“There are those who say that if the Holocaust had not occurred, the State of Israel would never have been established. But I say that if the State of Israel had been established earlier, the Holocaust would never have occurred.” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu in his policy speech, 14th June 2009.
The State of Israel was not founded as a result of the Holocaust, but rather as a result of the Jewish nation’s desire to return home.
My grandmother, her grandmother and her great grandmother on both my mother’s and father’s side, no matter how religious they may or may not have been in both Eastern Europe and Iraq, every year on Yom Kippur and Passover, recited “לשנה הבאה בירושלים הבנויה” or in English “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – this is the core of Zionism.
At every Jewish wedding “אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני, תדבק לשוני לחכי”, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate” is recited – reminding us that we have only one home, which is why we the Jewish nation politely declined the offer of being settled in Uganda, as was offered by Britain.
The Jewish people have for the past two painful millennia been yearning to return home and rebuild their state in their homeland. The People of Israel in the Land of Israel.
In 1896 – 43 years before the Holocaust – Theodor Herzl published his book Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) in which he took one ancient integral part of the Jewish faith and gave that part a specific name – Zionism. The idea of the People of Israel returning home to the Land of Israel and re-establishing their National Home was not born, rather reborn.
The five Aliyahs (waves of immigration) occurred from 1881 to 1939 – they started half a decade before Herzl’s Zionist vision came alive and ended just before the Holocaust started.
However, there are those who believe that the State of Israel was created as a result of the horrors of the Holocaust and Europe’s guilty conscience at sitting idly and watching while the Jews were being slaughtered. This is obviously false – Israel would have been created anyway, as the timeline proves.
There are nonetheless those who choose to believe in the above theory. There are those who even take it one step further and say that the Arabs should not have to pay the price of Europe’s wrongdoing. To those people I say: the local Arab population did not pay the price. 77% of the Land of Israel (the British Mandate) was given to them to form a new Arab country; Transjordan (now called Jordan). This new country by law banned Jews from residing in it and owning property – Jews whose families had for generations lived in what became the new Arab state of Transjordan were promptly kicked out.
In 1937, the Peel Commission decided that the remaining 23% of the Land of Israel was to be split, with yet another half going to the same Arabs who had already received 77% of the original Mandate territory. The Arabs refused. In 1947 the UN came up with a similar plan – again the Arabs refused. The plans were for the remaining 23% of the Land of Israel to be split amongst the Jewish and Arab populations according to where they lived – predominantly Arab areas would become part of the second Arab state in the Land of Israel while predominantly Jewish areas would become the tiny Jewish state in the Land of Israel. In line with Arab policy, Jews from the second Arab state in the Land of Israel were kicked out – as were most of the Jews in every single Arab state throughout the world, totalling roughly 800,000 Jewish refugees. However, as opposed to the Arab policy of ethnic cleansing, the Jewish state offered full citizenship and rights (including voting rights – making it the first country in the Middle East to offer Arabs the right to vote in free democratic elections) to the Arab minority that remained in the newly reborn State of Israel. Some Arabs agreed to stay on and some Arabs left.
The Arabs repeatedly refused the three-state solution – two Arab states in the Land of Israel, and one small Jewish state consisting of the predominantly Jewish areas in what was left of the Land of Israel.
The Jewish movement (Zionism) never aimed at taking Arab lands. However, back to the claim by some people that it is not right for the Arabs to suffer for what Europe did during the Holocaust. The fact is they did not. But let us assume for a moment that they did. So what?
What is wrong with the Arabs who resided in the Land of Israel prior to the rebirth of the Jewish State suffering as a result of the Arabs’ contribution to the Holocaust? I can see why it would be wrong had the local Arabs fought actively against the terror of the Holocaust, or even just taken a passive, neutral idle role, but they did not. They actively aided and abetted the German Nazi regime. They wanted to bring the same systematic killing of Jews on a mechanised industrial scale to the Land of Israel.
Just as Jews in Britain served in the British Armed Forces and Jews in the Land of Israel volunteered to serve in the Jewish Brigade, with their Zionist flag serving as the brigade’s official flag, doing sterling service in the British Armed Forces in the fight against the Nazis, the Arabs in the Land of Israel saw Hitler and his Nazi regime as “…natural friends fighting common enemies: Britain, the Jews…” as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem told Hitler during the former’s visit to Germany in 1941.
Muhammed Amin al-Husseini had been incarcerated for a 1920 attack against Jews who were praying at their holiest site, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. In 1922 he was pardoned by the British High Commissioner in the Land of Israel, Sir Herbert Samuel, because of Samuel’s anti-Zionist ideology. Not only was Muhammed Amin al-Husseini pardoned and made mufti, a new title was created for him: the title of Grand Mufti. Muhammed Amin al-Husseini was also made President of the Supreme Muslim Council, thereby becoming the leader in both the political and religious spheres of the Arabs in the Land of Israel.
