The great Norman Geras, says that,
… Arab and Palestinian collaboration with Nazism has no bearing on what the Palestinians lost or what they have suffered because of Israel’s creation. To maintain the contrary is to make every Palestinian responsible for Haj Amin al Husseini. It is also to treat the existence of Israel as a form of punishment - punishment on account of Husseini and other Arabs who were complicit with Nazism.
I know he’s just making a brief point regarding another text and isn’t obliged to argue everything in detail. Still, it does seem a bit drastic to say that “Palestinian collaboration with Nazism has no bearing on what the Palestinians lost”. No one imagines that Palestinians collaborated en masse with the Nazis but it’s a fact that one of their most important political leaders did and backing the wrong - both from a pragmatic and moral viewpoint - horse in the Second World War was a political act by a political leader with political consequences. One might fairly dispute the extent and importance of those consequences but not deny their possible existence outright.
Note that I’m not saying that because one of their leaders supported the Nazis the Palestinians as a nation deserved to lose out in 1948 - still less that ordinary Palestinians deserved to suffer - just that it’s something that might reasonably be taken into account when discussing how Israel came into existence and why a Palestinian state didn’t.
Similarly, when the argument is voiced that the Palestinians have been saddled with some of the costs arising from the failed attempt to exterminate the Jews, it should be possible to raise the notable enthusiasm for the Nazi cause expressed by one Palestinian leader without suggesting that this gives rise to a limitation on Palestinian rights today.
Professor Colin Shindler:
Anne Karpf is right to attack the equating of Palestinians with Nazis by rightwing authors, using the sojourn of the Mufti of Jerusalem in wartime Berlin (Islamofascist slanders, November 4). However, it is simplistic to gloss over the alignment of the mainstream Palestinian Arab national movement with Germany which argued from the standpoint of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” in order to eject the British from Mandatory Palestine.
The Mufti was not alone in his views. In February 1941, Sari Sakakini, a Christian Arab, conducted a poll on behalf of the US consulate in Jerusalem and discovered that 88% of Palestinian Arabs favoured Germany over Britain. Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the commander of the Arab Liberation Army which invaded Palestine in early 1948 - and opponent of the Mufti of Jerusalem - spent the war years in Berlin. Compared to the Jews, few Palestinian Arabs enlisted with the British forces.
If the Nazis had succeeded in conquering Palestine, SS Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, together with his Einsatzkommando, was on standby and would have been ordered to Palestine. The Nazis expected local participation in their actions, as had been the case in eastern Europe.
The fear of annihilation was undoubtedly a factor in the mindset of many Israelis during the war of 1948. There was also little sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian Arabs within the British left at that time, with Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn both embracing Zionism. Arafat’s Fatah therefore always distanced itself from the Mufti and made a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This is not the case with the Islamists of Hamas and Hizbullah, whose disdain for Jews extends beyond the borders of Israel-Palestine.
Miguel, interesting post/link with many important points.
Eamonn, I agree with you — that is, if I understood you correctly — wrt your reservations about Norm’s statement. It is really relevant mainly for people who argue from the Daniel-Pipes-pov. However, it is usually people who see themselves as pro-Palestinian advocates who bring up the slogan that the poor Palestinians had to pay the price for what Europe did to the Jews. If I had a penny for each time I encountered this “argument” e.g. on the Guardian’s Cif-website, boy, I would be doing pretty well…
Just recently, Cif had a piece by Anas Altikriti, who wanted to re-assure his readers about Hamas with the somewhat bizarre argument that “Hamas is not Al Qaida”, and he brought up exactly this point. What’s also important is that in the Middle East, there is virtually no acknowledgement whatsoever of the mufti’s Nazi past, or of the ties between the Brotherhood and the Nazis, or the fact that after WWII, Nazis found refuge in Arab countries and even served in official positions. And there is of course no acknowledgement whatsoever that just as the Nazis, the Arabs singled out Jews as “not belonging” after the UN-partition resolution in 1947, and there is no acknowledgement that the antisemitism that is so popular in the Middle East — and is freely expressed in cartoons, soap operas, and even by culture ministers who want to head UNESCO… — that this is also part of the Nazi ideology that the Arabs enthusiastically embraced. I may be biased as a historian, but I believe that not even acknowledging that all these Nazi-themes still echo in the Arab world is one of the obstacles to a real peace, i.e. a peace that is not just the absence of military hostilities.
