How Israel Uses The Holocaust for Anti-Palestinian Propaganda

Hajj Amine has become the favorite Palestinian of Zionists in recent years (of course, after their puppets Mahmoud Abass and Mohammad Dahlan.) Hajj Amine died decades ago, but his life has recently been revived by Zionist propagandists. He has been the source of numerous op-eds, an entire book and the Israeli foreign ministry recently commanded Israeli embassies to publicize a photo with the Hajj Amine meeting with Adolf Hitler. It is that photo - an effort to tarnish the Palestinian cause by creating a dubious link with Nazism - that has made Hajj Amine such a publicized Palestinian.

Israeli propagandists and their allies like to publicize the Hajj, but he was not a Palestinian figure. In fact, the Hajj is one of the least popular Palestinian personalities ever. But there is one man who initiated contact with the Nazis and remains a popular figure for one group of people: Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir is a late prime minister of Israel and terrorist who supported an alliance with the Nazis:

When the overtures to the Italians elicited no serious response from Rome, Stern and his colleagues dispatched a representative to meet in Lebanon in early 1941 with a German agent. They later sent the German Embassy in Ankara a detailed proposal for Zionist-Nazi cooperation. The Lehi proposal offered to help the Germans force the British out of Palestine in return for permission to establish a Jewish state there to which European Jewry would be transferred by the Nazis. This fantastic plan emphasized the ‘’common nationalist and totalitarian bonds” between Nazi ideology and Lehi’s revisionist Zionism.

And the Israeli Holocaust museum is not dedicated to the favorite Zionist lie: to tie the Palestinians to the Holocaust in order to smear them and pretend that the Palestinians should have to pay a price because they were responsible for the Holocaust:

yad Hn4vP 19672

H/T: Max Blumenthal

Daniel Bar-Tal, a renowned Israeli political psychologist who has conducted some of the most comprehensive surveys of Israeli attitudes since Operation Cast Lead, found that the racist, authoritarian trends that are increasingly pronounced in Israeli society are products of a “psycho-social infrastructure” dedicated to promoting “a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering.”

This infrastructure is comprised of institutions like the Zionist education system, the Israeli Defense Forces, and even Yad Vashem, which explicitly links the Palestinian national struggle to Nazism.

Indeed, the only image of a Palestinian in all of Yad Vashem (at least that I am aware of) is of the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who was forced by the British to flee to Germany, where he became a (not very successful) Nazi collaborator. In recent years, the Mufti has become a key fixture of Israeli propaganda efforts against the Palestinians. As such, a photo is featured prominently on a wall in Yad Vashem depicting him sig heiling a group of Nazi troops. However, there is no mention anywhere in Yad Vashem of the 9000 Palestinian Arabs the British recruited to fight the Nazis, or of the 233,000 North African volunteers who fought and died while battling the Nazis in the French Liberation Army (and whose heroic efforts were dramatized in the excellent film, “Days of Glory”).

According to Peter Novick, the author of “The Holocaust in American Life,” though the Mufti played no significant part in the Holocaust, he plays a “starring role” in Yad Vashem’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. “The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goring, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann — of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler.” [Novick, p. 158]

Not only has Yad Vashem attempted through propagandistic means to link the Palestinian struggle to Nazism, it has promoted an exclusivist view of the Holocaust. In April 2009, Yad Vashem fired a docent, Itamar Shapira, because he had discussed the massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yassin with a group of students from the settlement of Efrat. “All I was trying to say is that there were people who lived here before the Holocaust survivors arrived, that they suffered a terrible trauma too, and that we shouldn’t hide the facts,” Shapira told me a month after his firing. “Yad Vashem carefully selected what facts it wanted to present, but deliberately avoided things like Deir Yassin, even though its ruins were just a thousand meters from the museum.”

Is a one-time meeting with Hitler more important an entry than the man who actually masterminded the Holocaust? What other reason for the obsession with Hajj Amine al Husseini than solely to tar the Palestinian struggle with Nazism in order to discredit it and to pretend that the Palestinians are somehow to blame for the Holocaust? What other reason than to use the memory of the Holocaust for exploitative purposes as part of the propaganda of Zionism?

Whatever role the Palestinians played - and granted Hajj Amine did organize troops for the Nazis but not amongst Palestinians but Bosnian Muslims - it is a joke beyond sickness to claim that the Palestinians played a significant role in the Holocaust and worthy of such attention at the expense of actual Nazis. It was a shameful opportunistic role played by al Husseini and to his shame, not to the shame of the Palestinians, but to his exclusive shame as one, not the sole, but one Palestinian leader. Zionists would have you believe that a one-time meeting with Hitler and organizing of troops for the Nazi front lines, not for concentration camps but for infantry, constituted the most significant episode of the Holocaust and that the Palestinians were a decisive player in the extermination of Jews. Never mind that the organized Bosnians had nothing to do with running the death camps and that the Nazis did not receive any support from the Palestinians beyond a simple word. As if the Nazis took their cues to kill Jews from the Palestinians and would not have done it otherwise. But the Zionist narrative now has it that the Holocaust would never have happened were it not for the one-meeting between Amine and Hitler. This is the new Zionist line: the Palestinians are responsible for the Holocaust. But Zionists want to obsessively and maliciously smear the Palestinians if only to make themselves feel better and righteous and to assuage their conscience [sic] if they tell themselves that they need not feel sorry for their oppression of the Palestinians because they are all just a bunch of Nazis and they helped to kills Jews so they're the enemy and deserve their "chastisement". This is the de-humanization and vilification that Zionists engage in order to keep up their image of a righteous people such engaging in "self-defense" and the Israeli culture is a culture inundated with the imagery of the Holocaust that many of them want to vicariously fight the Nazis: so the Palestinian-are-Nazis myth aids that militarism. The Zionists love that photo of Husseini because it serves their own fascistic and Nazi-like actions and goals. It promotes their attacks against the Palestinians. And pretends that the Palestinians have to compensate "the Jews" for something.

The layers of lies and moral depravity that characterize Zionist ethos are stunning.