JERUSALEM/paris - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked a Holocaust controversy on Wednesday, hours before a visit to Germany, by saying that the Muslim elder in Jerusalem during the 1940s convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews.
In a speech to the Zionist Congress late on Tuesday, Netanyahu referred to a series of Muslim attacks on Jews in Palestine during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Husseini famously flew to visit Hitler in Berlin in 1941, and Netanyahu said that meeting was instrumental in the Nazi leader's decision to launch a campaign to annihilate the Jews.
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said in the speech. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (Palestine).' "'So what should I do with them?'" Netanyahu said Hitler asked the mufti, who responded: "Burn them."
Netanyahu on Wednesday backtracked on his claim that a Palestinian leader gave Hitler the idea to exterminate Jews after widespread controversy and a flood of online mockery.
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time. He wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu told the World Zionist Congress. "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?' he asked. He said: 'Burn them.'"
UN chief Ban Ki-moon pleaded for an end to spiralling violence on Wednesday as he met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in a bid to calm three weeks of deadly unrest. The UN secretary general's meeting with Abbas came after talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, when he called on both sides to end a "dangerous escalation" threatening a full-scale uprising.
Moreover, the United Nations cultural heritage body UNESCO condemned Israel for limiting Muslim access to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound, a flashpoint in a recent wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
The resolution approved by UNESCO’s executive board dropped a controversial clause from the original draft that laid claim to Jerusalem’s Western Wall - the holiest site where Jews can pray - as a space reserved for Muslims, Israeli diplomats said. That clause would have declared the Wall an integral part of the al-Aqsa mosque compound.
- a potential first step to banning Jews from approaching the site where they pray and slip written prayers into the wall’s cracks.
The raised and walled esplanade is sacred to both faiths. Jews call it the Temple Mount, site of two destroyed biblical temples. Muslims call it Haram al-Sharif and list its al-Aqsa mosque as holiest Islamic building outside Saudi Arabia. Jewish groups worldwide and the Israeli government mounted a last-minute campaign against the resolution, and UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova disowned it as dangerous amid Palestinian protests against alleged Israeli encroachment on the compound.
In its place, the resolution adopted on Wednesday said the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation condemned restrictions of freedom of worship at the al-Aqsa mosque and reiterated other complaints about Israeli management of disputed holy sites.
UNESCO did not immediately provide a copy of the resolution adopted following protracted negotiations but Palestinian and Israeli diplomats gave matching accounts to reporters. The news from UNESCO coincided with international endeavours to calm violence in which at least 42 Palestinians and eight Israelis have died. The turmoil was triggered in part by what Palestinians say are increasingly frequent Jewish visits to the compound that is officially under Muslim administration.
Ban, at least publicly, offered no concrete proposals to end the unrest, but spoke of returning to "meaningful negotiations," after more than a year of frozen peace efforts and seething frustration with Israel's occupation. "We will continue to support all efforts to create the conditions to make meaningful negotiations possible," Ban told journalists after meeting Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
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.
They noted the meeting between Husseini and Hitler took place on November 28, 1941. More than two years earlier, in January 1939, Hitler had addressed the Reichstag, Nazi Germany's parliament, and spoke clearly about his determination to exterminate the "Jewish race".
"To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct," Dina Porat, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum, told Israel Radio.
"The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in Hitler's ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti."
It is not clear why Netanyahu decided to launch into the issue now, but his remarks came with tensions between Israelis and Palestinians at a new peak, particularly over a Jerusalem holy site overseen by the current mufti.
A German government spokesman, asked about Netanyahu's comments, said the Holocaust was Germany's responsibility and there was no need for another view on it.
Responding to the criticism, Netanyahu said on Wednesday there was "much evidence" to back up his accusations against Husseini, including testimony by a deputy of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War Two.
Netanyahu, in a statement issued by his office, did not name the aide, but he seemed to be referring to Eichmann assistant Dieter Wisliceny, who has been quoted in news reports dating back to the late 1940s as having told the war crimes court that Husseini repeatedly suggested the extermination of European Jews to Nazi leaders.
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.
"It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbour so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of six million Jews," Erekat said.
Netanyahu dismissed any such notion. "It's absurd. I had no intention of absolving Hitler of his satanic responsibility for the annihilation of European Jewry. Hitler is the one who made the decision," he said.
But he added: "At the same time, it is absurd to ignore the role the mufti ... played in encouraging and motivating Hitler" and other Nazi leaders to take such action.
Husseini was sought for war crimes but never appeared at the Nuremberg trials, and later died in Beirut.
Netanyahu's defence minister, close ally Moshe Yaalon, said the prime minister had got it wrong. "It certainly wasn't (Husseini) who invented the Final Solution," he told Israel's Army Radio. "That was the evil brainchild of Hitler himself."