A Reality Check: Palestinian Arab Volunteers in the British Army in WWII - by Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen

A recent study recounts the purportedly unknown story of Palestinian Arab volunteers fighting the Nazis during WWII. Haaretz used this finding as an opportunity to mock PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pointed out that the Mufti of Jerusalem was a close ally of Hitler. Yet the Mufti’s position as “the most important Arab Quisling” is indisputable, while most of the study’s conclusions are dubious and inconsistent with historical facts.

Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,367..
09 December '19..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinian-arabs-british-army/

Israel’s Declaration of Independence notes the historic role played by Palestinian-Jewish volunteers to the British Army during WWII:

In WWII the Jewish Community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

It is hardly surprising that upon the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany, the Jewish Agency Executive and Vaad Leumi (National Council) rallied to the Allied standard. The two Jewish organizations jointly announced that everyone in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) between the ages of 18 and 50 should aid the British army. Within the first week of the war, more than 130,000 members of the Yishuv had volunteered to join the British army.

This enthusiastic response was in spite of the May 1939 British White Paper, which reneged on London’s obligation under the 1922 League of Nations mandate to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine in line with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and instead envisaged a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews would be reduced to a position of permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, hoped simultaneously to reassure both the Yishuv and the Mandate government by stating, with Solomonic nuance, “We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.”

Israeli professor Mustafa Abbasi views that history differently. In April 2019, he published an article (in Hebrew) titled “Palestinians fighting Against Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in the Second World War” (Cathedra Quarterly). In the words of the article’s abstract:

During WWII about 12,000 Palestinian Arabs volunteered to serve in the British army. These volunteers participated actively in battles in North Africa and Europe. Many of them lost their lives, others were wounded, and many are still missing. It is interesting that despite this vital contribution of the Palestinian people and their leadership in the war against the Nazis, especially among the opposition parties, the attention of historians has been mostly directed toward the meeting held between the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler.

Taking this claim for granted, the Israeli leftist daily Haaretz seized the opportunity to ridicule PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2015 assertion that the Mufti had urged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. In the wake of the criticism this statement had elicited, Netanyahu said his intention was not to absolve Hitler of culpability for the Holocaust but to note that “the Mufti played an important role in the Final Solution.”

This clarification is right on target. The Mufti’s contribution to the Nazi war effort was infinitely greater than his above-noted meeting with Hitler, in which he offered the formation of an Arab legion to fight on Germany’s side and the Nazi tyrant promised to destroy “the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power [i.e., the Yishuv]” with the Palestinian Arabs given an active role in this genocide. The Mufti’s contribution ranged from his involvement in the 1941 pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq, to his wartime broadcasting of Nazi propaganda to the Arab and Muslim worlds, to his recruitment of a Muslim SS division that fought on the Russian front, to his repeated incitement of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s murderous henchman with whom he established a close personal relationship, to exterminate European Jewry. So deep was Hajj Amin Husseini’s involvement with the Nazis that a contemporary British intelligence report described him as the “most important Arab Quisling” (after the infamous Norwegian Nazi collaborator).

Peace, Arabs-called-Palestinians and De-Nazification - by Yisrael Medad

...I then began saying, "without making any direct comparison, if, after World War II, there was a need by the Allies to institute a de-Nazification program..." but was loudly interrupted. My interlocutor raised his voice a bit: "you cannot make any comparison with the Nazis." I attempted to respond, saying, "I precisely prefaced my remarks by saying I am not comparing Arabs to Nazis but drawing attention to the program that was instituted..." but could not finish. I had wanted to continue and say, "and a similar program should be in place for a decade amongst the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority" but I could not.

Yisrael Medad..
My Right Word..
06 September '18..
Link: http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2018/09/arabs-called-palestinians-and-de.html

As I was saying goodbye to a group of students who had come to Shiloh to hear the 'other side' of the story, an accompanying adult pressed me as to how I saw the future.

I informed him that one of the central elements of the Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism was the inability of the Arabs, it seemed to me, to acknowledge any Jewish national identity in this area. Moreover, with no such groups as a "Peace Now" or "Yesh Din" within the Arab society, without pro-Israel demonstrations in Ramallah and Hebron, the extreme inequality of the populations and their perceptions make the situation worse. In addition, as a result of 25 years of the Oslo Process with the establishment of a "Palestinian Authority", today's 25-year old Arab's thinking has been conditioned by the educational system Arafat and Abbas created. That system, as has been documented, has inculcated the very worse of the 1920s and 1930s Mufti-thinking along with erasing Israel from maps, calling Jews dogs, inciting to violence and terrorism, glorifying such and excluding any educational programming that would facilitate coexistence, if not peace.

