After Netanyahu’s Holocaust Remark, Germany Cites Its Own ‘Break With

The German government said on Wednesday that responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans, after Israel’s prime minister sparked controversy before a visit to Berlin by saying a Muslim elder had convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate Jews.

Netanyahu said the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin al-Husseini, also instigated Palestinian attacks on Jews over lies that they planned to destroy the Temple Mount, known to Muslims at the Noble Sanctuary.

It’s true that in the 1930s the Nazis wanted to expel Germany’s Jews, and later, the Jews of Austria and Czechoslovakia, but at that time there was no contact between the mufti and the ideological Nazi elite. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ [Hitler] asked”. Mass killing began before the meeting of the Mufti with Hitler on November 22, 1941, and Hitler did not need the advice of small fry from the Near East to reach the conclusion that genocide is the optimal “solution for the Jewish question”.

Netanyahu’s new “historical revelation” is a repetition of this discourse of permanent emergency.

State Department spokesman John Kirby declined to characterize Netanyahu’s comments as potentially inciting, but he said scholarly evidence on the Holocaust did not support the prime minister’s view. Herzog warned that Netanyahu’s words “fall into the hands of Holocaust deniers like a ripe fruit”, and muddy Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused Netanyahu of using the human tragedy of the Holocaust to try to score political points against Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the remarks “appalling and degenerate”.

Netanyahu has always been criticized for invoking the Holocaust when talking about current affairs, alluding to it especially when discussing Iran and its nuclear program.

Alongside serious outrage, irreverent black-humor memes and “Hitler rants” poking fun at Netanyahu circulated on social media throughout the day, many viewed more widely than Netanyahu’s original comments.

Netanyahu, whose father was an eminent historian, was quickly harangued by opposition politicians and experts on the Holocaust who said he was distorting the historical record.

Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said: “All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilisation that was the Holocaust”.

“We are aware that this crime against humanity was Germany’s very own responsibility”, he said.

In the same way those who rejected Israel’s right to exist bear responsibility for the Holocaust of European Jewry, modern day rejectors are accomplice to this crime by not learning from history.

“The final goal must be the removal of Jews”, Hitler wrote, according to the letter found in the Nazi Archives in Nuremberg and now at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. While we place blame on the Western nations for denying asylum, the Nazi leadership for their racial policies, and on the peoples of Europe for joining in on the slaughter of Jews, not enough blame is put on those who prevented the establishment of a Jewish State.

Kerry will meet with Netanyahu in Berlin on Thursday at the outset of a trip aimed at finding ways to end the violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Kirby said.

According to Israel’s military, the 15- and 17-year-olds had approached an army post when one pulled out a knife and stabbed a soldier, lightly injuring him.

Her attacker was shot dead by another soldier on the scene, officials said.

Sobelman is a special correspondent.