The information in the following article is drawn from three sources: The Arab War Effort by the The American Christian Palestine Committee (1947); Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century by eminent British historian Martin Gilbert (1996); and A Place Among the Nations by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (1993). Citiations from these works will be noted as ACPC, MG and BN respectively.

The PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY's Nazi Heritage

In 1947, with memories of Nazism fresh in their minds, the American Christian Palestine Committee, founded by the Hon. Robert Wagner, mayor of New York, with Fiorella LaGuardia, Paul Tillich, Prof. Reinhold Neibuhr, and two dozen other prominent citizens, published a slender report entitled "The Arab War Effort."

"The tendency to forget the lessons of the past has always been one of man's most dangerous characteristics," the report begins. "One of those hard earned lessons is simply this: that appeasement does not work. The enemies of human freedom could neither be bribed nor cajoled. ...Yet now in 1947 we seem to be returning to the policy of appeasement in dealing with precisely those Arabs leaders who did their utmost to aid the Axis powers. ...It is not claimed that the facts stated in this document constitute a revelation. They do not appear to be in dispute in any responsible quarter. There seems, however, to be a tendency to ignore them as not longer politically relevant. This (is) unfortunate, for the data herewith presented point to conclusions that are still valid with regard to the political reasoning prevalent among the Arab peoples."

Wagner and the other authors want to make it perfectly clear that the Arab populace, not simply a few leaders, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis: "...sympathy with the Axis powers were widespread among the common people of the Arab countries... these feelings permeated the majority of the population, while the leaders often cooperated directly with the Axis. Fascist and Nazi ideologies were not so much imitated as paralleled in the Arab world; they fitted into modes of thought already in being and were taken up by existing political clubs and associations."

Tragically, extremist Arab leaders were appeased and courted, while moderates were ignored, as posing no threat: thus British policy promoted Arab fascism. Decades earlier, the Palestinian clan head Al-Hussein had been banned from the Mandate for fomenting pogroms and assassinating Arab moderates. He seemed destined to fade into obscurity. This wise policy was reversed by Sir Herbert Samuel, a British Jew appointed to be the High Commissioner of Palestine. In one of the most self-destructive acts of appeasement in Jewish history, Samuel pardoned Al-Husseini, passed over the three winning candidates of a Moslem election, and gave Al-Husseini the post of Mufti - and the power he needed to lead his people into active Nazi collaboration. (MG)

The annihilation of Europe's Jews required two factors: the Final Solution within Europe, and the slamming shut of all exits. Palestinian Arabs began working with the German regime from the year Hitler seized power, in 1933. Working with Adoph Eichman and the Waffen SS, Palestinian Arabs contributed directly to the first factor, the Final Solution. (ACPC,21; BN 191-3) More importantly, they were the main players in the second factor: cutting off Jews from safety in Mandate Palestine. Funded by the Nazis, Palestinians staged riots and pogroms precisely to halt the inflow of refugees from Nazi terror - so that the Jews would be trapped in Europe and destroyed. The Palestinian goal to create an Arab state from Iraq to Jordan was centered on a shared Nazi plan to wipe out the Jews of both Europe and the Middle East.

Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons against the appeasement of Arab violence in the service of the Nazis by the closing of Palestine to Jewish immigration. "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. ...We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda." (MG,155)

Through their efforts on behalf of the Axis powers - which included not only rioting, but also military recruiting, sabotage, propaganda, and organizing a potentially devastating pro-Axis revolt in Iraq -- Palestinian Arabs succeeded in cowing the British into betraying the Jews, reneging on the promise of a Jewish homeland, and preventing Jewish access to Mandate Palestine.

The most famous Palestinian Nazi, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini traveled to Germany to meet Hitler in 1941, and broadcast on Radio Berlin, "The enemies of the Mufti will not escape their fate." (ACPC,17) In 1943 he broadcast his standard anti-Jewish lie that Jews planned to destroy Al Aqsa Mosque (the same lie used by Arafat to foment the famous tunnel riots), and read a pledge from the Nazi Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, that "the obliteration of what is called the Jewish National Home" was a "basic tenet of German policy." (MG,165)

Today's version of events leaves out all these undisputed facts of the historic record. Instead, we are told by the Palestinian Arabs and the American media that the Palestinian Arabs were uninvolved in World War II, and have unfairly paid the price of the Shoah by having Israel imposed on them. The enormity of their murderous enmity to Jews and a Jewish state is sanitized, hidden and justified - much as Nazi Jew-hatred was during the thirties. Far from occupying a moral high ground, Palestinian Arabs worked alongside and for Hitler with all the means available to them, and they succeeded in helping him destroy European Jewry.

Nazism held a genuine appeal for the Arab populace, who were attracted to its messages of resentment, Jew-hating, revenge, rejection of democracy, and recovery of past military glory. A popular Arab song during the war went, "Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth." There were many Nazi youth groups and political clubs. The Husseini clan in Palestine founded a youth division called the Nazi Scouts. (BN,191)

Unlike Germans, following the war Palestinian Arabs did not repudiate and repent for their Nazi activities. Yassir Arafat's leadership is legitimized by his being a member of the pro-Nazi Husseini clan. Arafat has extolled the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with reverence, called him his mentor and guide and emphasized, in a 1985 conference, that "the PLO is continuing the path set by the Mufti." Members of the PLO use noms de guerre such as Hitler and Rommel. Arafat's personal bodyguard named his two sons Hitler and Eichmann. (BN,195)

Arafat took the name Yasser in memory of a leader of the Mufti's terror campaign of the 1930's. (BN,188) With funding from Hitler, the Husseinis instituted a reign of terror in Palestine in order to silence or murder all Arabs who were willing to allow Jews a national home. They murdered thousands of moderate Palestinians, threw live victims into pits of scorpions and snakes, eliminated the entire Nashashibi family of Jerusalem, and drove forty thousand Arabs into exile. The corpses of their victims would be left in the street for days, a shoe stuck in their mouth, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating a Jewish homeland. (BN,189)

By the time of the 1939 British Peel Commission on the future of the Mandate, the Husseini clan could claim to be "the sole representatives of the Palestinian Arabs." They had wiped out, exiled or terrorized all who did not agree with their own Nazi plans for the Jews. Hitler had recently annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Jewish families were desperately trying to escape to Eretz Israel. The British appeased the Mufti and the Arab mobs by breaking the terms of the League of Nations Mandate and refusing Jews access to Palestine, actually blocking the coast with naval vessels.

