Netanyahu rewrites history

S P SETH

It is unbelievable that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has got away with his recent preposterous statement that Hitler’s massacre of Jews was in fact done at the instigation and encouragement of the then Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The way Netanyahu made his assertion would seem to suggest that he might actually have been present during the conversation on the subject of getting rid of the Jews. Netanyahu said, “Hitler didn’t want to want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” Just when Hitler was weighing his options, according to Netanyahu’s telling of the conversation, he met Haj Amin al-Husseini who said to Hitler, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ Hitler then asked the Grand Mufti, ‘So what should I do with them?’ The Mufti said, ‘Burn them.’ And Hitler obviously did what he was told by the Mufti. And the world ‘naively’ believed all this time that Hitler was the ultimate monster. In Netanyahu’s re-telling of the story, the bigger monster was indeed the then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

The absurdity of it all is all too patent but its dangerous overtones for the Palestinians are not a laughing matter. Its underlying meaning is that the Palestinians and their leadership has been and continues to harbor destruction of the Jews and their state of Israel. And Netanyahu was not slow to own up to his real motive in making such a stupid, but dangerous, assertion. When questioned, he said, “I did not intend to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry.” Elaborating, he said, “My intention was… rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, … without the so-called ‘occupation’… even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.” 

In other words, the Palestinians are intrinsically an evil people and their hatred of the Jews is not due to ‘occupation’ of their country by Israel but is part of who they are. It is amazing how Netanyahu got away with such dangerously ludicrous distortion in a world so sensitive to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust of the Jews. Indeed, Isaac Herzog, the opposition leader in the Israeli parliament was quite critical of such rewriting of history. He reportedly said, “This is a dangerous historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimizes the Holocaust, Nazism and… Hitler’s part in our people’s terrible disaster.” (In a subsequent clarification, he did acknowledge Nazi Germany’s role in the mass killing of the Jews, but the Mufti still remained the main inspiration.)

Despite such rewriting of history, the world at large didn’t seem overtly concerned about how Israel’s prime minister twisted history to suit his country’s crusade against the Palestinians. Since the carving out of the Israeli state out of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli leaders have repeatedly emphasized a few themes. The first and the foremost, of course, has been the Holocaust their people suffered under the Nazi Germany. Which is true. But that they deserve a state of their own out of their mythical ‘holy land’, which is today’s Palestine, to feel safe was politically and morally a questionable proposition. At a very basic level, Palestine was not some empty desert land awaiting new Jewish settlers. The Palestinian people had lived there for generations. And there was no reason why they should be penalized for Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews, or their historical persecution in Europe. Of course, now we are told by Netanyahu that the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was behind it all!

The second point the new state of emphasized was to deny the existence of a Palestinian entity and the Palestinian people, as it started the process of violently expelling them from their own country. The whole idea seemed to be that these ‘homeless’ people will be absorbed in neighbouring Arab countries and this will miraculously resolve the Palestinian question. With Palestine occupied by Israel and Palestinians scattered and settled in other Arab countries, there will be no Palestinian problem. And the process of expulsion continued through wars, like the 1967 war and the 1973 war, with more Palestinians expelled and killed and more Jewish settlements in the occupied territory. And this violence against the Palestinians continues to this day. Despite their ever-increasing misery, Palestinian entity and Palestinian people have refused to vanish, not only in their own country but also in other Arab countries in refugee settlements.

In the midst of it all, Israel still claims to be the victim of Palestinian violence. And they do it by demonizing Palestinians as terrorists, barbarians and whatever else they can throw at them. The fact is that the Palestinians are an occupied people and they are easily suppressed, if and when they rise up, because Israel has all the power, militarily, economically, politically and internationally. Therefore, their occasional bursts of violence, mostly of a local nature and exercised through some stone-throwing and knife wielding, is essentially the rage of an exasperated and frustrated people largely abandoned by the international community, with the world’s most powerful country, the US, always behind Israel. And with that sort of Palestinian impotent rage, Israel uses all its propaganda to demonize them as subhuman or worse.

 With their country under Israeli occupation, they are subjected to the worst kind of apartheid, which is meant to humiliate them by virtual confinement surrounded by military check points, observation towers, searches and the like. And even that kind of humiliation and demonization is not enough for Netanyahu. And now, with Netanyahu citing the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as inspiration behind Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews, the Palestinians of all generations are implicated. With such ‘antecedents’ and practicing ‘barbarism’ and ‘terrorism’, the Palestinians don’t deserve humanity, as Netanyahu and his ilk would think.

In the midst of its sordid record of occupation, Israel has the temerity to talk of its democracy, including its justice system. About its courts and ‘democracy’ in general, David Shulman had this to say in an article in the New York Review of Books in 2009, “For decades now, the courts have allowed the settlement enterprise to proceed unimpeded by significant legal constraints, despite its evident criminal nature under international law… They have let rampant violence by settlers throughout the territories… go largely unpunished. They have sanctioned the fencing off of Palestinian villages into tiny, discontinuous enclaves cut off from markets, schools, hospitals, and work places…”

And it keeps getting worse as recent events, arising out of increasing restrictions at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to Muslim worshippers, testifies. For Palestinians, it would seem there is more of the same as long as Israel can get away with murder in daylight.     

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.