As you may recall from Part 1, even anti-Zionist historian Nathan Weinstock recognizes that the ‘Palestinian movement’ in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ was not exactly admirable. It was, he says, “deformed by racism.” Racism against whom? The British? That should be the first hypothesis for a movement that Weinstock calls “the Palestinian anti-colonialist movement,” because the British were the occupying imperialist/colonialist power in charge. But no, as Weinstock himself concedes, this movement was racist against the Jews (Zionist or not, mind you). Weinstock’s admission that the ‘Palestinian’ movement’s flag was anti-Jewish racism is important because it comes from someone who would like to defend the justice of this movement.
Precisely in order to defend this movement, Nathan Weinstock would like you to think that the violent racism of so-called ‘Palestinian’ Arabs was “understandable” because, he claims, the Zionist Jews and the British were “clearly” allied with each other against the Arabs (see Part 1). This representation is absurd. As Weinstock himself admits,
1) the British imperialists were helping the Arabs kill Jews (see Part 1); and as Weinstock also admits,
2) the Arab feudal lords in ‘Palestine’ incited racist violence against the Jews in order to create a climate to intimidate fellow Arabs who might want to get along with the mostly socialist Jews, the better to further exploit the downtrodden Arab commoners (see Part 3)
Therefore, it is amazing that Weinstock, who says he is an anti-imperialist Marxist, should not defend the interpretation that the British ruling class and the Arab ruling class were allied against ordinary Arabs and Jews. After all, as I also show in Part 3, the Zionist Jews had no role in oppressing the Arabs; on the contrary, the Zionist Jews were indirectly and directly helping to end the oppression which the Arab (effendi) feudal lords made the ordinary (fellahin) peasant Arabs to suffer.
Nathan Weinstock would also like you to think that this allegedly ‘Palestinian’ movement was an expression of a Palestinian Arab “national consciousness.” But this is quite impossible. As I show in Part 1, the ideology of this movement was just plain old anti-Jewish racism, of the traditional sort in the Muslim world, and quite comparable -- notwithstanding Weinstock’s loud protestations to the contrary -- to the traditional European anti-Jewish racism that produced the Shoah (Holocaust). Moreover, as I show in Part 2, ‘Palestine’ as such never existed, and neither was there ever any such thing as an ‘Arab Palestinian’ population with a ‘Palestinian identity,’ much less Weinstock’s alleged “national consciousness.” Most of the so-called ‘Palestinian Arabs,’ as I also show in Part 2, were immigrants from elsewhere attracted by the economic boom that the Zionist Jews created when they transformed a desolate land into an oasis.
So, although Nathan Weinstock may refer to the racist movement that killed innocent Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ as the “Palestinian anti-colonialist movement,” the well-documented facts suggest that this movement had absolutely nothing to do with fighting colonialism. On the contrary, the aristocratic Arab leaders of repeated terrorist violence against ordinary Arabs and Jews were directly sponsored and assisted by the colonialist British Mandate government and the colonialist British military, as I will document below in some detail. It was this British sponsorship and assistance that initially set in motion the so-called ‘Palestinian movement.’ Later, the Nazis would also sponsor it. And after that, the United States.
Anybody who chooses to defend the ‘Palestinian movement’ should do so in full awareness of the facts documented below.
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Table of Contents
< Introduction (above)
< British policy toward the Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ -- John Patterson’s hypothesis
< The British, after encouraging the anti-Jewish violence of the early 1920s, rewarded the Arab terrorists and took measures against the Jews
< The British encouraged the anti-Jewish violence of the late 1920s, took measures against the Jews, and again rewarded the Arab terrorists
< The Arab terrorist and British puppet Hajj Amin al Husseini becomes a British-Nazi puppet
< Hajj Amin al Husseini, leader of the ‘Palestinian movement,’ becomes an architect of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, and then continues the extermination effort beyond the World War
< The next great patron of Hajj Amin’s movement became...the United States
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British policy toward the Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ -- John Patterson’s hypothesis
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Repeatedly, there were outbursts of massive anti-Jewish terrorist violence in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ Kenneth Levin writes about the anti-Jewish riots as follows:
“The British, in the postwar years [after WWI], were attempting to maintain their Middle East territories with very limited forces and were indeed concerned with minimizing local unrest. But, of course, this does not account for Mandate officers working as agents provocateurs and stirring up anti-Jewish violence or for British authorities failing to quell Arab riots when they were fully able to do so. Nor does it explain the [British Mandate] Military Administration’s preventing local Jewish units -- elements of the Jewish Battalions -- from coming to the defense of the Jews of Jerusalem. [The Zionist leader Vladimir Zeev] Jabotinsky, who tried to organize defense, was arrested by the British and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. He was soon released but only in the context of an amnesty extended also to the rioters. The British chose to construe the Jewish units’ attempts to defend the Jews of Jerusalem as an intolerable breach of military discipline and disbanded the units.”[1]
Why were British officers in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ “working as agents provocateurs and stirring up anti-Jewish violence”? And why did they actively sabotage Jewish self-defense and blame the Jewish victims? According to Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson, a dissenting voice within the Military Administration of British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ his fellow Britons were trying to derail the Zionist project. Kenneth Levin explains that, during World War I,
“Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson, a non-Jewish British officer who had commanded the Zion Mule Corps in Gallipolli [a Jewish force that fought with distinction on the British side], was subsequently appointed commander of the 38th Jewish Battalion and led the battalion in the [WWI] Palestine campaign [during which the British wrested control of ‘Palestine’ from the Ottoman Turks].”[2]
In other words, Patterson 1) had sympathy for the Jews; 2) was an eyewitness to the terrorist Arab attacks against the Jews; and 3) was an insider eye-witness to the behavior of his fellow British officers in the context of the same terrorist attacks.
“Patterson wrote extensively of the anti-Jewish depredations to which his [Jewish] troops, and the Jewish population of Palestine, were subjected by the British military’s forces in Palestine under Allenby (the Egyptian Expeditionary Force) and later by the Military Administration. These depredations emanated both from the command structure and, in the wake of evident command tolerance, from the rank and file. With regard to Arab attacks on the Jews in April, 1920, in Jerusalem, Patterson, referring to the assault as ‘the Jerusalem pogrom’ [pogrom = unprovoked racist attack against unarmed Jews, with the semi-unofficial assistance of the authorities[3]] noted the Military Administration’s encouragement of the violence, its failure to intervene to stop it, its blocking of intervention by Jewish troops, its attempts to use the Arab assault as an excuse to curb Zionist programs, and its scapegoating of [the Zionist leader] Jabotinsky, [who tried to defend the Jews].”[4]
The assessment of modern researchers concerning the 1920 terrorist riots, labeled by many the “al-Nebi Musa disturbances,” agrees with John Patterson’s contemporary judgment. Here is historian Anita Shapira, writing in 1992:
“The al-Nebi Musa disturbances took place under the unblinking eye of the British military regime that was charged with exercising supreme authority in Palestine... Modern research on the military regime has shown that its leaders, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby (at the time commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces) and Major General Sir Louis Bols, the chief administrator, were, to put it mildly, quite cool toward the pro-Zionist policies followed by the British government and even tried their hand at various manipulations aimed at bringing about what they considered a necessary volte-face. They wished to...be rid of the Zionists. There is evidence pointing to the fact that this position on the part of the heads of the army was made known to Arab leaders and was taken into account by them. ...Just before the al-Nebi Musa celebrations, the army had been ordered to leave Jerusalem, a decision described by the Palin report on the riots, an indubitably anti-Zionist account, as a serious mistake.”[5]
But was this really a “mistake”? Or was it deliberately intended to produce loss of Jewish life?
This question can be answered merely by looking into the history of the al-Nebi Musa “celebrations,” because these happened every spring, and so the authorities knew what to expect. As it turns out, “The Ottoman Turks had usually deployed thousands of soldiers to keep order in the narrow streets of Jerusalem during the Nebi Musa procession,” precisely because the ‘celebrating’ Arabs were traditionally fond of using this occasion to attack non-Muslims.[6] So, if “just before the al-Nebi Musa celebrations,” as we see above, “the [British] army had been ordered to leave Jerusalem,” and if the British desire to be “rid of the Zionists... was made known to Arab leaders,” then obviously the British authorities did not make a “serious mistake”: they were trying to produce anti-Jewish bloodshed. This is particularly obvious when we factor in that, immediately before the British gave the Arab terrorists the green light to attack, and removed their forces, a concerned Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist organization, had just warned the British, in the wake of recent terrorist incidents against Jews living in Galilee (Tel Hai, also in 1920), and in the wake of the violence of the Arab terrorist group Black Hand, that a “pogrom is in the air.”[7] And indeed, as we saw in Part 1, it is generally agreed that the British were looking for ways to kill Jews, because even an anti-Zionist historian such as Nathan Weinstock concedes that the British “encouraged” (his word) the anti-Jewish Arab violence.
Kenneth Levin reproduces some of what eyewitness Lieutenant John Patterson wrote concerning the anti-Jewish terrorist violence during the al-Nebi Musa “celebrations” of 1920. Here it is below:
“A veritable ‘pogrom’ such as we have hitherto only associated with Tsarist [Czarist] Russia,[3] took place in the Holy City of Jerusalem in April, 1920, and as this was the climax to the maladministration of the Military Authorities, I consider that the facts of the case should be made public...
The Balfour Declaration [which gave Britain the responsibility of establishing a Jewish homeland in British Mandate ‘Palestine’]...was never allowed [by the Military Administration] to be officially published within the borders of Palestine; the Hebrew language was proscribed; there was open discrimination against the Jews; the Jewish Regiment was at all times kept in the background and treated as a pariah. This official attitude was interpreted by the [Arab] hooligan element and interested [Arab] schemers in the only possible way, viz., that the military authorities in Palestine were against the Jews and Zionism, and the conviction began to grow [within Arab circles] that any act calculated to deal a death blow to Zionist aspirations would not be unwelcome by those in authority...
Moreover, this malign influence was sometimes strengthened by very plain speaking. The Military Governor of an important town was actually heard to declare...in the presence of British and French Officers and of Arab waiters, that in case of anti-Jewish riots in his city, he would remove the garrison and take up his position at a window, where he could watch, and laugh at, what went on!
This amazing declaration was reported to the Acting Chief Administrator, and the Acting Chief Political Officer, but no action was taken against the Governor. Only one interpretation can be placed on such leniency.”[8]
Patterson’s interpretation was that his own superiors in the British government and military were trying to destroy the Zionist movement. Patterson was not a rocket scientist: as he himself pointed out, he was concluding the obvious. The British treaty obligations under the Balfour Declaration, and later also under the League of Nations, were to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home,” and “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of [British Mandate] Palestine.”[9] But these are obligations that the overwhelming majority of Britons in power did not want to fulfill, so they were hoping that by fomenting widespread Arab violence against the Jews they could declare in public that the Zionist project had to be abandoned for being politically unrealizable. Wrote Patterson:
“There can be no doubt that it was assumed in some quarters that when trouble, which had been deliberately encouraged, arose, the Home Government, embarrassed by a thousand difficulties at its doors, would agree with the wire-pullers in Palestine, and say to the Jewish people that the carrying out of the Balfour Declaration, owing to the hostility displayed by the Arabs, was outside the range of practical politics.’”[10]
There is no shortage of evidence to suggest that John Patterson’s hypothesis is correct: the British were working overtime to destroy any possibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence so they could abort the Zionist project. Below, I will review this evidence, but before I do, let me point out that even anti-Zionist historian Nathan Weinstock agrees with the main point: “The British,” he writes, “in accordance with a pattern which we shall encounter with every Arab revolt in Palestine, reacted...by making concessions to Arab opinion.”[11]
The British, after encouraging the anti-Jewish violence of the early 1920s, rewarded the Arab terrorists and took measures against the Jews
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Nathan Weinstock himself points out that “Amin al Husseini, the future Mufti of Jerusalem, ...led the rioters and harangued the crowd assembled for the Nebi Musa festivities.”[12] Historian Uri Milstein explains what the consequence of the 1920 al-Nebi Musa terrorist riots were for the chief terrorist in charge:
“Haj Amin [al Husseini] was the prime instigator of the 1920 riots against the Jews of Jerusalem. For that, he was tried and sentenced to ten years imprisonment, but British intelligence officers helped him flee. One year later, the Jewish High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel, pardoned him, had him brought back to Palestine and appointed him Mufti of the city -- even though he was not one of the three candidates for the office -- due to pressure from British officials and officers of the Cairo school, which was fostering Arab nationalism in the hope of making it a basis for British control of the region.”[13]
We’ve seen above that before the al-Nebi Musa terrorist riots of 1920, the British authorities made it clear to the leaders of the riots that they could kill Jews with impunity. This means they were communicating principally with Hajj Amin al Husseini, because Hajj Amin was “the prime instigator of the 1920 riots.” After these riots, the British did not prosecute the chief offender Hajj Amin (their ally); on the contrary, they accused the Jews of defending themselves and then made Hajj Amin, the terrorist leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem.
The British policy can hardly be clearer.
This Hajj Amin al Husseini was a total cynic, and his incitement of the Arabs against the Jews -- which relied on mobilizing the widespread contempt and hatred that the Arabs already felt, traditionally, for the Jews (see Part 1) -- was not part of a policy to defend the Arabs from the British, much less from the Zionist Jews. Rather, his anti-Jewish racist incitement -- launched in collusion with the British -- was meant to create a climate of intimidation such that fellow Arab smallholders would not dare improve their economic well being by selling their modest plots of land to the Jews, lest they be identified as ‘traitors’ and selected for execution by Hajj Amin’s terrorists. In this way, Hajj Amin’s family -- one of the largest landowners in the area -- could buy these small plots at bargain prices and then resell them to the same Zionist Jews at absurdly high prices (see Part 3).
Hajj Amin was made Mufti of Jerusalem immediately after “a second outbreak of [Arab anti-Jewish terrorist] violence [that] occurred on May 1, 1921, and [which] continued for several days.”[14] The man directly in charge of giving Hajj Amin bureaucratic authority was Herbert Samuel, who, as Uri Milstein points out above, was Jewish. This “Herbert Samuel, one of the leading figures in the British Liberal party,” had been “appointed high commissioner for Palestine in June 1920,” in the wake of the al-Nebi Musa terrorist riots of that year.[15] Herbert Samuel’s elevation of the terrorist Hajj Amin to the position of Mufti of Jerusalem, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, was officially to reward Hajj Amin for having supposedly quieted the new racist violence of 1921.[16] But, naturally, Hajj Amin went on to organize more anti-Jewish terrorist violence with the bureaucratic authority and budget that was made available to him in his position as Mufti (as we shall see below).
It is important to point out the parallel. In recent years Yasser Arafat -- leader of the antisemitic terrorist organizations Al Fatah and the PLO -- was given more and more power inside the Jewish state, by Jewish leaders, in exchange for his supposed efforts to combat anti-Jewish Arab terrorism, when in fact Yasser Arafat -- obviously -- continued to direct anti-Jewish terrorism all the time, and much more effectively thanks to the power which Jewish leaders in Israel gave him. (It pays to learn history, because patterns such as these can be noticed, and a healthy skepticism about current Jewish leaders can then be nurtured, the better to defend the Jewish people from their own leaders.[17] )
The 1921 Arab terrorist riots against the Jews were “even more violent” than the riots of 1920, so those Jews in Palestine who had come there fleeing the Czarist Russian pogroms were aghast that “even a high commissioner who was Jewish...had adopted policies similar to those of the [violently antisemitic] Russian authorities.”[18]
“Once again, ‘Arabs murdered and looted, and the Jews are the ones held up as guilty and put on trial.’ The authorities came out with an explanation that the disturbances had been the result of clashes between Jewish communist and anticommunist demonstrators on May Day. Jews regarded this as sheer nonsense. How could an internal political quarrel among Jews result in horrible murders [by Arabs against Jews] in a hotel for immigrants in Jaffa? Government communiqués spoke about clashes between Jews and Arabs and tried to play down the fact that the attacks had come solely from the Arab side. Arab policemen had taken active part in the riots and went unpunished. On this occasion as well, the British were quick to arrest Jews who, in defending themselves and their families, had injured their attackers. Stolen Jewish property was not returned, the murderers of Brenner and his friends were not brought to justice. The British put a stop to [Jewish] immigration, and even Jews already on their way to Palestine were returned to their ports of embarkation. [Herbert] Samuel’s speech on June 3, 1921 completed the picture: Once again, the rioters were being encouraged by the authorities -- violence was rewarded, the victims punished.”[19]
Herbert Samuel’s report contained all sorts of “political concessions to the Arabs, and the following year those concessions, as well as the de facto detachment of Transjordan from the Mandate, were formalized in a White Paper issued by [Winston] Churchill.”[20] In other words, the British used the anti-Jewish Arab terrorist violence which they had themselves fomented to provide themselves with an excuse to reduce by 75% the territory in which the Jews could settle; this they did by redefining the territory called ‘Palestine’ (before this redefinition ‘Palestine’ had included all of ‘Transjordan,’ which later became the kingdom of Jordan; see Part 2). The fact that Winston Churchill put his stamp on all this, from his position as Secretary of State for the Colonies, is perfectly in character, given Winston Churchill’s well documented pro-fascist sympathies.[21] As Churchill’s recent biographer Paul Addison has put it, “With fascism as such…he had no quarrel.”[22]
But what explains Herbert Samuel’s behavior?
Kenneth Levin explains that “Samuel’s tenure, which lasted until 1925, was marked by additional concessions to the Arabs and further reneging on Britain’s Mandate obligations toward the Jews.” One of those “additional concessions” that Herbert Samuel made to the Arabs came in 1922. According to a Library of Congress study on the history of Israel,
“In 1922 [Samuel] augmented Hajj Amin’s power by appointing him president of the newly constituted Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), which was given wide powers over the disbursement of funds from religious endowments, fees, and the like.”[25]
The same Library of Congress study points out what the consequences of the British sponsorship of Hajj Amin were for Arab politics:
“By heading the SMC, Hajj Amin controlled a vast patronage network, giving him power over a large constituency. This new patronage system competed with and threatened the traditional family-clan and Islamic ties that existed under the Ottoman Empire. Traditional Arab elites hailing from other locales, such as Hebron and Haifa, resented the monopoly of power of the British-supported Jerusalem-based elite...
“Tension between members of Arab elites was exacerbated because Hajj Amin, who was not an elected official, increasingly attempted to dictate Palestinian politics. The competition between the major families and the increased use of the Zionist threat as a political tool in inter-elite struggles placed a premium on extremism. Hajj Amin frequently incited his followers against the Nashashibis [a competing clan] by referring to the latter as Zionist collaborators.”
I remind you that Hajj Amin, whom the British pardoned after he organized mass murders of Jews, and whom they then made Mufti of Jerusalem, before making him the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, was “not [even] one of the three candidates for the office” of Mufti. Clearly, then, the British were going quite out of their way, and flexing their every muscle, to transform Arab politics in such a way that those extreme anti-Jewish racists who also attacked fellow Arabs with terrorism ended at the top. The point? As we see above, to prevent Arab leaders who wanted to get along with the Zionist Jews from having any influence, thus derailing the Zionist project.
The above all happened under Herbert Samuel.
Anita Shapira explains that “there is a debate among historians about Herbert Samuel’s policies”; some wish to see Samuel as well meaning, whereas others see him as “fostering the radical forces among [the Arabs] at the expense of the moderates. In the eyes of Jewish contemporaries at the time, Samuel was viewed almost as a national traitor...”[26] In my view the latter assessment is correct, except that I don’t think Samuel was almost a traitor.
Strong support for my view comes from Herbert Samuel’s subsequent behavior on the eve of the Holocaust: acting as a representative of the Jews before the British government, he kept important information secret that could have saved thousands of European Jewish lives.[27] Samuel consistently cooperated with the antisemitic feelings of the majority of British officials -- he was loyal to them, not to the Jewish people.
Herbert Samuel is supposed to have been “a proclaimed Zionist,”[28] and this naturally has something to do with the fact that he was “one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration.”[29] But in the final analysis, taking his whole career into account, if it is proper to call Herbert Samuel a ‘Zionist’ then we urgently need a more precise vocabulary.
The British encouraged the anti-Jewish violence of the late 1920s, took measures against the Jews, and again rewarded the Arab terrorists
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Kenneth Levin remarks on the great difference between Herbert Samuel and his successor:
“Samuel was replaced by Lord Herbert Plumer, who generally resisted further backtracking from the Mandate even in the face of Arab pressures, and Plumer’s three years in office saw a marked decrease in violence. This reflected a pattern that has been noted by a number of historians who have written on the Mandate: Appeasement tended to result in increased Arab violence as violence was perceived as yielding rewards, while a more steadfast course and rejection of concessions in the face of violence typically yielded more peaceful interludes.”[24]
When Plumer left, the British once again began allowing Arab violence against the Jews. Anita Shapira writes:
“Beginning in 1928, there was mounting tension between Jews and Arabs. After years [the three Plumer years] in which the British had imposed impeccable public order and Jews, men and women alike, had been able to walk freely throughout Palestine in complete safety and without fear, the situation now changed. There were more and more incidents of rape of young Jewish women in Jerusalem by Arabs and an increasing number of robberies in cities and towns everywhere in the country. ...the background to these incidents was criminal, not nationalist.”[31]
In 1929, the next year, there was a Zionist Congress in which Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann remained in control despite widespread criticism of his acquiescence to any and all anti-Jewish measures decided by the British government, measures that violated not only the spirit but the letter of Britain’s treaty obligations to the Jews.[32] Feeling the climate change, and sensing an easy prey, in the same year of 1929, Hajj Amin al Husseini once again mobilized Arab mob violence against the Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ Writes Kenneth Levin:
“...shortly following the 1929 [Zionist] Congress, the de facto leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Amin al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, orchestrated large-scale assaults on the Jews of the Yishuv [Jewish community], attacks that began in Jerusalem and soon spread throughout the country. In Hebron, one of the hardest hit targets, more than sixty Jews were killed and the rest of the community was forced to flee.”[33]
Anita Shapira tells it like this:
“The [1929] riots were accompanied by militant Arab slogans such as ‘The law of Muhammad is being implemented by the sword,’ ‘Palestine is our land and the Jews our dogs,’ ‘We are well armed and shall slaughter you by the sword.’ There were also brutal acts by Arabs for the apparent sake of cruelty, such as the killings in Hebron, where small children were tortured by their murderers before being murdered. The dread that the Arabs were planning to annihilate the entire Jewish community -- men, women, and children -- in one concentrated burst of violence surfaced for the first time in the wake of the August 1929 disturbances [which]...swept with a fury through Jewish settlements and neighborhoods throughout the length and breadth of the country. The danger now appeared to threaten the very survival of the entire Jewish community.”[34]
What did the British do? As in 1920-21, the British cooperated with the Arab anti-Jewish violence. Writes Kenneth Levin:
“For days, British forces across the country did virtually nothing to stop the carnage. The commission appointed by then Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield to investigate the violence submitted a report that was in key respects a reprise of earlier such exercises: It acknowledged that the Arabs were fully responsible for the violence but then recommended restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases to placate the Arabs.
The leaders of the Yishuv and the Zionist leadership outside the Mandate protested and were supported by sympathetic segments of the British public. The League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission also condemned the report as offering recommendations that violated Britain’s Mandate obligations. Still, the Labor government in London imposed a moratorium on [Jewish] immigration in May, 1930, and the following fall the government issued the so-called Passfield White Paper spelling out further anti-Zionist steps. Protest against the halt to immigration and the White Paper obliged the government to lift the former and to offer some softening ‘clarifications’ of the latter, but the White Paper was not rescinded.”[35]
Anita Shapira relays the opinion of the Jewish press at the time, which characterized the Arab leaders as
“...agitators and instigators, who by lying and deceit whipped up the masses into a religious frenzy and stirred up uncontrollable urges. They were hypocrites who tried to play both sides of the fence, enjoying the profits of land sales to the Jews, while inciting the Arabs against them in order to strengthen their hold over the masses.”[36]
I think this contemporaneous analysis, made by the Zionist Jews at the time, gets it just right. The same Jews, however, failed to recognize the depth of traditional anti-Jewish racism among ordinary Arabs, which is precisely what the Arab leaders, chiefly Hajj Amin al Husseini, were relying on to incite them against the Jews. In consequence, many Jews naively increased their efforts to find common cause with the Arab workers against the Arab feudal lords (effendis).
“...now more than ever in the past, Jews sought to be active in the Arab sector and made efforts to find ways to establish ties and advance cooperation. Socialists found it natural to channel the desire for action among Arabs by trying to organize Arab workers.”[37]
This naiveté can profitably be compared to how many Jews today on the ‘left’ increase their efforts to accommodate their Arab enemies even as Arab violence against the Jews mounts. History repeats itself, because the culture of both Jews and Arabs is transmitted vertically from parents to children, so we see similar self-destructive responses on the part of Jews mobilized in the face of similarly intractable terrorist racism on the part of Arabs. We must not forget, however, the role played by Jewish leaders without any real concern for the lives of Jews, on the one hand, and the role played by thoroughly cynical Arab leaders backed by the great powers, on the other, because these aspects, too, have been reproduced from the past into the present.[38]
The Arab terrorist and British puppet Hajj Amin al Husseini becomes a British-Nazi puppet
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In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany.
“In March, 1936, [Zionist leader] Ben Gurion urged a high-profile campaign in Britain and the United States demanding support for immigration to the Yishuv of a million Jews [but] he was unable to muster sufficient support among his colleagues.”[39]
Once again sensing a political opportunity, and an easy prey, Hajj Amin did what he did best: mobilize terrorist violence against the Jews. The first outburst of violence took place 19 April 1936: the murder of Jews in Jaffa in retaliation against Arabs who had supposedly been assaulted by Jews in Tel Aviv. But no Arabs had been assaulted in Tel Aviv: this was just Arab terrorist incitement, once again.[40] At first the unrest was in the hands of upstart young Arabs but very soon Hajj Amin decided that he wanted to direct any and all violence against the Jews himself.
“...On April 25 [1936], the Mufti [Haj Amin] induced several of Palestine’s clan leaders to establish an Arab Higher Committee, with himself as president. It was this group that supported his call for the nonpayment of taxes after May 15, to be followed by a nationwide strike of Arab workers and businesses.
