islam and Nazi Germany's War, Husseini and other Muslim clerics did play an important role in German policy in Europe but it was not by exerting an important influence on Holocaust decision-making. Rather he helped to recruit Imams who preached to tens of thousands of Muslims who fought with Wehrmacht, especially on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. While some of these units took part in actions against Jews, this considerable collaboration did not have an influence on Hitler's decision-making.
Though Netanyahu is thus wrong about Husseini's role in the decisions that led to the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, he is right to draw attention to Husseini's disastrous impact on Palestinian politics and society. In response to the storm of criticism that greeted his remarks, Netanyahu replied:
My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called 'occupation', without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews."
Husseini absolutely wanted to exterminate the Jews, above all, the Jews of pre-state Palestine, and then the Jews of Israel. The evidence of Husseini's pleas to kill the Jews, of his boundless hatred of Judaism as a religion and the Jews as a people is well documented in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
Bosnian Waffen-SS soldiers read a booklet titled Islam und Judentum, a German version of the mufti's pamphlet Islam i židovstvo (Islam and Judaism) that demonized Jews and Judaism.
Husseini embedded his Jew-hatred in his understanding of Islam as early as a 1937 speech in Syria that the Germans published in German the following year. In the midst of the terrorist attacks he led and incited from 1936 to 1939 in Palestine, it was Husseini who claimed that the Zionists wanted to seize or destroy the Al Aksa Mosque. This lie became a central element of Palestinian propaganda over the decades until recent weeks.
On November 5, 1943, Husseini spoke at the Islamic Institute in Berlin on "Balfour Day," a day to denounce the Balfour Declaration. The speech was printed in German and broadcast on the radio. I examine it in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. He vents his hatred of the Jews and the British for helping the Zionists. The Jews, he said, had tormented the world for ages, and have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: You will find that those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.' They tried to poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs and Muslims.
Husseini the Palestinian leader of the war of 1948 and hero to Yasser Arafat and his generation of leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, interpreted Zionism as only the most recent of this supposed age-old Jewish hostility not only to the Palestinians or Arabs as modern national groups but also to the religion of Islam. In the Islamic Institute speech he also referred to a supposed "Jewish desire" to seize the Islamic holy sites, a desire that extended to the Al Akas Mosque. Indeed, the Jews, he said, planned "to build a temple on its ruins." Haj Amin al-Husseini's very regrettable but consequential accomplishment was to fuse secular Arab anti-Zionism with the Islamist and thus theologically inspired hatred of the Jews and Judaism. The lies which Mahmoud Abbas and others have told in recent weeks about Israel's supposed desire to somehow infringe on the rights of Muslims to pay at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies that are now at least 75 years old.
Netanyahu added the following:
Unfortunately, Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews – continues. Not in the same format, but in a different one, and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders, it is necessary to stop the incitement. What is important is to recognize the historical facts and not ignore them, not then and not today."
Here the Prime Minister is on rock solid ground. Far from denouncing Husseini for spreading lies, absurd conspiracy theories and radical anti-Semitism, he has remained a revered figure in Palestinian political memory. The absurdities for which Husseini became famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too prominent role in the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did incite others to murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy theories comparable to those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to help the Nazis in a failing effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle East and to win the war in Europe. He left behind a legacy of hatred, paranoia, religious fanaticism and celebration of terror so long as it was aimed at Jews and Israelis. The Palestinian authority and Hamas even more so has kept that legacy is alive and well and fills the heads of Palestinian teenagers with rubbish that has led to the terror wave of recent weeks.
The Prime Minister has erred in his understanding of the timing of Hitler's decision-making but he is right about Husseini's disastrous impact on Palestinian political culture. I hope that the discussion his comments have generated will draw more attention to the now abundant scholarship on Husseini's role in collaborating with the Nazis in their failed efforts to murder the Jews of North African and the Middle East during World War II. We need more public discussion about the atrocious legacy he left behind that has been playing itself out, yet again, in the knife attacks on the streets of Israel's cities. That legacy of a political culture that venerates violence and anti-Semitism is a huge barrier to successful diplomacy and resolution of the old conflict. The more decision-makers in Washington cast a harsh glare on the enduring impact of Husseini's legacy, the more likely they will enhance the now dim chances for diplomatic success. If they can't find the words to speak clearly about it, diplomacy will stand little chance of success.
・Jeffrey Herf is a professor of History at the University of Maryland-College Park and a fellow at the Middle East Forum. His recent works include: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009) and The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (2006).
(End)