According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, Nazi Germany’s dreaded SS helped finance the Grand Mufti’s acts of violence against Jews in the Land of Israel from 1936 to 1939, and Adolf Eichmann maintained regular contact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from Berlin.
In 1940 the Grand Mufti requested that the following be acknowledged as an Arab right: “... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy”.
During the Nuremberg trials Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny said “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.”
“Haj Amin al-Husseini, who issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) calling on all Muslims to help the pro-Axis government in Iraq, became one of England’s most wanted men.” http://www.nyjtimes.com/co
In 1939 Britain issued a White Paper severely restricting Jewish movement to the Jewish Homeland as a result of Arab pressure, in the hope that this would calm the Arabs, yet two years later in 1941 the Mufti struck the British again by issuing a fatwa for a holy war against Britain from his base in Iraq and later that year underscored his animosity towards Britain by meeting with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. Restrictions on Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel meant the Jews faced the only path left open to them, the path of the concentration camps and gas chambers. The Arabs in the Land of Israel therefore most certainly do carry considerable blame for the Holocaust.
After Muhammed Amin al-Husseini’s death he was followed by his nephew, the terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat who after he died was followed by the present incumbent, Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust.
The point of the above discourse is to prove that the Arabs in the Land of Israel have an integral and undeniable role in the Holocaust. They sided with the aggressors (the Nazis), unlike the Jewish people who sided with the defending Allies. Since the Nazis lost it is no more than fair that their Arab allies be required to pay part of the price. Just like Germany lost territory as a consequence of the Second World War so too should the Arabs in the Land of Israel. However, they did not. The undeniable historical fact is that they were offered two Arab (Jew-free) states in the Land of Israel, once in 1937 and twice since the end of the Second World War, once in 1947 and again in 2000-2001. All three times they declined and chose instead the path of death, war and destruction.
The Jewish nation has every right to live in its homeland, in the homeland of its forefathers; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We never left voluntarily, we were forcibly exiled and we never gave up our right to return home. This is our land; we have historic and religious connections to the land. We are the only people who have resided in this land without a break, in sometimes smaller and sometimes bigger numbers, but we have always had a presence here since the exodus from Egypt.
The Jewish nation has the right to settle in its homeland and to join fellow Jews who never left. While there were Arabs who did leave the Land of Israel following the State of Israel’s foundation, the blame for that migration does not lie with Israel. Rather, it was the result of a war started by the Arabs with the sole purpose of expelling Jews from the entire Middle East.
The Arabs should have paid the price for siding with the Nazis, but as always they have been shielded from the consequences of their own misdeeds. The Arabs did not suffer as a result of the Jewish nation returning home. On the contrary, it is where the Jewish people settled that democracy, freedom, prosperity, medical care and education have bloomed – for Jew and Arab alike. The People of Israel were going to re-establish their State of Israel in the Land of Israel with or without the Holocaust, and as Benjamin Netanyahu said, had we just established our homeland a few years earlier, there would have been no Holocaust.
It is the simplest facts that are often overlooked by egocentric politicians with an eye on personal glory rather than lasting solutions based on principle and honesty. Foreign dignitaries would do well to return to the history books and learn to speak less but say more.
The State of Israel was not founded as a result of the Holocaust, but rather as a result of the Jewish nation’s desire to return home.
My grandmother, her grandmother and her great grandmother on both my mother’s and father’s side, no matter how religious they may or may not have been in both Eastern Europe and Iraq, every year on Yom Kippur and Passover, recited “לשנה הבאה בירושלים הבנויה” or in English “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – this is the core of Zionism.
At every Jewish wedding “אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני, תדבק לשוני לחכי”, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate” is recited – reminding us that we have only one home, which is why we the Jewish nation politely declined the offer of being settled in Uganda, as was offered by Britain.
The Jewish people have for the past two painful millennia been yearning to return home and rebuild their state in their homeland. The People of Israel in the Land of Israel.
In 1896 – 43 years before the Holocaust – Theodor Herzl published his book Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) in which he took one ancient integral part of the Jewish faith and gave that part a specific name – Zionism. The idea of the People of Israel returning home to the Land of Israel and re-establishing their National Home was not born, rather reborn.
The five Aliyahs (waves of immigration) occurred from 1881 to 1939 – they started half a decade before Herzl’s Zionist vision came alive and ended just before the Holocaust started.
However, there are those who believe that the State of Israel was created as a result of the horrors of the Holocaust and Europe’s guilty conscience at sitting idly and watching while the Jews were being slaughtered. This is obviously false – Israel would have been created anyway, as the timeline proves.
