A half year ago, Archbishop Desmond Tutu expressed a common sentiment in the Middle East.
The Nobel Prize laureate spoke to Haaretz in Jerusalem as the organization The Elders concluded its tour of Israel and the West Bank. He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.”
“But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.”
It’s a common refrain. When Palestinians (or Arabs generally) don’t deny the Holocaust, they claim (falsely) that Israel is committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians or claim that the Palestinians are paying the price of a European crime. But Shlomo Avineir writes that the Arabs and Palestinians were not innnocent victims:
But in the winter of 1938-39, the British changed their policy after the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain realized that its appeasement of Hitler had failed. Britain began to prepare for a war against the Nazis, and as part of this it changed its Middle East policy. Britain reintroduced the draft, started massive production of tanks and aircraft, and developed the radar. In light of the need to insure the Empire’s critical link to India via the Suez Canal, Britain feared that continued violent suppression of the Arab revolt in Palestine would push all Arabs in the region closer to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It consequently decided to move closer to the Arabs and away from the Jews and Zionism. As Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald explained to the Zionist leadership, the change was prompted not by a British conviction that Arab claims were justified, but rather by realpolitik: There were more Arabs than Jews; the Jews would support Britain against the Nazis in any case, but the Arabs have the option of joining Nazi Germany.
The cruel paradox lies in the fact that appeasement of the Arabs started just as Britain relinquished its appeasement policy vis-a-vis Hitler and was preparing for war against Germany. This was the reason for the 1939 White Paper, which drastically limited the right of Jews to buy land in Mandatory Palestine and placed a ceiling of 75,000 on Jewish immigration. The message to the Arabs was clear: The Jews would remain a minority in Palestine.
Avineri writes that these policies restricting Jewish immigration to Israel, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. This is aside from the very active collaboration between Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Nazis.
Crossposted on Yourish.
I have often wondered to what extent the Holocaust itself was the result of an attempt by the Nazis to appease the Arabs. Certainly Hitler’s psychopathic antisemitism cannot be underestimated. But one of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust is the extent to which this horrific undertaking was actually detrimental to the defense of Germany. Anne Frank was captured in 1944 after the invasion of Normandy. How on earth could it have been worthwhile for Germany, retreating and under attack from all sides, to divert resources to hunt down a teenage girl and transport her to a death camp hundreds of miles away? Multiplied by millions, of course. The Nazis could have simply expelled Jews from Europe. But that of course would have led to a massive influx of Jews into Palestine. The Middle East was a critical theater of the war, especially in 1941-2 right around the time the Holocaust was moving into full gear. You connect the dots.
Gary,
From Hitler’s point of view, which his followers shared, the war against the Jews was the real war. In their warped minds the Jews had started a global war against Germany and had to be eliminated for the good of humanity. The various states fighting Germany were doing so because the Jews controlled the power in those states, and thus could act against the real interests of their peoples (does that argument sound familiar?). This ideology struck deep roots in the Middle East and you can hear its echo in the propaganda of the Arabs and the Mullahs. Hitler did not think he was weakening the German war effort by concentrating on killing the Jews, quite the contrary. He thought that by killing Jews he struck at the real enemy.
There were some really sick puppies ruling in the 20th Century, and old Adolf was not the only one. There now seem to be a lot of people around who think that the 20th Century was so much fun, with its world wars, genocide, mass murders for reasons of insane political ideologies, mass starvation for the same reasons, continental wide impoverishment on account of those same insane ideologies, massive political criminality, and general civilizational entropy, that we ought to do it all over again in the 21st Century. Only this time, we’ll all have nukes from the start.