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The Palestinians Must Acknowledge Their Role in the Holocaust
(Jerusalem Post) Mark Regev - Had the Axis military advance not been stopped in 1942 by the British Army at El Alamein in Egypt, there can be little doubt what Nazi occupation would have meant for the half a million Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. In German-occupied territories where the populace was either supportive of the genocide or indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors, such as occupied Ukraine and the Baltic states, the destruction of the Jews was often near total. There can be little doubt that in Mandatory Palestine, the Germans would have found a collaborationist leadership eager to enlist the local population in the mass killing of the Jews. At the time, Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and president of the Arab Higher Committee, was the pivotal figure in the Palestinian national movement. He was a hardcore anti-Semite and an infamous Nazi collaborator. Husseini helped orchestrate the April 1941 pro-Nazi Rashid Ali coup in Iraq and the subsequent Farhud massacre of Baghdadi Jews. Husseini relocated to Berlin where he became Hitler's most outspoken Arab advocate, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Middle East while recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen-SS. Germany's post-war integration into Europe was predicated upon taking full responsibility for its wartime actions. It is high time the Palestinians did the same. The writer is a former adviser to the prime minister and currently a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies.