The Right Way is the Kirchwey

I followed up on this Pamela Geller post on the Mufti, among others, and reached here, where I found this:

...On May 5th, The Nation Associates submitted its second memorandum, a 133-page report signed by Kirchwey *, titled “The Palestine Problem and Proposals for its Solution.”...The report reviewed the history of Hitler’s crimes against the Jews, the unwillingness of the Western powers to rescue them, and the British white paper of 1939 that slammed the doors of Palestine “shut in the face of the supplicants.”

At the war’s end, the report continued, “the common assumption was that the first victims of Hitlerism would be the first to be rescued by a sympathetic world.” [but]...The British Government was using every method of “exclusion and repression, to prevent them from going to Palestine.” This policy, Kirchwey believed, was meant to serve British imperial interests and the ruling elements among the Arabs, “even at the cost of defending a decadent, feudal, and hierarchical social system.”

The section called “Some Proposed Solutions” carefully surveyed possible alternatives for Palestine. Kirchwey, its principal author, flatly rejected calls for the creation of a bi-national state coming from liberal Jewish intellectuals such as Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, I. F. Stone, and Hannah Arendt. Acknowledging that the idea “has a strong democratic appeal,” she countered that it would not “satisfy the needs of the Jews to migrate to Palestine—particularly in view of the consistent opposition of the Arabs.” If such a state were created, Kirchwey predicted, “conflict would inevitably develop between two peoples whose cultural and industrial development is on such contrasting levels and whose approach to social and political problems is so different.” While the Jewish advocates of a bi-national state were “patient and reliable,” the Arab leaders would never permit it. The only workable solution was therefore partition.

Kirchwey also rejected the demand for an independent Arab state in Palestine. The Jewish population, she wrote, would be at the mercy of an Arab majority led by the anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The exposure of the role played by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini in the affairs of Arab Palestine was probably The Nation’s most important revelation. Newly published histories, such as Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Klaus Gensicke’s Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, have detailed the Mufti’s wartime relationship with Hitler, and his role in support of the Nazis while living in exile in Germany from 1941 to 1945. Kirchwey presented much the same evidence and material in 1947.

On May 10th, The Nation Associates submitted a memorandum on Axis affiliations with the exiled Grand Mufti and chairman of the Arab Higher Committee. The facts in the report, Kirchwey explained, were taken directly from captured files belonging to the Mufti and the German High Command, all discovered by American military authorities in Germany and now in the possession of the State Department.

“The Arab Higher Committee: Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes” contained documents and 35 photographs showing the Mufti and other Arab leaders in the company of Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Dino Alfieri, Benito Mussolini’s ambassador to Berlin. The report substantiated the charge that the Mufti controlled and directed the Arab Higher Committee, the self-appointed representative of the Palestinian Arabs, from his Egyptian exile and that he had worked with the Nazis. All 55 UN delegates received a copy of the 75-page report; 5,000 copies were printed and disseminated to Congress and the White House. The report identified Emil Ghouri, head of the Arab delegation to the UN, and delegates Wasef Kamal and Rasem Khalidi, as
being “notorious for their long-time association with the Mufti and his Axis activities.” It also noted that one of the other delegates, Jamal Husseini, the Mufti’s cousin, had joined him in Iraq in 1939. There, he organized a fifth column that incited the anti-British rebellion of 1941. Kamal, it reported, subsequently fled Iraq and escaped to Turkey, where he became a “paid agent of the German secret service.”

As for the Mufti himself, captured German files revealed that he planned the Arab Palestinian riots of 1936, using funds supplied by the Nazis to fuel the violence. After escaping to Iraq, the report alleged that the Mufti bore responsibility for the deaths of 400 Jewish men, women, and children who were murdered on Baghdad’s streets. Escaping again, he made his way to Italy and then on to Nazi Germany.

In Berlin, the report stated, “The Nazis established a special office for him,” from which the Mufti engaged in activities including “propaganda, espionage, organization of Moslem military units in Axis-occupied countries and in North Africa and Russia, establishment of Arab legions in an Arab brigade and organization of fifth-column activities in the Middle East, including sabotage and parachutist expeditions.” He used Nazi radio to broadcast not only to the Middle East but also to Bari, Rome, Tokyo, and Athens, and eventually to India, Indonesia, and Java.

The report concluded that the Grand Mufti both supported and encouraged “the Nazi program of extermination of the Jews.” Captured records revealed that he had accompanied Adolf Eichmann to visit the gas chambers at Auschwitz and helped to put an end to negotiations being carried out by the Nazis to ransom Jews; the Mufti insisted they be liquidated. Writing to Himmler, the Mufti accused him and Joachim von Ribbentrop of being too lenient, since they had allowed some Jews to flee Germany. “If such practices continue,” the Mufti was quoted, “it would be “incomprehensible to Arabs and Moslems and provoke a feeling of disappointment.” Refusing comment, members of the Arab Higher Committee in New York responded simply that “the Axis issue should be forgotten.”

Kirchwey made sure that her reports reached the White House. Writing to Truman about The Nation Associates’ report on the Mufti and the Arab Higher Committee, White House aide David Niles explained the significance of the material:

You have received a copy of the Documentary Record submitted to the United Nations. This contains very confidential material that is in the files of the State Department. I think it is important to find out how it got out. It is very damaging evidence that the Arab representatives now at UNO were allies of Hitler. There is also included in this material the diary of the Grand Mufti, which Justice Jackson found at Nuremberg. Copies of this document have already gone to all the Members of Congress.

Clearly, Freda Kirchwey had obtained the classified information from a friendly source in the State Department. “Thanks, glad you sent it,” Truman replied. The president was already aware of its revelations. “I knew all about the purported facts mentioned and, of course, I don’t like it.” He wished that its contents “could have been used [by the U.S. government] for the welfare of the world.”

The Arab states and the Arab Higher Committee had proposed that the UN immediately declare itself in favor of an independent Palestine, which, under the terms they favored, would have meant an Arab state. In such a state, Kirchwey argued, a pledge of legal equality for Jews was not credible. There is nothing, she wrote, “to justify confidence in the attitude of the Arab states towards minorities in their population.” Their treatment of Jews, Lebanese, Christian Copts, and Armenians offered “striking refutation” of their assurances. Kirchwey later noted that her report on the connection between the Mufti, the Arab Higher Committee and Hitler gave the delegates pause; into whose hands might they be delivering the Jews? The Nation report, she wrote, had “a striking effect on the final decisions of the session” and persuaded various delegations not to vote for the Arab proposal.

And read through this as well:

The British Record on Partition as revealed in British Military Intelligence

and other Official Sources A Memorandum Submitted

to the Special Session of The General Assembly of the United Nations

April 1948

Published by The Nation Associates

___________________
*

The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Freda Kirchwey. Her father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, a well-known pacifist, and president of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of this journal). After graduating from Barnard College in 1915, she began a career in journalism, working for various New York newspapers. In 1918, she joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943.

And here is how Freda worked: