By this definition, the PLO has always been, at its essence, a Nazi organization. The first move toward pushing the Jews into the sea came during World War II from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. “Germany,” as the Mufti put it, “is the only country in the world that has not merely fought the Jews at home but has declared war on the entirety of world Jewry; in this war against world Jewry the Arabs feel profoundly connected to Germany.”
Fresh from aiding the massacre of Jews in Romania and Bosnia and recruiting Bosnian Muslims into the Nazi forces, the Mufti was a fanatical participant in the European Holocaust. His most passionate goal was to extend it to the Middle East. After visiting Auschwitz with Himmler, this founder-hero of the Palestinian movement urged the Nazis to accelerate and intensify the killings and then join him in extending the carnage to Palestine by massacring the half-million Jews living there. In this pursuit, he conspired with the Nazis under Walther Rauff, engineer of Auschwitz, to create a special force in Greece ready to make the attack. Only General Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at El Alamein prevented the Mufti and his friends from pursuing their plan. Still unsated in his killing frenzies in late 1944, the Grand Mufti launched an attack of parachutists on the Tel Aviv water supply with ten containers of toxin. Failing in the attempt, he devoted the rest of his life to the cause of destroying Israel.
Cited as a war criminal, Husseini gained asylum with the similarly rabid Holocaust celebrants among the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. For his barbarities, the Mufti remains a revered historical figure among the Palestinians. Beginning in the 1930s, his Nazi animus originated long before any of the alleged Israeli offenses that are now cited to justify Palestinian violence and hatred against the Jews in Israel.
When Husseini died in 1974, his anti-Semitic cause was taken up by his distant relative Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader and eventual Nobel “Peace” laureate. Arafat characteristically bought Hitler’s Mein Kampf in bulk and distributed it to his followers in Arab translation under the title My Jihad, as Israeli soldiers discovered on capturing his abandoned camp in southern Lebanon in 1982. Arafat was a master of the duplicitous art of recanting in splenetic Arabic to his followers any public professions of peace he may have expressed in English at international meetings and “summits.”
Arafat’s successor as head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is supposedly a “moderate.” This seems to be the term for anti-Semites who are ambivalent about whether to celebrate the Holocaust or to deny that it occurred. Devoted to the destruction of Israel, Abbas was a Holocaust denier from the time of his doctoral thesis — in his own words, a study of “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed.” Contesting Abbas for power and winning Palestinian elections in 2006 was Hamas, an organization whose founding charter proclaims its devotion to the killing of Jews. After Hamas joined Fatah in a unity government in May 2011, Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, declared on Al-Aqsa TV:
All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews. In just a few years, all the Zionists and the settlers will realize that their arrival in Palestine was for the purpose of the great massacre, by means of which Allah wants to relieve humanity of their evil.
Perhaps the most menacing force for Palestinian “liberation” is Hamas’ ally, Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 2002 that if all the Jews gather in Israel, “they’ll make our job easier, and will keep us from having to go hunt them down all over the world.”
When experts in the United States urge the creation of a Palestinian state, they are effectively endorsing a Nazi national movement with roots in Europe. Pointless and fantastical are claims to favor a Palestinian national movement that renounces the murder of Jews. Murdering Jews is the essence of the only Palestinian national movement the world has ever known.
The creation of a peaceful and productive Palestinian state would require support from neither Harvard nor Hezbollah, nor any force outside Palestine itself. The Palestinian Arabs could be a nation tomorrow and a state the day after, if their leaders could let go of the notion that the Jews must die before Palestine can live. By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy. Civilized people with the good fortune to live near brilliant entrepreneurs or thinkers go to work for them and attempt to learn their skills and master their fields of knowledge. Then they may start similar ventures on their own. It is the only way to succeed. In the past, Palestinian Arabs often excelled as entrepreneurs, and some do around the world today. But nowhere are the Palestinians less likely to prosper than under the current Palestinian regimes. Palestinian leaders tell their people to disdain the peaceful and collaborative demands of democratic capitalism. Palestinians are taught to say they find it “humiliating” to work for Jews. They are taught that the creation of Israel was their “naqba,” a catastrophe comparable to the Holocaust rather than the source of their own nationhood and property. So, like the other self-defeating democrats everywhere in the region, they elect jihadists to drive out the Jews.
In no way do the usual defenders of Israel so clearly concede the National Socialist framing of the debate as on the question of “settlements”: the fate of the several hundred thousand Jews living on West Bank territory, land that some Israeli government might concede to a Palestinian state. Dershowitz and scores of other defenders of Israel, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Goldberg, join the chorus of critics regarding as a “serious” or even a “catastrophic error” settlements that plant productive people on mostly undeveloped areas of Judea and Samaria that once chiefly sprouted missiles and mortars overlooking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Once again, nominal defenders of Israel give up the key point without even seeing it. For the dispute over the settlements is an argument over whether Jews may reasonably expect to be permitted to live among Arabs anywhere.
After the Arabs refused all offers of land for peace in the wake of the 1967 war, the Israelis were necessarily responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s government under Levi Eshkol initially barred settlements on the grounds that under a peace agreement the land would one day be relinquished to the capacious and underpopulated existing Palestinian state named Jordan. When the Jordanians joined the rest of the Arab states in adamantly refusing any negotiations, Israel inherited the land. Refuting every claim of Arab “displacement” by Jews, the Israelis spurred development and welcomed Arabs thronging in to participate in it. Between the 1967 war and the first intifada in 1987, Arab settlers, moving in from Jordan and other Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza, came to outnumber Israeli settlers eight to one.
Since Israel’s creation, while it was accommodating massive immigration from Arab nations, essentially every Arab state expelled its own Jews, many resident for generations. Evicted were more than 800,000 people. Confiscated was some $2.5 billion in land and wealth. Rivaling every Nazi dream of ethnic purity are these domains ruled by Arab sharia law, anti-Semitism and state socialism.
Every proposal for a Palestinian state, even from Israel’s usual supporters, takes this massive crime as a given and proposes that Israel preemptively carry out exactly such an act of “ethnic cleansing” by itself uprooting the Jewish inhabitants from the West Bank. Although Israel accepts both Christians and Muslims as citizens, and indeed includes elected Arab members in its national legislature, both Israel’s enemies and its defenders assume that any future Palestinian state will exclude any remaining Jews from the homes and neighborhoods, communities, shops, and schools they themselves have built. Too bizarre to be contemplated, apparently, is the possibility that the Jews, if they so chose, could be allowed to live in a Palestinian state, or be safe if they did. One of the essential duties of a democratic government is the safeguarding of the rights of its minorities.