Palestine Arabs “fighting” alongside the British is, at best, misleading. Palestine’s Arabs—like most of the Middle East’s Arabs—would have preferred a Nazi German victory and the defeat of the Western democracies. The British were seen as the common enemy of the Germans and the Palestinians. As Sakakini, a Palestinian nationalist, relates in a diary entry of 1941, the Arabs of Palestine “had rejoiced when the British bastion at Tobruk fell to the Germans,” and “not only the Palestinians rejoiced … but the whole Arab world.”
This support for Hitler wasn’t merely a matter of the old adage that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestine national movement, was an outspoken antisemite. He aided the 1941 pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad. When it collapsed, he fled to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war years enjoying a handsome salary for his work as a Nazi propagandist and a recruiter of Balkan Muslims for the SS.
Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust; and they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war. In radio broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against Britain and “kill the Jews.”
All these inconvenient facts are shoved under the carpet in the New York Times piece….
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