Why International Farhud
Day Stymies Invented Palestinian History
The
mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941.
Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.
When International Farhud Day was proclaimed at a
conference convened at the United Nations headquarters on June 1, 2015, its
proponents wanted to achieve more than merely establish a commemoration of the
ghastly 1941 Arab-Nazi pogrom in Baghdad that killed and injured hundreds of
Iraqi Jews. Farhud means violent dispossession. The
Farhud but the first bloody step along the tormented
path to the ultimate expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from
across the Arab world. That systematic expulsion ended centuries of Jewish
existence and stature in those lands.
Jews had thrived in Iraq for 2,700 years, a thousand years before
Muhammad. But all that came to end when the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led the broad Arab-Nazi alliance
in the Holocaust that produced a military, economic, political, and ideological
common cause with Hitler. Although Husseini spearheaded an international
pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish Islamic movement from India to Central Europe to the
Middle East, it was in Baghdad — a 1,000-kilometer drive from Jerusalem — that
he launched his robust coordination with the Third Reich.
In 1941, Iraq still hosted Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company,
which controlled the region’s oil. Hitler wanted that oil to propel his
invasion of Russia. The Arabs, led by Husseini, wanted the Jews out of
Palestine and Europe’s persecuted Jews kept away from the Middle East. Indeed,
Husseini persuasively argued to Hitler that Jews should not be expelled to
Palestine but rather to “Poland,” where “they will be under active control.”
Translation: send Jews to the concentration camps. Husseini had visited
concentration camps. He had been hosted by architect of the genocide Heinrich
Himmler, and the mufti considered Shoah engineer Adolf Eichmann not
only a great friend, but a “diamond” among men.
Nazi lust for oil and Arab hatred of Jews
combined synergistically June 1–2, 1941, burning the Farhud into history. Arab
soldiers, police, and hooligans, swearing allegiance to the mufti and Hitler,
bolstered by fascist coup plotters known as the Golden Square, ran wild in the
streets, raping, shooting, burning, dismembering, and decapitating. Jewish
blood flowed through those streets and their screams created echoes that have
never faded.
The 1941 Farhud massacre, which was launched in tandem with an
attempted takeover of the British oil fields and London’s airbase at Habbaniya,
set the stage for the Mufti-Hitler summit and the establishment of three Islamic and Arab Waffen SS divisions in
central Europe under Himmler’s direct sponsorship. After the State of Israel
was established in 1948, mufti adherents and devotees throughout the Arab
world, working through the Arab League, openly and systematically expelled
850,000 Jews from Morocco to Lebanon. Penniless and stateless, many of those
refugees were airlifted to Israel where they were absorbed and became almost
half the families of Israel.
Remembering the tragic facts of the Farhud process will make it
harder for the newly-invented history to take root. After the Arabs rebranded
themselves as “Palestinians” in May 1964 with the backing of the Soviet KGB, a
new narrative began to come together. In part, it pretends that the Arabs of
Ottoman and then British Palestine did not arrive in the seventh century during
the Arab-Islamic Conquest, as history records. Their narrative now asserts that
are actually descendants of the Canaanites and the Philistines. Palestine is named for the Philistines. After the
Jews were expelled by the Romans in about 135-136 CE, the name of their nation
was changed from Judea to Syria Palaestina. But in truth, the Israelites gave
rise to the only true surviving Canaanites. The Philistines were Greek Island sea invaders defeated
by Ramses III in about 1150 BCE and sequestered into the Gaza Pentapolis, not
Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula who conquered in the seventh century CE.
Invented Palestinian history also asserts that
present-day Israelis are almost entirely transplants from such alien regions as
the Ukraine, Poland, Brooklyn, and Germany — or descendants thereof.
Remembering the Farhud helps us understand that almost half the early Jewish
families in newly-declared Israel were not from across the sea, but rather from
across the river, across the bridge, down the road, and plucked from the same
culture.
What’s more, the fabricated Palestinian history laments that
Palestine became just a consolation prize for the Holocaust — a tragedy that
either never occurred or was a purely European misdeed for which Arabs are not
responsible and in which they were not involved. Remembering the 1941 Farhud
and the Arab-Nazi alliance that sparked it, locks in Arab involvement in the
Holocaust as one of full partnership with the Third Reich. This Nazi-Arab
alliance thrived, complete with tens of thousands of Islamic and Arab
volunteers arduously fighting in the trenches, coordinating diplomatic and
strategic affairs through the Arab Higher Committee, broadcasting nightly
incendiary hate messages beginning with words “Oh Muslims,” and undertaking all
things calculated to advance a German victory which promised an Arab state in Palestine and a
disappeared Jewish population. No wonder the Arab marketplaces were filled
with placards that exhorted, “In Heaven, Allah is your ruler. On Earth, it is
Adolf Hitler.”
The established and incontrovertible facts chronicling the Arab
world’s deep and enthusiastic anti-Jewish alliance with the Third Reich during
the Holocaust, which exploded into the Farhud, plus the subsequent population
shift that Arab governments engineered to expel 850,000 of their own Jewish
citizens, make it impossible to weave a fabric of invented history.
Recognizing, remembering, and reminding the world of those facts on
International Farhud Day, June 1, will help all
participants and observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict confront the true
legacy that has helped create today’s stalemate. Recognition is the first step
along the painful path toward reconciliation.
Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the prize-winning
book The Farhud — Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust. In 2015, Black organized and founded International Farhud Day.
I remember a story about Hitler refusing to see the Mufti because he was not an ARYAN, but someone assured him that the Mufti had Blue Eyes.
