Revisiting Netanyahu on the Mufti’s Holocaust Role

Remember the contretemps when, five years ago, Binyamin Netanyahu attacked the Grand Mufti of the Palestine Mandate?

Examples:

The Guardian

Anger at Netanyahu claim Palestinian grand mufti inspired Holocaust

Israeli PM accused of trivialising the Holocaust for saying grand mufti of Jerusalem gave Hitler idea of exterminating Europe’s Jews

The New York Times

Netanyahu Denounced for Saying Palestinian Inspired Holocaust

Israeli historians and opposition politicians joined Palestinians in denouncing the Israeli prime minister

Haaretz:

Netanyahu: Hitler Didn't Want to Exterminate the Jews

Prime minister tells World Zionist Congress that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, but Jerusalem's Grand Mufti convinced him to exterminate them, a claim that was rejected by most accepted Holocaust scholars.

And then there is this:

...at a war crimes trial on 26 July 1946 Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that “the Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan.”   

which is from Joseph B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer: The Rise and Fall of Haj Aminel-Husseini (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), p. 160.  

In the British Foreign Office file, 371/52585/E1984/515/31, F.O. minute, October 6, 1946, you can find this quotation of Wisliceny:

"According to my opinion, the Grand-Mufti who has been in Berlin since 1941 played a role in the decision of the German Government to exterminate the European Jews."

Phillip Mattar describes those affidavits as unreliable yet Eichmann himself, in his testimony at his trial, confirmed that the Nazis had "an agreement with the Grand Mufti" to prevent emigration to Palestine (The Eichmann Trial: Proceedings, Session No. 58, p. 1053).

But the British did not feel confident to place him on trial.  Other historical surviews of the Mufti disagree with the Mufti not bein involved firectly in the Holocaust.  Here. And here.

Rafael Medoff took to task those who had an interest in downplaying the Mufti Nazi links.  He notes a 1990 study of American Zionism during the Holocaust years. Its author

claims that American Zionist organizations exaggerated the Mufti's crimes and sought his indictment as a war criminal on the false premise that he had a role in formulating the Final Solution

What they did seek to charge the Mufti was this

the Mufti's organizing the Arab Legion, his role in the pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq in 1941, and the Yugoslavia atrocities — but not the genocide.

Medoff includes, in a footnote,  reliable evidence of a Nazi link to Palestinian Arab violence before the outbreak of World War II during 1938 based on five original British police documents proving such a link that were published in Efraim Dekel, Shai: The Exploits of Haganah Intelligence, New York, 1959.

More from Medoff:

A specific link between the Mufti and the Final Solution became known in early 1946 when a prominent American journalist, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the New York Post, cited documents revealing Husseini's effort to interfere in ransom negotiations over European Jewish refugees. The documents referred to a proposal by the British in the spring of 1943 to permit 4,000 Jewish refugee children from Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Slovakia, accompanied by 500 adults, to enter Palestine, in exchange for the release of 20,000German prisoners of war. The Germans were interested in the scheme and entered into negotiations with the British, but later withdrew after the Mufti protested...Surely the Mufti knew something about the Final Solution from the visit by his top aides to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Oranienburg. David Yisraeli long ago uncovered German Foreign Office correspondence documenting how the Mufti arranged, in 1942, for several of his assistants to undergo training by the SS, including a visit to Sachsenhausen,adjacent to the headquarters of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, in order "to learn how to deal with the enemy, particularly the Jews."

And

Eichmann himself confirmed that the Mufti's aides were given SS training, and that he himself briefed them on the genocide process. He testified at his 1961 trial that on one occasion, three of the Mufti's Arab associates "came to work in my Section for their information for a day or two."  He recalled: "I received the order to open everything to them, to let them look everywhere, also state secrets."  In his testimony, Eichmann also acknowledged that the Mufti's aides were given training, in his department and others, to "recondition [them] into experts for any Gestapo to be set up in the Near East" in the event that the Nazis conquered that region.

The 1943 Himmler congratulatory telegram to the Mufti is, alas, too non-specific although being friendly enough with Himmkler to receive such a missive is interesting.

At the time of the Netanyahu-Mufti affair, Time Magazine had this to offer from 
David Kaiser on the Mufti:

He proposed an Arab revolt all across the Middle East to fight the Jews...He also wanted to form an Arab legion, using Arab prisoners from the French Empire who were then POWs inside Germany. He also asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine.Netanyahu uttered a half-truth when he referred to Hitler’s supposed desire to expel, rather than murder, the Jews. 

Nevertheless, the Holocaust was not the brainchild of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem although he had plans for crematoria in the Dotan Valley in northern Samaria.  And let us not forget this from Bernard Lewis' 1999 book, "Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice", pages 146-47, that I posted five years ago

^