‘How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses?”
The question was asked recently by the author and journalist, Yossi Klein Halevi. He argues that the charge of genocide against Israel is the endpoint of decades of delegitimizing Israel, in which its enemies have systematically dismantled the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history.
First came the settler colonial canard, denying the Jews’ indigenousness in their ancient homeland. Then came the Nakba, the narrative denying that Palestinians were forced from their homes by a war that the Arab side started and lost.
Holocaust education
Klein Halevi has tried to explain these obscene distortions of history by blaming Holocaust education. He claims that it has been a failure because educators have tried to universalize the message. Instead of being an unique expression of murderous antisemitism against the Jewish people, Holocaust education has become a generalized message of anti-racism.
Klein Halevi is right. But the problem is not just the universalizing of the worst catastrophe ever suffered by the Jewish people, it is ignoring the huge impact Nazism had on the Arabs. I would argue that genocide is not the endpoint, but the starting point of the Arab and Islamist war against the Jews, preceding even the establishment of the State of Israel.
Nazism inspired “secular” Arab nationalist parties, complete with paramilitary “shirts” brigades reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, to glorify militarism and martyrdom. Once independent, Arab autocracies sidelined and ultimately ethnically cleansed their non-Muslim minorities. Jews were identified with the hated European colonizers, although they had predated Arab and Muslim imperialism by 1,000 years or more. (If European colonialism was welcomed by Jews, it is because the European powers had insisted on ending their second-class status under Islam.)
The Middle East has since suffered a catastrophic exodus of minorities – Copts, Assyrians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Baha’is – to the point that the region is now 99% monolithically Muslim. Close to a million Jews were forced to flee as refugees, most finding a haven in Israel.
Threats of genocide were made by Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run-up to and following the UN Partition Plan of 1947. Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, made the memorable statement that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”
While Israel thwarted such threats, it has remained embattled for the past 76 years.
IN THE 1950s, the Soviets played their part in demonizing Zionism. They declared Zionists to be the new Nazis.
After 1967, the Arab war was rebranded as a campaign against occupation and white settler colonialism. Israel succeeded South Africa as the focus of the fashionable anti-apartheid cause. The Left cemented its unholy Red-Green Alliance. The end result was the anti-Zionist takeover of liberal Western intellectual thought.
Arab nationalism has been replaced by Islamism, also inspired by Nazi antisemitism. The genocide Hamas hoped to perpetrate on the Jews derives from an Orwellian-style fear of Jewish domination and control.
This is an old idea, going back to the 1930s. European antisemitism seeped into the ideology of the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Muslim Brotherhood, creating a toxic mix of jihadism and anti-Jewish hatred. The mufti turned anti-Zionism into an antisemitic movement when he incited violence against the non-Zionists of Hebron in 1929.
The mufti also helped stage a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941 and incited the anti-Jewish massacre known as the Farhud, making no secret of his wish to exterminate the Jews in his sphere of influence in the event of a Nazi victory. As Hitler’s guest in Berlin, the mufti of Jerusalem raised SS units of Muslim troops and broadcast poisonous anti-Jewish propaganda. “Kill the Jews wherever you find them! This pleases God, religion, and history”, he exhorted from the Berlin shortwave radio station.
For reasons of realpolitik, al-Husseini was never tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Thus, the Palestinian cause was never de-Nazified. The mufti was, according to the scholar Matthias Küntzel, the linchpin of the Nazis’ great war against the Jews and the Arabs’ small war against Israel.
Nazi-Arab alliance
NAZIS FOUGHT alongside Arabs in the 1948 war and became military advisers to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. In the 1950s, Islamized antisemitism, influenced by European ideas of Jewish conspiracy and control, became entrenched in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology. Nazi fugitives like Johann von Leers spread their poison in Egypt. Sayid Qutb wrote the Muslim Brotherhood playbook on Islamized antisemitism: Our struggle against the Jews.
Holocaust education remains resolutely Eurocentric, often erasing, for reasons of political correctness, the connection between the Nazis, their Arab sympathizers, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such omissions convey the impression that the innocent Palestinians paid the price for European crimes against the Jews.
While the Palestinian nationalists of Fatah espouse politicide – destroying Israel by stages by overwhelming it with millions of returning Palestinian “refugees,” Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim brotherhood created in 1987, wants to defeat Israel through terrorism. Its aim is genocide of the Jews – a never-ending series of October 7 massacres.
Therefore, Holocaust education needs to teach about the direct link between Nazism and the genocidal ideology of Hamas.
It may not be too late for decent-minded people to see through what is a thoroughly destructive and immoral cause.
The writer is the co-founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.