Yad Vashem: Serving Israel's Agenda

By Steve Rodan

Not long ago, Israel cast Haj Amin Al Husseini as one of the greatest villains of the Holocaust, a partner of Hitler, Germany's weapon in plans to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine.

And then things changed: Israel found Al Husseini, the late mufti of Jerusalem, an embarrassment in its efforts to reconcile with the Arab world. Highlighting the mufti went against the grain of winning the friendship of countries that long viewed the Jewish state an enemy.

So, Israel simply changed the narrative. The tool for this was Yad Vashem, regarded as one of the leading institutions of Holocaust research but from the beginning in service of Israel's domestic and foreign policy agenda.

The relationship between Yad Vashem and Israel's foreign policy establishment began with the founding of the state. In the early years, the nascent institution struggled to maintain any standing. In 1948, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry founded the Chamber of the Holocaust. In Paris, the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation was fast becoming a leading center for Holocaust research and commemoration.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry worked around the world to ensure that Yad Vashem would dominate the field of Holocaust commemoration and research. The ministry offered the Paris center $500,000 from German reparations in exchange that it would end fundraising. Israeli diplomats were ordered to monitor compliance. Later, the Israeli government would ensure that Yad Vashem would receive the domestic and foreign funds needed to operate.

In return, Yad Vashem became a tool of Israel's domestic and diplomatic agenda. The institution, unlike the Chamber of the Holocaust, erased the history of the devout Jewish majority, particularly rabbinical leaders, in Eastern Europe. The Israel leadership was concerned that the Holocaust would become the purview of religious Jews.

But Yad Vashem would prove more useful in advancing Israel's foreign policy agenda. Research was filtered through the prism of Israeli interests. The most promising area was the recognition of gentiles who helped Jews during World War II. But Yad Vashem's commemoration was linked to diplomatic relations between Israel and the country in which the candidates resided. So, from 1962 until 1982 4,000 gentiles were recognized by Yad Vashem. But over the next 25 years the institution registered 18,000 gentiles, the great majority from the East Bloc, which restored relations with Israel after the Cold War. By this time, most of the gentiles had died.

Yad Vashem's recognition of the gentiles dismissed Jewish assistance to its brethren during the war. In many cases, Yad Vashem hailed the gentiles while dismissing the Jews who worked or financed them. The impression left by Yad Vashem was that Jews were cowards.

That was just fine with foreign countries that wanted to erase the stain of collaboration during World War II. In 2005, French President Jacques Chirac claimed that gentiles had saved 75 percent of his country's Jews, or 230,000 people. Chirac ignored the Jewish resistance in France.

When Yad Vashem activities threatened Israel's diplomatic agenda, the Foreign Ministry simply pulled the plug. In 1982, the institution was pressured by the ministry to cancel plans for an international academic conference titled "Holocaust and Murder of a Nation." The parley was to have included a discussion of the Turkish massacre of some one million Armenians during World War I. Ankara protested vigorously and hinted that it might sever diplomatic relations with Israel.

First Yad Vashem withdrew its sponsorship of the conference. Then, Yad Vashem and the Foreign Ministry worked to ensure that every Israeli researcher cancel his participation. Yad Vashem justified its behavior by saying it could not discuss the genocide of other nations without harming the uniqueness of the Final Solution.

In 2018, Yad Vashem was embroiled in what was probably the greatest revision of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem's chief historian Dina Porat reportedly supported an Israeli government initiative to revise history in exchange for a promise by Poland to discuss the transfer of assets of Polish Jewry to Israel. Under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem and Warsaw issued a statement that Poland had systematically helped Jews throughout the war. Porat's endorsement generated a backlash within her staff, who asserted that the Poles killed up to hundreds of thousands of Jews during the war.

The Israeli rapprochement with Gulf Arab states led to further changes at Yad Vashem. By 2021, it became engaged with the Arab world, developing a website in Arabic that focused on the stories of survivors rather than their persecutors. There is nothing on Arab or Muslim collaboration with Hitler. In December 2020, despite a lockdown, an official delegation from Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates visited Yad Vashem.

"Over the past months, as diplomatic relations solidified between Israel and certain Arab states, Yad Vashem began to search for ways to further its outreach to the Arab world," Yad Vashem said in December 2020.

Yad Vashem hasn't yet erased its previous accounts of Al Husseini. In a thumbnail biography, the institution pointed out that the mufti supported the Final Solution and established Bosnian Muslim battalions of the Waffen-SS that massacred civilians.

"Husseini also tried to convince the Axis authorities to bomb Tel Aviv, and to extend the 'Final Solution' to the Jews in North Africa and Palestine," Yad Vashem said. "When he was informed of various Nazi plans to exchange Jewish lives for goods or large sums of money, he strenuously lobbied against them."

In December 2021, Yad Vashem chairman Danny Dayan declared that the mufti played a "marginal" role in the Holocaust. Dayan defended Yad Vashem's decision not to display a photograph of Al Husseini with Hitler in their meeting in November 1941.

"Research shows that the meeting between the mufti and Adolf Hitler had a negligible practical effect on Nazi policy," Dayan said. "Attempting to pressure Yad Vashem to expand the exhibit on the mufti in the Holocaust History Museum is tantamount to forcing Yad Vashem to partake in a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is alien to its mission. For Yad Vashem to expand an exhibit for reasons not related to the Holocaust might even legitimize Holocaust distortion by others with nefarious intentions. Yad Vashem will continue to defend the historical truth of this dark chapter of our not-too-distant past, without falling prey to any political agenda."

Dayan, a businessman who entered politics, has little background on the Holocaust. He was merely parroting what Porat had argued years earlier. In 2015, Porat attributed the Final Solution exclusively to Hitler. Regardless of his lobbying, she said, the mufti could have contributed little to the extermination of the Jews.

"The mufti of Jerusalem was no lover of the Jewish people," Porat said. "He was an ardent anti-Semite, but the idea of the 'Final Solution' was Hitler's alone, as was the implementation of its appalling policies and actions."

Still, that description could be stretched when needed. In 2018, Israel responded to the Holocaust revisions of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas by trotting out the Hitler-Husseini relationship. Yad Vashem pointed out that Hitler -- eight months before the Wannsee conference, which recruited the German bureaucracy to the Holocaust -- revealed Germany's wartime aims to the mufti. Dayan and Porat notwithstanding, Yad Vashem became very much a willing collaborator in Israel's political agenda.

"In May 1941, as the Holocaust was taking place, Hitler made clear to the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, that once German forces had broken through from the southern Caucasus region into the Middle East, 'Germany's goal will be the extermination of the Jews who reside in Arab territories under British rule,'" Yad Vashem said.

Second of three parts. Next: Yad Vashem: Who Pays and Who Plays?