...Haj Amin loosed a series of grim warnings of the ‘revenge of God Almighty.’ The initial outburst of Arab violence was then followed by a mass strike against the government’s immigration policy... Enforced by the Mufti’s strong-arm men, the work stoppage paralyzed government and public transportation services, as well as Arab business and much of Arab agriculture...”[41] (my emphasis)
This strike, which Hajj Amin, as we see above, enforced with violence against ordinary Arabs, “crippled the economy of the entire Mandate,” and punished the Arabs especially.[42] Soon, “al Husseini unleashed another wave of Arab massacres of Jews as well as attacks on Jewish farms that entailed wide destruction of crops.”[43] The strike and accompanying terrorist violence was called the ‘Arab Revolt.’
“...By midsummer 1936 the intensity of the fighting mounted as Arab irregulars poured into the hill country around Jerusalem, into Galilee and Samaria. A majority of them at first were local Palestinians recruited by Haj Amin’s agents. But soon ‘Committees for the Defense of Palestine’ were established in neighboring Arab lands. Syrian and Iraqi volunteers began arriving in Palestine at the rate of two or three hundred a month. Their leader, Fawzi al-Qawukji, played a vital role in the ensuing civil war... He was a compact, sandy-haired man in his early forties when the civil war began, gruff, vigorous, and endowed with an unquestionable dynamism that he cultivated in open imitation of his hero, Adolf Hitler. During the summer of 1936 it was Qawukji who organized military training among the Arab nationalists, imposing a single, unified command over the disparate rebel forces and helping smuggle in Axis [i.e. Nazi German and fascist Italian] weapons. His guerilla technique rarely varied. It took the form of night assaults on Jewish farms, the destruction of cattle and crops, the murder of civilians.”[44] (my emphases)
As we see above, this terrorist ‘Arab Revolt’ was supported by the fascists in Germany and Italy. Historian Howard Sachar explains the context leading up to the ‘Arab Revolt’:
[Quote from Howard Sachar begins here]
“With his impressive African staging bases in Libya, Ethiopia, and Italian Somaliland, [Italian fascist leader, and Hitler ally, Benito] Mussolini could indeed begin to look westward toward French Tunisia, and eastward toward Egypt and the Levant, the historic destinations of the merchant fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Trieste. A high-powered Italian short-wave radio station in Bari broadcast Arabic-language propaganda nightly to the Mahgreb [Muslim North Africa] and the Middle East, striking systematically at Britain’s and France’s tenure in their Arab lands of occupation. Posturing as the ‘friend and protector of Islam,’ the Duce at the same time left no doubt that he regarded the Mediterranean as mare nostrum -- our (Italy’s) sea.
The Italian campaign for influence in the Moslem world was shrewdly reinforced by Nazi Germany. Hitler may have evinced little enthusiasm for projecting German territorial claims into the eastern Mediterranean; it was understood that the Middle East was Italy’s sphere of expansion. But it was the Führer’s intention to erode the Allied position in a region widely considered to be the very pivot of Anglo-French imperial and defensive power. By 1935, therefore, the Nazi propaganda bureau was subsidizing a wide variety of Middle Eastern courses, institutes, and journals, and spending millions of marks on the ‘educational’ activities of German cultural and press attachés in the Islamic world. Beginning in 1938, the newly equipped German radio station at Seesen transmitted propaganda to the Middle East in all the languages of the area (except, of course, Hebrew). Combined with the broadcasts of radio Bari and Spain’s Radio Sevilla [run by the Spanish fascist regime of Francisco Franco], these programs won a large and appreciative reception in the Arab world. So did the ‘goodwill’ visits to the Middle East of eminent Nazi figures, among them Dr. Hjalmar Schacht and Baldur von Shirach.
One particularly successful Axis technique of winning favor among the Arabs had its basis in ideology. German journalists and diplomats constantly drew parallels between Nazi Pan-Germanism and ‘the youthful power of Pan-Arab nationalism [which] is the wave of the Arab future.’ More significantly, the Arabs were reminded of the enemies they shared in common with the Nazis. Even in the mid-1930s, when Berlin exercised a certain restraint in ventilating its animosity against Britain and France, Nazi German diplomats evinced no hesitation whatever in publicizing the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign. Hardly a German Arabic-Language newspaper or magazine appeared in the Middle East without a sharp thrust against the Jews. Reprints of these strictures were widely distributed by the [Jerusalem] Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee. Upon introducing the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935, therefore, Hitler received telegrams of congratulation and praise from all corners of the Arab world. The Palestine newspaper al-Liwa eagerly borrowed the Nazi slogan ‘One Country, One People, One Leader.’ Ahmed Hussein, leader of the ‘Young Egypt’ movement, confided to the Lavoro Fascista that ‘Italy and Germany re today the only true democracies in Europe, and the others are only parliamentary plutocracies.’ A delegation of Iraqi sporting associations, returning from a trip to Germany in September 1937, expressed their profound admiration for ‘National Socialist order and discipline.’ During a visit to Transjordan in 1939, Carl Raswan, a noted German-born journalist, was struck by the near-unanimity of Arab opinion that only ‘Italy and Germany were strong, and England and the whole British Empire existed only by the grace of Mussolini and Hitler.’ Throughout the Arab Middle East, a spate of ultra-right-wing political groupings and parties developed in conscious imitation of Nazism and Italian fascism.”[45]
[Quote from Howard Sachar ends here]
In the wake of the ‘Arab Revolt’ the British yet again appointed a Commission to ‘investigate’ and, naturally, proposed punishing the Jews and rewarding the Arab terrorists with a partition plan that would give the Jews just 4 percent of the original Mandate territory for a Jewish state, giving all of Transjordan, and the rest of ‘Palestine’ for an Arab state. The Zionist leader Ben Gurion decided to accept this outrage (though the League of Nations was protesting that it violated Britain’s Mandate obligations to the Jews) because the situation of the European Jews, on the eve of a Holocaust that was clearly on its way, was desperate, and some place was needed to give them refuge. Hajj Amin, however, led the Arabs in a total refusal, which reveals that the ‘Palestinian movement’ was never interested in a Palestinian Arab state, but merely in preventing the Jews from having any state -- even if it was just 4% of the original Mandate territory -- where the Jewish people could live free of persecution.[46] Such views agreed perfectly with the ideology of Hajj Amin’s Nazi sponsors, which was also the ideology of Hajj Amin: death to all the Jews.
