The Rehabilitation of the Mufti

By Steve Rodan

Amin Haj Al Husseini has always been an uncomfortable subject for Arabs and their Western supporters. The reason: the man endorsed by the British as mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 undermined the Arab argument that its opposition to a Jewish state was not anti-Semitic and did not threaten the Jews outside Palestine.

The Arabs need no longer feel uncomfortable. Al Husseini has been rehabilitated -- by the State of Israel. The history of the mufti and Hitler has been removed from Yad Vashem, Israel's state institution on the Holocaust.

As a leading Arab nationalist, Al Husseini saw genocide as the solution for Jews everywhere. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and imposed a Nazi regime, Al Husseini found a friend and partner. In the 1930s, he urged Hitler to send money and weapons to kill Jews in Palestine. He came under the responsibility of the Abwehr, the German military espionage service that led the preparations for what turned out to be the Final Solution.

During World War II, the mufti was a leading agent of Germany. The Germans paid him well: He received a monthly paycheck of 50,000 marks, with another 80,000 marks for so-called living expenses -- the equivalent today of more than $12 million and regarded as an "absolute fortune." He recruited Muslims to operate death camps, particularly Jasenovac, located in the puppet state of Croatia.

The Germans depended on Al Husseini to destabilize Palestine and prepare for the extermination of its Jewish community of more than 500,000. That operation seemed likely with the advance of German Gen. Erwin Rommel through North Africa in the summer of 1942. When Rommel was stopped by the British Army in Egypt's El Alamein that October, Al Husseini worked with the Waffen-SS on a series of genocide missions, including poisoning the water supply of Tel Aviv in September 1944.

In a broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 1, 1944, Al Husseini called on the Arabs to exterminate the Jews. "Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you."

It would be hard to exaggerate Al Husseini's access to and influence on the German leadership. In November 1941, he met Hitler, who promised to kill all the Jews in the Arab world. He maintained a correspondence with everybody from Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The mufti often dealt with Adolf Eichmann, particularly in Hungary. In Bosnia, the mufti helped recruit thousands of Muslims for three army divisions.

Still, Al Husseini was often dissatisfied with Berlin. His refrain was that the Nazis were not doing enough to kill Jews. At times, they were even releasing small numbers of Jews in exchange for German prisoners of war.

In a June 28, 1943 letter to Ribbentrop, [see below] Al Husseini opposed the proposed transfer of 900 Jewish children from Hungary to Palestine. The mufti, who urged the Arabs to support the Final Solution, demanded that the children along with the other Jews be shipped to Poland, where they would come under "active control," in other words extermination.

"To authorize these Jews to leave your country under the above circumstances and in this way," the mufti wrote, "would by no means solve the Jewish problem and would certainly not protect your country against their evil influence -- far from it! For this escape would make it possible for them to communicate and combine freely with their racial brethren in enemy countries in order to strengthen their position and exert a more dangerous influence on the outcome of the war, especially since, as a consequence of their long stay in your country, they are necessarily in a position to know many of your secrets and also about your war effort."

The mufti's efforts were not ignored by Hitler and his henchmen. The Hungarian rescue plan, as well as others involving Jewish children, was foiled. In November 1943, Ribbentrop declared that "the destruction of the so-called Jewish national home in Palestine is an immutable part of the policy of the greater German Reich."

Unlike Hitler, Al Husseini survived the war but was captured by France. The French wanted to prosecute the mufti as a war criminal. But although he had issued a fatwa against London, he was saved by the British, who hoped he could unite the Arabs to prevent a Jewish state. Britain threatened France that unless Al Husseini was released, London would foment an uprising in French Morocco.

In the end, Al Husseini managed to escape to Egypt where he renewed his alliance with the Germans. He sought to form an army that would fight the Jews. That army would be equipped with German rockets, poison gas and other means of death he had overseen in occupied Europe. His latest partner was Otto Skorzeny, the former chief of the SS commando squad who helped Himmler nearly destroy Hungary's Jews in late 1944.

Al Husseini died in Beirut in July 1974. Israel refused a request by the Supreme Muslim Council to bury him on the Temple Mount. His granddaughter married one of the most notorious of Palestinian terrorists, Ali Hassan Salameh, the founder of Black September, the architect of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich, Germany in September 1972.

Most Arabs have forgotten Al Husseini. Although he was hailed by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas as the "father of the Palestinian people," there is no official monument anywhere for the mufti. Over the last few years, the Jews began to forget about him as well, his genocidal past sanitized and distorted.

In October 2015, then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Al Husseini inspired Hitler's Final Solution. Netanyahu said Hitler had planned to expel the Jews but Al Husseini urged the fuehrer to kill them to prevent immigration to Palestine. The prime minister's statement was criticized for trying to use the Holocaust to delegitimize Palestinian statehood. The highest level criticism came from Germany.

But by the time Netanyahu made the statement, Israel had long dismissed Al Husseini's role in the Holocaust. The leading player in this revision was Yad Vashem, meant to commemorate the six million victims of Hitler and educate the world on the Final Solution. In 2005, Yad Vashem removed from its exhibit a photograph of the 1941 meeting between Hitler and the mufti. On Dec. 2, 2021, Yad Vashem chairman Danny Dayan said the mufti's role was "marginal" and his meeting with Hitler marked a "negligible, practical effect on Nazi policy." A recent appointee, he denied that Yad Vashem had ever exhibited a photo of Hitler and the mufti.

Dayan said highlighting Al Husseini's role could "legitimize Holocaust distortion." He said this could push Yad Vashem into participating "in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Yad Vashem has left a photograph of the mufti with Himmler. But the image has been placed in a dark corner of the museum. Tour guides did not know that the 1x2 inch photograph existed.

Why the change? Critics say Yad Vashem has bowed to an Israeli government agenda determined to reduce friction with the Palestinian Authority and the Arab world.

“As a child of Holocaust survivors born in the displaced persons camp in Germany who lost most of my family to Hitler, I find it really appalling for Danny Dayan to actually be censoring out a part of Holocaust history at the major Holocaust museum in an attempt to appease the Palestinian Arabs," Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said.

Next: Yad Vashem and its role in Israel's foreign policy.