In addition to preventing escape, Palestinian Arabs were directly involved with the annihilation of Yugoslav Jewry and the slaughter of Iraq's Jews in 1941. (BN,191) Nazi Palestinians organized Arab and Moslem troops from the Middle East, Soviet Union and Balkans for Waffen SS units. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, personally recruited six thousand Yugoslavian Moslems, telling them, "Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion." (BN, 192) (A similar phrase, "Wherever you meet them, kill them, wherever you are, kill those Jews" and "Allah will torture them at your hands," was heard as recently as Oct 14, 2000, on Palestinian Authority TV, spoken by Dr. Halabiya, member of the P.A. appointed Fatwa Council, and former rector of the Islamic University of Gaza. See www.memri.org)

The Mufti was based in Berlin from 1942 to 1944, along with other Palestinian Nazis. According to testimony from the Nuremberg trials by Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichman's deputy:

"The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichman and Himmler in the execution of the plan. He was one of Eichman's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the exterminaiton measures." (BN, 193)

The Mufti boasted of visiting the gas chambers of Auschwitz incognito (whether or not it was true, that he would boast of it speaks volumes). He worked ceaselessly to pressure the Nazis to let no Jew escape, focusing especially on Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia, which had been willing to allow Jews to flee.

Palestinian participation in the Nazi cause posed a genuine threat to the British. Among the Palestinian war efforts on behalf of the Axis powers (ACPC, 17-21):

* created an espionage network covering Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Palestine that reported to German Intelligence

* ran a Parachutist and Sabotage School for Arabs (Athens, Greece)

* launched parachutist expeditions armed with explosives, ammunitions, radios and gold were captured in Jericho, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. Others succeeded in cutting telephone and pipe lines, bridges, and rail lines.

* recruited Moslem Legions in the Balkans, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Turkestan etc. for the Wehrmacht and a plan to recruit half a million North African soldiers

* organized Arab students and emigrees in Germany into an Arab Brigrade

* fomented the Iraqi revolt of 1941

The most threatening accomplishment of the Palestinians on behalf of the Axis came in 1941, the darkest days of World War II when Britain was battling alone and seemed to be losing. Seizing Iraq was a major German goal. It would have deprived Britain of her chief source of oil, cut the sea lanes to India, a crucial source of raw materials, and cut the British empire in two. It would also have allowed the Axis to invade Russia along a second front from Iraq. (ACPC,9)

In the words of the American Christian Palestine Committee:

The Iraqi revolt came when the outcome of the war seemed certain. In the spring of 1941 Britain's forces were at their lowest ebb. Neither Russia nor the U.S. had yet entered the war. ... It was indeed a critical moment that the Iraqi rebels, prodded and aided by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, chose for their uprising. For two months the fight hung in the balance. British troops were rushed to Basra from India...German and Italian airplanes, refueling in Syria, were thrown into the flight. Trainloads of French arms were shipped to Iraq (by the Vichy regime in Syria). At the call of Haj Amin ...subversive elements throughout the Middle East were touched off into activity. Looking back, one sees that it was by sheer miracle ... most of all by the heroic Greek and British resistance in Greece and Crete...preventing the Germans from transporting reinforcements of men and material to Iraq - that the Iraqi revolt was quelled.

According to a British intelligence report published in 1945, entitled "A Short History of Enemy Subversive Activity in Iraq, 1935-1945" it was a host of fanatical pro-Nazi Palestinians and Syrians who were responsible for the subversion of Iraq, leading to the 1941 installation of an Axis government there and the slaughter of 600 Jews. Under German direction, Palestinians infiltrated and took over much of the Iraqi government, creating a patronage-based state-within-a-state. (ACPC,33)

The Palestinian ex-Mufti "was paid 2% of the salary of every Iraqi government official, including the Military and Police... 60,000 pounds by the Germans and 40,000 by the Italians." (ACPC,35-36) Setting the model for the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, his followers lived in luxury, with cars and fancy homes. Educated pro-Nazi Palestinians were appointed throughout the Iraqi government, and reported to the Mufti. The Palestinian policy of assassination was used to good effect to weaken the pro-British administration. Pro-Axis officers took over in a bloodless coup "after a good deal of negotiations and meeting with the Army leaders ...and the ex-Mufti. The important part played by the ex-Mufti in making these arrangement was well-known ...it was first realized what an important part the ex-Mufti was already playing in Iraq's domestic affairs."

The Palestinian's efforts to cut England off from the oil fields and the sea lane to India was foiled, but the British were now frightened of the Palestinian elite's ability to further the Axis war aims. Even when the news of the Final Solution and the gas chambers reached Britain in 1942 and led to a public outcry to help Jews escape, the British government remained adamant that the doors of the Jewish National Home, mandated by international law, must remain shut to Jews.

To return to the words of the Hon. Robert Wagner and the American Christian Palestine Committee, as true now as in in 1947 : "Appeasement had not justified itself. But appeasement is still the ...policy throughout the strategic Middle East. One may well ask how secure a foundation it can be for a new and peaceful world order."