“Shortly afterwards, the Arabs, under the Grand Mufti [Hajj Amin] and with Nazi encouragement, initiated open rebellion in the Mandate. They targeted Jews, British officials and troops, and Arabs considered too accommodating of the Jews. Over the next two years, the Mufti’s forces killed more than four hundred Jews and several thousand Arabs.”[47]
Hajj Amin and his thugs were killing many more Arabs than Jews; the leaders of the ‘Palestinian movement’ have always been as bad or worse for the Arabs they pretend to lead than they are for the Jews (and this means that those who support the ‘Palestinian movement’ have never done so out of compassion for these Arabs).
The British reaction to this violence, after they put it down, was, once again, to punish the Jews, and in 1939, right before the Holocaust was to begin, they sharply restricted Jewish immigration to ‘Palestine’ and committed themselves to creating an independent Arab state in ‘Palestine’ within ten years. This new policy has been called the Chamberlain White Paper or the MacDonald White Paper (Malcolm MacDonald was the Colonial Secretary), and it constituted a “death warrant for much of European Jewry.”[48]
It is hard to exaggerate the extremity of the British position. After the outbreak of the World War, there were brutal British searches for weapons in Jewish settlements, and they denied entry to ‘Palestine’ to three ships that came full of Jewish immigrants escaping Adolf Hitler.
“The heads of the [Jewish] community and the Jewish Agency beseeched the [British] authorities to allow the Jews to stay in Palestine, even if in detention, until the authorities were convinced that these people were, in truth, genuine refugees and not dangerous spies, as the British alleged. Their pleas were in vain. The high commissioner, Harold MacMichael, was determined to send them to Mauritius [an island in the middle of nowhere, in the Indian Ocean] in order to set an example for all to see: The intended message was that there was no sense in continuing with illegal immigration. The passengers onboard the Milos and the Pacific, and some of those on the Atlantic, were transferred to the deportation ship Patria. Hagana members decided to prevent the sailing of the Patria by planting a bomb aboard that would cause damage to the ship [Hagana = initially ineffective Jewish self-defense militia created in response to Arab terrorist attacks, but which later formed the backbone of what became the Israeli Defense Forces]. They hoped that this delay would facilitate a change in decisions in London. The result was disastrous: The blast was much larger than expected; and enormous hole was blown in the ship, and nearly three hundred passengers perished.”[49]
The tragedy of the Patria, however, did cause Winston Churchill to intervene and the survivors from this accident were allowed to stay. But Winston Churchill’s compassion, if that’s what it was, could not be moved with respect to the rest of the refugees:
“The rest of the Atlantic refugees, who were interned in the meantime in Atlit, were brought by force aboard two deportation ships and sent on a long journey to Mauritius. Their evacuation was accompanied by a show of brutal force that made even many of the British police officers flinch. General Nim, with whom Shertock had discussed the matter, expressed shock that the Jews could dare damage a much-needed ship like the Patria during time of war. Yet significantly, he was not perturbed in the least by the allocation of ships and other resources for sending refugees to Mauritius.
...[The British] conducted searches for weapons in Jewish settlements...in the early years of the war as if it was the principal military mission of the hour. ...The Jews did not use weapons against the British, and all victims killed during the aggressive searches were Jewish.”[50]
Hajj Amin al Husseini, leader of the ‘Palestinian movement,’ becomes an architect of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, and then continues the extermination effort beyond the
World War
__________
Because the so-called ‘Arab Revolt’ had been directed in part against the British and supported by the Nazis, the British for once moved against Hajj Amin, and he became a fugitive. A furious 1948 New York Post article against the ex-Mufti, by Immanuel Velikovsky, states that
“...The ex-Mufti escaped from Jerusalem and Palestine in the garb of a woman. In Syria he was on Mussolini’s payroll. When, with the beginning of the war, his position in Syria, a French mandate, became ‘insecure,’ he escaped to Iraq. There he worked hard and succeeded in [organizing a coup,] bringing Iraq into the war against the Allies, the declaration of war having been made on May 2, 1941. At that time the Nazis’ entered Greece and Egypt.”[51]
While in Iraq, Hajj Amin organized a pogrom like the ones he had been organizing in 'Palestine' against the Iraqi Jewish community, which ended some 2600 years of Jewish life in Iraq. This pogrom was called the Farhud.[52] Velikovsky continues,
“When the [Iraqi] revolt was crushed (mainly by the Jewish volunteers from Palestine), the ex-Mufti escaped to Iran and hid himself in the Japanese Embassy there. From Teheran he escaped to Italy, where his arrival was announced by the Fascist radio as a ‘great and happy event’; in November, 1941, he arrived in Berlin and was received by Hitler. In 1942 the ex-Mufti organized the Arab Legion that fought the American invasion in Africa...”[53]
The substance of Hajj Amin’s 1941 interview with Adolf Hitler is preserved in a Nazi document that summarizes the exchange between the two men:
“The Führer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart:
1. He (the Führer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.
2. At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
3. As soon as this had happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power [my emphasis]. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”[54]
Hajj Amin al Husseini meets with Hitler
(Berlin, 1941)
The same document states that the Mufti, “was fully reassured and satisfied by the words which he had heard from the Chief of the German State.” That is, he was “fully reassured and satisfied” that Hitler would (1) help him carry out the destruction of all Jews living in the Arab sphere and, (2) based on that Final Solution, make him “the most authoritative spokesman in the Arab world.” Once again, this shows that Hajj Amin al Husseini was not interested in defending any Arabs, but rather interested in killing Jews. Hajj Amin would now demonstrate his special predilection with a vengeance by leading Adolf Hitler’s extermination program against the European Jews.
This has been well established.
Dieter Wisliceny was one of the most important deputies of Adolf Eichmann, the same Eichmann who was officially the chief architect of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution (Wisliceny was eventually tried for war crimes in Czechoslovakia and executed).[55] At Adolf Eichmann’s own war-crimes trial in Israel, the earlier testimony of Dieter Wisliceny was presented. This included Wisliceny’s remarks about Hajj Amin al Husseini. Strictly speaking, these were Wisliceny’s reactions to somebody else’s report of what Wisliceny had said about Hajj Amin. The only thing that Wisliceny corrected was the other person’s mistaken beliefs that 1) Wisliceny had described Eichmann as a German born in Palestine, and that 2) Wisliceny had described Hajj Amin as a close personal friend of Heinrich Himmler. So Wisliceny agreed with all of the following:
“The Mufti [Hajj Amin] is a sworn enemy of the Jews and has always fought for the idea of annihilating the Jews. He sticks to this idea always, also in his talks with [Adolf] Eichmann ... The Mufti is one of the originators of the systematic destruction of European Jewry by the Germans, and he has become a permanent colleague, partner and adviser to Eichmann...in the implementation of this programme.”[56] (my emphasis)
In other words, Hajj Amin al Husseini, at the very top of the Nazi leadership, planned with Adolf Eichmann from the very beginning, and then supervised and directed as “permanent colleague, partner and adviser to Eichmann,” the World War II extermination of the European Jews.
Hajj Amin was a genocidal antisemite who didn’t have anything to learn from Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. On the contrary, it may have been Eichmann and Hitler who learned a thing or two from Hajj Amin. After all, it was Hajj Amin who, when he arrived in Berlin in 1941, had many years of direct experience organizing genocidal violence against the Jews. It is worth pointing out, therefore, that the Nazis had not yet opted for extermination when Hajj Amin met with Hitler in Berlin on 30 November 1941. According to historians, the decision to exterminate the European Jews was taken at the Wannsee Conference that took place January 20, 1942, which is less than two months after Hitler met Hajj Amin.[56a]
But Hajj Amin did not merely probably suggest, and definitely organize and direct from start to finish the German Nazi Final Solution as co-chief executive with Adolf Eichmann. He was also eager to soak his own hands, literally, in Jewish blood, so he took personal and direct responsibility for some of the major episodes of European anti-Jewish mass killing.
As explained by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,
“[Hajj Amin al] Husseini made his contribution to the Axis war effort in his capacity as a Muslim, rather than as an Arab leader, by recruiting and organizing in record time [my emphasis], during the spring of 1943, Bosnian Muslim battalions in Croatia comprising some twenty thousand men. These Muslim volunteer units, called Hanjar (sword),[57] were put in Waffen-SS units, fought [the mostly Serbian] Yugoslav partisans in Bosnia, and carried out police and security duties in Hungary. They participated in the massacre of [mostly Serbian, Jewish, and Roma (Gypsy)] civilians in Bosnia and volunteered to join in the hunt for Jews in Croatia... [my emphasis]. The Germans made a point of publicizing the fact that Husseini had flown from Berlin to Sarajevo for the sole purpose of giving his blessing to the Muslim army and inspecting its arms and training exercises.”[58]
Hajj Amin (center, in black coat and white hat) does the Nazi salute
as he inspects his Nazi SS Bosnian Muslim troops.
Hajj Amin's Bosnian Muslim SS troops killed hundreds of thousands of people (mainly Serbs, Jews, and Roma) in their homes or else sent them to die in the vast Croatian concentration camp system known as Jasenovac.[58a]
In addition to the SS Handzar division, Hajj Amin also created in Bosnia the SS Freiwilligen-BH-Gebirgs-Division. The French newspaper Le Monde quotes from a speech Hajj Amin gave to his assembled troops:
“‘You must be the example and beacon in the fight against the common enemies of National-Socialism [Nazism] and Islam.’ November 1943. In the heart of Bosnia, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini finishes his speech, and then slowly reviews the troops of the SS Freiwilligen-BH-Gebirgs-Division, the volunteers of the mountain division in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”[58b]
This proud Nazi, Hajj Amin, who perceived a great affinity between the ideologies of Nazism and Islam, also carried out diplomacy to make sure that 400,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the death camps and killed.[59]
After the war, the Yugoslav government issued a warrant for Hajj Amin’s arrest for war crimes. The Western Allies captured him. They should have tried him for war crimes at Nuremberg or turned him over to Yugoslavia. Instead, he mysteriously escaped. Immanuel Velikovsky's furious 1948 article in the New York Post accuses,
“In August 1945, Yugoslavia asked that the ex-Mufti be placed on the official list of war criminals. What is the reason for the failure to bring him to trial in Germany, where he was captured when Germany collapsed?
...according to the Charter of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg, the ex-Mufti is a criminal on all three counts, for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”[60]
The reason that Hajj Amin was not brought to trial, is that the Allies who captured him put him on house arrest.[60a] Question: When do you put the man who is arguably history’s greatest war criminal on house arrest? Answer: When you want him to escape. And that is precisely what Hajj Amin did, making his way eventually to Cairo. Nathan Weinstock explains what happened next.
“The reappearance of the Mufti [Hajj Amin] in Cairo in May 1946 considerably reinforced the Husseinis’ prestige. As he was banned from Palestine, his cousin Jamal Al Husseini asserted himself in the country as the spiritual leader of Palestinian nationalism.
By falling once more under the control of the Husseinis, Palestinian nationalism was led into the most extreme chauvinism. The Arab Higher Committee resorted to systematic terror to crush the last vestiges of Jewish-Arab cooperation in every area of social life. It rejected not merely the proposed partition of the country and all further immigration, but even the proposal that the Palestinian Jews should be given national minority status [in an Arab state].”[62]
So once again Hajj Amin was attacking his fellow Arabs in order to advance his supreme goal: the extermination of the Jews. Notes Weinstock:
“Even the Communist organizations ended up following the orders of the Husseinis’ Arab Higher Committee. Moreover, the latter used terror and political assassination to eliminate their opponents. Palestinian nationalism sank once again into clannish faction fights and vendettas.”[61]
It is unclear why Nathan Weinstock would insist on calling Arab terror against fellow Arabs “Palestinian nationalism,” particularly when the point of this terror was to intimidate any pro-Jewish Arabs so that the anti-Jewish extermination effort could be re-launched. But if we remember that Nathan Weinstock is an anti-Zionist who defends the justice of the ‘Palestinian movement,’ we have an obvious clue.
In 1947, Hajj Amin, who had once again ensured that ‘Palestinian movement’ became synonymous with his own ideology and leadership, issued a fatwa (legal Islamic pronouncement) to murder all remaining Jews: “I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!”[63]
1947 is the year that the UN voted to create a Jewish and an Arab state in ‘Palestine.’ In reaction, the Arabs in ‘Palestine,’ led by Hajj Amin al Husseini, and the Arabs living in Arab states, considered that it was much more important to kill the Jews in ‘Palestine’ than to get an Arab state, and they launched a war of extermination. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League (a British creation), promised: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[64] In addressing the UN Security Council in April 1948, Jamal Husseini, spokesperson for Hajj Amin’s Arab Higher Committee, straightforwardly and proudly admitted that this was a war of aggression: “The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.”[65]
One of Hajj Amin's soldiers, in this genocidal war, was Yasser Arafat. According to David N. Bossie, writing in the Washington Times,
“The mufti [Hajj Amin] barely escaped trial for [war crimes] by fleeing to Egypt in 1946. There he made young Yasser Arafat, then living in Cairo, his protégé. The mufti secretly imported a former Nazi commando officer into Egypt to teach Mr. Arafat and other teenage recruits the fine points of guerrilla warfare. Mr. Arafat learned his lessons well; the mufti was so proud of him he even pretended the two of them were blood relations.”[70a]
This agrees with Yassar Arafat’s own statements. For example, in 2002, Arafat said the following to an interviewer from the pro-PLO, London-based, Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat (his comments were picked up by the leading Palestinian daily Al-Quds):
“We are the Mighty People. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini? ...There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops.”[70]
This “1948 war” became Israel’s War of Independence, and after the Jews miraculously won it, the Jewish state, the state of Israel, was finally established.