Eamonn and Petra:
Better to ask him than speculate, but I think all Norm Geras is trying to say, is, not only would it be wrong to claim as many do, that the Palestinians are the blameless victims of European anti-Semetism, but that it would be equally wrong to claim that the 1948 armistice was just punishment meted out to the Palestinians for the Mufti’s alliance with the Nazis.
Punishing nations allied with the Nazis simply wasn’t a consideration of the voting nations who supported the UN resolution that created Israel. Sympathy for creating a homeland somewhere for a minority faith group existed before Hitler’s accession to power. (Lenin had, at some point, proposed a Jewish state in Biro-bajan and Sir Moses Montefiore made the first land purchase in what later became Israel following the Damascus blood libel, which was early in the 19th century, for the protection of Levantine Jews)
It seems to me that Norman Geras still sees the Palestinians as ‘victims’, saddled with the unfortunate consequences of backing the wrong horse. The truth is that the Palestinians were the DRIVING FORCE behind the genocidal project aganst the Jews. Their incitement was not confined to Palestine but spread all over the Arab world. Apart from the Mufti’s own personal pro-Nazi machinations, Palestinians in Syria and in the Yemen stirred anti-Jewish ill-feeling in those countries.In Iraq, Palestinian teachers were directly responsible for inciting the locals against the Jews, leading to the terrible 1941 pogrom which killed 179 Jews. Because Palestinian collaboration in the genocidal project against the Jews has been obscured and played down, because the Mufti was never tried as a Nazi war criminal, it seems to me that Palestinians have got off lightly - they have not paid enough of a price for their misdeeds and in the eyes of western liberals still retain this undeserved aura of innocence.
We allowed the above comment after some debate and because it reflects a certain broader desire to answer the pernicious “the Jews are the new Nazis” argument with an equally unacceptable “the Palestinians were/are the real Nazis” one.
We also think it’s condemned by its own evident stupidity and racism and no more of the same ilk will be permitted.
Eamonn:
FYI, Bataween is the author of the Point of No Return blogsite. http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/
and, although she might not have chosen her words well in her response to this thread above, she writes most eloquently about the Middle East’s forgotten refugees.
Hi,
I am not if you are being hypersensitive or if bataween’s post got edited but with a couple of changes it seems utterly reasonable.
The Palestinian leadership certainly were not “**the** driving force” as the germans would have carried out the anti-semitic rulings anyway but in the Middle East it is simply not in dispute that the Palestinian leadership was a vector by which European style anti-semitism was imported into the Middle East. The case can also be made that had Jews been able to freely leave for the Mandate in the late 30s and early 40s that a significant portion that were killed would not have been.
It is also indisputable that the Mufti was a war criminal and it is one of the great might have beens of history that had he been tried as one and had his followers have been discredited and broken that come 1947 the war might not have broken out. Probably would have anyway but the two main agitators on the Palestinian side would have stood in the dock together.
The last logical leap from the crimes of their leadership to say the Palestinians as a whole never paid enough is the second thing which is clearly false. Whilst the Mufti, Kawaquji and Rashid Ali might have been ideologically sympathetic to the Nazis the ordinary populus were at best backing a winner in 1940-1942 and probably mostly indifferent and i think one would be hard pressed to say the average Palestinian hasn’t paid and isn’t paying a very very heavy price for their leadership’s misdeeds.
That said as the post stands - as of 2/12/2009 - it doesn’t strike me as “evidently racist” or “evidently stupid”.