Investigating the Role of Palestinians and Arabs in the Holocaust
Joel Fishman
November 1943 Amin al-Husseini greeting Bosnian Waffen-SS volunteers with a Nazi salute
On Oct. 24, 2015, Ha’aretz columnist Chemi Shalev criticized an “ostensibly academic” article entitled “ Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust,” that appeared in the Jewish Political Studies Review in March 2015, written by Prof. Joseph S. Spoerl, Professor of Philosophy at St. Anselm College, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Spoerl writes:
The claim that Palestinians and Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust is false. In fact, Arab and Palestinian leaders played a significant role in aiding and abetting the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe and they hoped to implement the genocide in the Middle East. A growing number of publications, including extensive original, high-quality archival scholarship, proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Among the major authors are: Zvi Elpeleg, Klaus Gensicke, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, Matthias Kuntzel, Jeffrey Herf, Wolfgang Schwanitz, and Barry Rubin.
A careful examination of this history shows that…the Arab-Israel War of 1947-9…was a war of self-defense against a ruthless, pro-Nazi, and openly genocidal Palestinian leadership that enjoyed enormous popularity among the Arab and Palestinian masses….If [the Palestinians] cared about justice, they would apportion a substantial share of the blame for the nakba or “catastrophe” of 1948 to themselves and would admit the existence of widespread Jew-hatred in the Arab and Islamic world and its role in undermining peace between Jews and Arabs from the 1920s to the present. |
