Haj Amin Al-Husseini - Amin Al-Husseini and Antisemitism

Amin Al-Husseini and Antisemitism

al-Husseini is pictured by many scholars as a staunch antisemite. Other area specialists deny he was an antisemite. Robert Kiely sees Husseini as moving "incrementally toward anti-Semitism as he opposed Jewish ambitions in the region."

Zvi Elpeleg, while rehabilitating him from other charges, concludes his chapter concerning al-Husseini's involvement in the extermination of the Jews as follows:

'n any case, there is no doubt that Haj Amin's hatred was not limited to Zionism, but extended to Jews as such. His frequent, close contacts with leaders of the Nazi regime cannot have left Haj Amin any doubt as to the fate which awaited Jews whose emigration was prevented by his efforts. His many comments show that he was not only delighted that Jews were prevented from emigrating to Palestine, but was very pleased by the Nazis' Final Solution'.

Both Walter Laqueur Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, and Benny Morris share this view, arguing that al-Husseini saw the Holocaust as German revenge for a putative Jewish sabotaging of their war effort in WW 1. He wasn't merely anti-Zionist, as his extreme hatred, in assertions that the 'Jews are evil', show. He was, Morris argues, fully aware of the Holocaust, and happy it was taking place.

In a study dedicated to the role and use of the Holocaust in Israeli nationalist discourse, Idith Zertal reexamining al-Husseini's alleged antisemitism, states that 'in more correct proportions, as a fanatic nationalist-religious Palestinian leader'.

Robert Fisk, discussing the difficulties of describing al-Husseini's life and its motivations, summarized the problem in the following way:-

'(M)erely to discuss his life is to be caught up in the Arab-Israeli propaganda war. To make an impartial assessment of the man's career-or, for that matter, an unbiased history of the Arab-Israeli dispute- is like trying to ride two bicycles at the same time.'

The Nazi regime virtually banned the use of the word 'Anti-semitism' during WW2 in deference to their ally al-Husseini who disliked it.Laqueur 2006. In the immediate postwar period, al-Husseini was almost invariably characterised as antisemitic. His first biographer, Moshe Pearlman, described him as virulently antisemitic, as did, a decade and a half later, Joseph Schechtman. More recent biographers like Mattar and Elpeleg, writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, began to emphasize his nationalism. While the Palestinian historian Mattar blames him as the main culprit of sowing the seeds of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli historian Elpeleg, who formerly governed both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, compares him to Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and even to Theodor Herzl.

Peter Novick has argued that the post-war historiographical depiction of al-Husseini reflected complex geopolitical interests that distorted the record.

'The claims of Palestinian complicity in the murder of the European Jews were to some extent a defensive strategy, a preemptive response to the Palestinian complaint that if Israel was recompensed for the Holocaust, it was unjust that Palestinian Muslims should pick up the bill for the crimes of European Christians. The assertion that Palestinians were complicit in the Holocaust was mostly based on the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem, a pre-World War II Palestinian nationalist leader who, to escape imprisonment by the British, sought refuge during the war in Germany. The Mufti was in many ways a disreputable character, but post-war claims that he played any significant part in the Holocaust have never been sustained. This did not prevent the editors of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from giving him a starring role. The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Göring, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann--of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler.'