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.
At home in the United States, if some locally dominant ethnic group violently protested against Jews being allowed to live on property amounting to 2 percent of “the neighborhood,” all these supposed defenders of Israel would know exactly whom they were dealing with and how to respond. But in the case of the Palestinians, we are to accept as their natural right their claims to be squeamish about living anywhere near Jews.
But without the presence of the Jews, there is no evidence that the Palestinians would particularly want these territories for a nation. When they were held under Jordanian and Egyptian rule between 1948 and 1967, after all, there was no significant move to create a Palestinian state, but there was a continuing migration toward the peace and prosperity that the Jews were creating. Hostility toward Jews stems not from any alleged legal violations or untoward violence, but from their exceptional virtues. This is the essence of anti-Semitism.
The Israel test forces a remorseless realism. It disallows all the bumper-sticker contradictions of pacifistic bellicosity. Either the world, principally the United States, supports Israel, or Israel, one way or another, will be destroyed. There are no other realistic choices. And if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the protected home of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy.
Winston Churchill proclaimed the essential situation in a speech in Parliament in 1939 responding to efforts to withdraw British support for a Jewish state. Describing “the magnificent work which the Jewish colonists have done,” he said: “They have made the desert bloom . . . started a score