The very first thing I'd suggest is dealing with this younger generation to condition them for peace and acceptance of the Jew-as-Zionist.

I then began saying, "without making any direct comparison, if, after World War II, there was a need by the Allies to institute a de-Nazification program..." but was loudly interrupted. My interlocutor raised his voice a bit: "you cannot make any comparison with the Nazis."

I attempted to respond, saying, "I precisely prefaced my remarks by saying I am not comparing Arabs to Nazis but drawing attention to the program that was instituted..." but could not finish. I had wanted to continue and say, "and a similar program should be in place for a decade amongst the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority" but I could not. The man was getting agitated, was refusing to listen and someone thought better to move him, gently, on to the bus and end the exchange.

The Middle East and the Ghosts of Auschwitz

...The ghosts of Auschwitz are still haunting Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Gaza, Iraq, Iran and a hundred other places. The victims are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Yazidis and numberless others. The Nazis began with the Jews. The Muslim saying is, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Auschwitz is what happens when we fail to take threats like that seriously because we want peace at any price.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
04 February '15..

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.

He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.

His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.

“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will “not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

There was Eichmann’s Hadith Holocaust with even the rocks and trees finding Jews for the Islamic SS. A more literal judgment came Eichmann’s way five years later in Jerusalem when Israeli agents used extraordinary rendition to seize him and bring him to trial. But the Muslim world had issued its own verdict long ago when the Mufti of Jerusalem had come to Europe urging the extermination of the Jews. “This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race… Kill the Jews,” the Mufti had ranted to fellow Muslims.

(Continue)

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UN, J Street, Hitler, fight for Palestinian rights

Fresnozionism.org
12 December '10

This is going to be an easy post for me to write, since I will let my friends at our United Nations write most of it for me:

In 1975, by its resolution 3376 the United Nations General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and requested it to recommend a programme of implementation to enable the Palestinian people to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination without external interference, national independence and sovereignty; and to return to their homes and property from which they had been displaced. The Committee’s recommendations were endorsed by the Assembly, to which the Committee reports annually. The Assembly established the Special Unit on Palestinian Rights (later redesignated as the Division for Palestinian Rights) as its secretariat and, throughout the years, has gradually expanded the Committee’s mandate.

As far as I know, no other ‘people’ has a committee to help them exercise their inalienable rights — certainly not the Jewish people, or the Kurdish people or the Tibetan people or anyone else. To make sure that nobody forgets the ‘plight’ of the sainted Palestinians,

(Read full "UN, J Street, Hitler, fight for Palestinian rights")

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The taboo on Israeli chauvinism

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
26 March '10

Those Israelis not shunned in the media and on campuses abroad are predominantly left-wing trashers of their own country.

Truth is often an unwelcome guest. Truth can be unpopular. Truth can disconcert. Truth can be bad for business. Truth can be counterproductive for certain reputations – even for the reputation of professionals whose status is ostensibly derived from their dedication to seeking truth.

Truth can be denied even when solidly backed by history. In our postmodern moral-relativist environment no truths exist, only self-serving narratives, claims and counterclaims. Hence truth can be spurned as a biased assertion aimed at furthering someone’s narrow interests. This is all the more insidious because it’s so fashionable.

It’s simplistic to dismiss any fact as an expedient and calculated misrepresentation. This isn’t just intellectual indolence. It’s also intellectual anarchy. Everything can be willy-nilly turned upside down. With nothing rooted to actual sequences of events, liars are liberated. Falsehoods are granted equal standing with truth. Frequently they even gain ascendency and are paraded as unquestionable. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

MY ABOVE ruminations were inspired by twin events. An opinion piece I wrote for an Australian newspaper elicited a deluge of noxious e-mails sent to my private mailbox. In these my ancestors and I were dispatched to the lowest levels of hell and my offspring and I were threatened with torture and death.

Yet somehow worse, because it didn’t come from the loony fringe, was a very polite letter sent by a highly respectable German magazine editor to an acquaintance (also German) who suggested the periodical print his translated version of my column “A good cop goes to Auschwitz” (January 20). The column revisited the World War II avid Arab collaboration with the Nazis (in the wake of MK Muhammad Barakei’s provocative participation at the Auschwitz liberation memorial).

It was flatly rejected on the grounds that it’s “too pro-Israel” and “too massively partisan.” The editor judged it unsuitable, saying it raises “the specter of chauvinism” (in its original sense of ultra-nationalism, before it was hijacked by gender polemics).

(Read full article)
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