JERUSALEM -- Israeli historians and opposition politicians on Wednesday joined Palestinians in denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying it was a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who gave German dictator Adolf Hitler the idea of annihilating European Jews during World War II.
Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," according to a transcript provided by his office. The prime minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, protested to Hitler that "they'll all come here," referring to the Palestinian region.
"'So what should I do with them?'" Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking al-Husseini. "He said, 'Burn them.'"
Professor Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, called the speech "a lie" and "a disgrace." Professor Moshe Zimmermann, a specialist of German history at Hebrew University, said, "With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people that we would call Holocaust deniers."
Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition in the Israeli parliament, said the accusation was "a dangerous historical distortion," and he demanded that Netanyahu "correct it immediately."
Even Moshe Yaalon, the defense minister and a senior member of Netanyahu's Likud Party, said in a radio interview that "history is actually very, very clear."
"Hitler initiated it," he said. "Haj Amin al-Husseini joined him."
The comments arose during weeks of spiraling violence in which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly accused Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, of lying, principally about Israel's actions at a holy site in the Old City.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, in an effort to end the violence, visited with Netanyahu on Tuesday and Abbas on Wednesday. Speaking at a news conference in Ramallah, West Bank, on Wednesday, Ban said: "Our most urgent challenge is to stop the current wave of violence and avoid any further loss of life."
Many Israelis have vilified Abbas as a Holocaust denier because of a book he wrote that challenged the number of Jewish victims and accused Zionists of collaborating with Nazis to propel more Jews to what would become Israel. When Abbas issued a formal statement last year calling the Holocaust "the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era," Netanyahu dismissed it.
Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Wednesday that Netanyahu's "regrettable statements have deepened the divide" and denounced them as "morally indefensible and inflammatory."
"Mr. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the Holocaust and completely absolved Adolf Hitler's heinous and reprehensible genocide of the Jewish people," Erekat said in a statement. "It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history."
Netanyahu, who had also called the mufti "one of the leading architects of the Final Solution" in a 2012 speech, on Wednesday called the criticism of his remarks "absurd."
"My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility," he said, according to a statement provided by his office as he left Israel for Germany, where he was to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. "But rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called occupation, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.
"Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate 6 million Jews; he made the decision," Netanyahu added. "It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler."
Netanyahu, who is scheduled to meet Secretary of State John Kerry today in Berlin to discuss ways of defusing the heightened violence, said he would ask Kerry to demand that Abbas "stop the incitement that is the source of many attacks that we see here."
There is broad agreement that the mufti, who helped instigate Arab pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land in the 1920s, collaborated with the Nazis and promoted genocide over deportation of Europe's Jews as part of his virulent opposition to Zionism. He escaped prosecution in the Nuremberg trials and died in 1974.
Edy Cohen of Bar-Ilan University, an expert on Arab collaboration with the Nazis, said he supported Netanyahu's take on history, though he said it was impossible to precisely balance blame for the extermination idea.
"What I can surely say is that both men mutually inspired each other," Cohen said, adding that the mufti promoted plans to send Jews from the Middle East to concentration camps in what was then the Mandate for Palestine. "One can't be in their heads and know who hated Jews more."
A Section on 10/22/2015