Re: [Marxism] Previous outburst of German "leftist" support for Zionism

[Anna Fierling <anna_fierling@xxxxxxxxx>]

Andy wrote:

>This would be shocking if we didn't remember that the Israeli ruling
party's founders collaborated with the fascists

Uh, so did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By your reasoning then, it
shouldn't surprise us that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion enjoys such
wide circulation under Palestinians....


Anna Fierling:

There's obviously no point in debating Andy/Alex or whomever and his absurd 
celebration of Israel. His comment about the mufti is typical of his ilk, 
though, and warrants a response -- this is an excerpt from a very good article 
from "The Nation" from last January (Baruch Kimmerling, "Israel's Culture of 
Martyrdom"):

One striking effort of the attorney generalduring Eichmann's trial was to 
equate the Arabs with the Nazis. This was achieved by inflating the role of Haj 
Amin al-Husseini, the prominent Palestinian political and religious leader 
(chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council and the mufti of Jerusalem) in the 
extermination of the Jews. In 1937, a year after the outbreak of the Arab 
Revolt, the British tried to arrest Husseini, among other Arab rebels, in the 
hope of quelling the uprising. Husseini escaped to Fascist Italy and then to 
Germany, where he offered his services to Hitler. There is no doubt that he saw 
in Nazi Germany an important ally against Zionism and, in at least one case, he 
tried to intervene to prevent the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children to 
Palestine. Husseini probably knew and approved of the Nazi plan to annihilate 
the Jewish people and hoped to receive a proper position in "liberated 
Palestine." He helped the Nazis form a collaborationist Muslim brigade in 
Bosnia, and
 to broadcast propaganda to the Arab world. However, the argument that he was a 
chief adviser to the Nazis on the "solution of the Jewish problem"--an argument 
on prominent display at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum--is preposterous. 
The Germans did not need Husseini's advice and in fact scorned the non-Aryan 
religious cleric.

Since then, however, "the mufti" has become one of the major assets of 
pro-Israel propaganda. The argument was and is as follows: The Arabs do not 
accept the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, therefore they are 
anti-Semites who want to annihilate all the Jews and to accomplish the Nazi 
program--the best example being the mufti's alliance with Nazi Germany. This 
social construction of reality ignores not only the complexity and the 
fundamentally different basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also some 
inconvenient historical facts. One such fact is that while assisting the Nazis, 
the mufti lost almost all his influence over the Palestinian Arabs, which he 
never regained. Another is that during the 1930s and '40s Palestine was the 
only country in the region (and perhaps in the whole world) where no Nazi party 
or organization was established. During the 1930s, some Arab, as well as some 
Jewish, leaders expressed admiration for fascist regimes, but this was before 
the
 racist bases of these regimes became clear. It was only much later that Arabs 
borrowed anti-Semitic literature and motifs from the Europeans and used them in 
their propaganda.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050110&s=kimmerling




Anna Fierling
Otto-Suhr-Institut
FU-Berlin

"Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden."
                
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