There is a great deal of propaganda concerning supposed war crimes committed by the Israeli Jews during this war. But it was not the Israeli Jews who attacked, and it was not the Israeli Jews who announced their goal to exterminate anybody. Neither was it the Israeli Jews who were led by a man who was the world's most accomplished exterminator of an entire people. So skepticism is in order when examining such accusations against the Israelis. I have examined skeptically what is by far the single most important such accusation -- the allegation that Israeli soldiers committed a massacre of Arab civilians in the town of Deir Yassin (or Dir Yassin). What I found is that this was a fabrication put forward by representatives of Hajj Amin al Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee:
“WAS THERE A MASSACRE AT DEIR YASSIN?; The pro-PLO camp says yes; the historical documentation says otherwise”; Historical and Investigative Research; 20 November 2005; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/deir-yassin.htm
By contrast, there is no shortage of evidence that the Arabs took no prisoners: any Jews who fell alive into Arab hands were routinely tortured to death -- so much so, in fact, that Jewish soldiers quickly learned that if they were left wounded on the battlefield, beyond the reach of their comrades, the thing to do was commit suicide by exploding a grenade.[66] In line with the announced genocidal purpose of the war, Jewish civilians were targeted as a matter of Arab policy.
The British were not less opposed than the Arabs to the creation of a Jewish state, and apparently equally keen on exterminating the Israeli Jews. So the British not only assisted the publicly genocidal Arab offensive of 1948 in various ways with the troops they had not yet evacuated from ‘Palestine,’ but in addition sent captured Nazi officers to lead and advise the Arab armies.[67] You read correctly (skeptics should consult the footnote).
Hajj Amin’s Arab Higher Committee continued to be the sole representative of the so-called ‘Palestinian’ Arabs after 1948, until this role was taken over by Al Fatah, an organization created by. . .Hajj Amin’s Arab Higher Committee. Historian Howard Sachar explains:
“...in February 1967 the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] leader [Ahmed Shukeiry] was wounded in an assassination attempt. For the while, as a result, the organization was at least partially immobilized by factional intrigues.
Not so a rival, and even more radical Palestinian group in Syria, the Fatah (Arab Liberation Movement), organized several years earlier by veterans of the Mufti’s former Arab Higher Committee.
...From the outset... the Fatah’s reputation depended largely upon the success of its Moslem traditionalist approach of jihad against Israel, and upon conventional infiltration methods.”[68] (my emphases)
Al Fatah, from the start, was run by Mahmoud Abbas (alias Abu Mazen), the current leader of the PLO, and Yasser Arafat.[69] Soon, Al Fatah swallowed the PLO, but kept its name, as explained by historian Howard Sachar:
“By [1970]…the splinterization of the guerilla ranks largely dictated the altered nature of their offensive against Israel. Nominally, most of them belonged to an umbrella coordinating federation, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yet this prewar, Egyptian-dominated group had been seriously crippled by the June debacle, and its leader, Ahmed Shukeiry, had been forced into retirement. Since then, the PLO had experienced less a revival than a total reincarnation of membership and purpose under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Consisting ostensibly of representatives of all guerilla organizations, the PLO in its resurrected form was almost entirely Fatah-dominated, and Arafat himself served as president of its executive. In this capacity he was invited to attend meetings of the Arab League, and won extensive subsidies from the oil-rich governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf.”[71] (my emphases)
Because the PLO/Fatah became the sole representative of the so-called 'Palestinian' Arabs, Hajj Amin's ideology and leadership once again became synonymous with the 'Palestinian movement.' Hajj Amin himself died in 1974, but his legacy has lived on, which is why the PLO's Constitution proudly calls for the extermination of the Jewish people.[72]
After the German Nazis, the next great patron of Hajj Amin’s movement became...the United States
_____________________________________
The secretive behavior of the US ruling elite makes it difficult to establish precisely when US Intelligence became the boss of Hajj Amin’s movement. But there is some evidence to suggest that the Allies were secretly working with Hajj Amin immediately after the war:
1) The British, as mentioned above, were in favor of the Arab destruction of the fledgling state of Israel in the War of 1948, and backed the Arabs materially, including the sending of captured Nazi officers to ‘advise’ the genocidal Arab armies.[75] It was Hajj Amin’s forces that they were assisting.
2) In the same War of 1948, the US announced that it no longer recognized the state of Israel and slapped an arms embargo on the Israeli Jews, making things easier for Hajj Amin’s forces.[76]
The above establishes that, immediately after the war, the Allies had a policy to further the aims of Hajj Amin’s movement. This makes it relatively plausible that immediately after the war, the Allies were working directly with Hajj Amin, given that they let him escape by placing him on house arrest,[73] and given that they said in public that Hajj Amin -- perhaps history's greatest war criminal -- was, in their view, not a war criminal:
“Zionist groups petitioned the British to have [Hajj Amin] indicted as a war criminal [but] the British declined, partly because they considered the evidence indecisive...”[74]
In addition, we must consider that US Intelligence absorbed as its employees tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, immediately after the war,[78] and that just-released US government documents show that the CIA protected the fugitive Adolf Eichmann, Hajj Amin's “permanent colleague [and] partner...in the implementation of th[e Final Solution] programme.”[77]
In light of such facts, it is not exactly outlandish to suggest that US Intelligence began making direct use of Hajj Amin immediately after the war.
What is beyond question is that, at least by 1977, the master-pet relationship between the CIA and Hajj Amin’s movement was firmly in place. In 1977, the US was holding high-level secret talks with Hajj Amin's PLO/Fatah that violated a 1975 agreement with Israel not to do that.[77a] In public, US president Jimmy Carter worked very hard to give PLO/Fatah the dignity of a government in exile. The explicit point of Jimmy Carter’s diplomacy was to give international legitimacy to the demand for a PLO state in the West Bank and Gaza, and it was in fact Jimmy Carter who first proposed such a state, with the PLO obediently following about a week later, though up to this point the PLO had loudly rejected the idea of a PLO state in the West Bank and Gaza.[79]
In 1978, when Israel tried to defend itself from PLO terrorist attacks coming from the PLO bases in southern Lebanon, vigorous US pressure forced the Israelis to back down.[80]
In 1981, against Israeli objections, Ronald Reagan pushed hard for a PLO state in the West Bank and Gaza.[81]
In 1982-1983 the Reagan administration rushed into Lebano
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