There are nonetheless those who choose to believe in the above theory. There are those who even take it one step further and say that the Arabs should not have to pay the price of Europe’s wrongdoing. To those people I say: the local Arab population did not pay the price. 77% of the Land of Israel (the British Mandate) was given to them to form a new Arab country; Transjordan (now called Jordan). This new country by law banned Jews from residing in it and owning property – Jews whose families had for generations lived in what became the new Arab state of Transjordan were promptly kicked out.
In 1937, the Peel Commission decided that the remaining 23% of the Land of Israel was to be split, with yet another half going to the same Arabs who had already received 77% of the original Mandate territory. The Arabs refused. In 1947 the UN came up with a similar plan – again the Arabs refused. The plans were for the remaining 23% of the Land of Israel to be split amongst the Jewish and Arab populations according to where they lived – predominantly Arab areas would become part of the second Arab state in the Land of Israel while predominantly Jewish areas would become the tiny Jewish state in the Land of Israel. In line with Arab policy, Jews from the second Arab state in the Land of Israel were kicked out – as were most of the Jews in every single Arab state throughout the world, totalling roughly 800,000 Jewish refugees. However, as opposed to the Arab policy of ethnic cleansing, the Jewish state offered full citizenship and rights (including voting rights – making it the first country in the Middle East to offer Arabs the right to vote in free democratic elections) to the Arab minority that remained in the newly reborn State of Israel. Some Arabs agreed to stay on and some Arabs left.
The Arabs repeatedly refused the three-state solution – two Arab states in the Land of Israel, and one small Jewish state consisting of the predominantly Jewish areas in what was left of the Land of Israel.
The Jewish movement (Zionism) never aimed at taking Arab lands. However, back to the claim by some people that it is not right for the Arabs to suffer for what Europe did during the Holocaust. The fact is they did not. But let us assume for a moment that they did. So what?
What is wrong with the Arabs who resided in the Land of Israel prior to the rebirth of the Jewish State suffering as a result of the Arabs’ contribution to the Holocaust? I can see why it would be wrong had the local Arabs fought actively against the terror of the Holocaust, or even just taken a passive, neutral idle role, but they did not. They actively aided and abetted the German Nazi regime. They wanted to bring the same systematic killing of Jews on a mechanised industrial scale to the Land of Israel.
Just as Jews in Britain served in the British Armed Forces and Jews in the Land of Israel volunteered to serve in the Jewish Brigade, with their Zionist flag serving as the brigade’s official flag, doing sterling service in the British Armed Forces in the fight against the Nazis, the Arabs in the Land of Israel saw Hitler and his Nazi regime as “…natural friends fighting common enemies: Britain, the Jews…” as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem told Hitler during the former’s visit to Germany in 1941.
Muhammed Amin al-Husseini had been incarcerated for a 1920 attack against Jews who were praying at their holiest site, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. In 1922 he was pardoned by the British High Commissioner in the Land of Israel, Sir Herbert Samuel, because of Samuel’s anti-Zionist ideology. Not only was Muhammed Amin al-Husseini pardoned and made mufti, a new title was created for him: the title of Grand Mufti. Muhammed Amin al-Husseini was also made President of the Supreme Muslim Council, thereby becoming the leader in both the political and religious spheres of the Arabs in the Land of Israel.
According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, Nazi Germany’s dreaded SS helped finance the Grand Mufti’s acts of violence against Jews in the Land of Israel from 1936 to 1939, and Adolf Eichmann maintained regular contact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from Berlin.
In 1940 the Grand Mufti requested that the following be acknowledged as an Arab right: “... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy”.
During the Nuremberg trials Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny said “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.”
“Haj Amin al-Husseini, who issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) calling on all Muslims to help the pro-Axis government in Iraq, became one of England’s most wanted men.” http://www.nyjtimes.com/co
In 1939 Britain issued a White Paper severely restricting Jewish movement to the Jewish Homeland as a result of Arab pressure, in the hope that this would calm the Arabs, yet two years later in 1941 the Mufti struck the British again by issuing a fatwa for a holy war against Britain from his base in Iraq and later that year underscored his animosity towards Britain by meeting with Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. Restrictions on Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel meant the Jews faced the only path left open to them, the path of the concentration camps and gas chambers. The Arabs in the Land of Israel therefore most certainly do carry considerable blame for the Holocaust.
After Muhammed Amin al-Husseini’s death he was followed by his nephew, the terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat who after he died was followed by the present incumbent, Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust.
The point of the above discourse is to prove that the Arabs in the Land of Israel have an integral and undeniable role in the Holocaust. They sided with the aggressors (the Nazis), unlike the Jewish people who sided with the defending Allies. Since the Nazis lost it is no more than fair that their Arab allies be required to pay part of the price. Just like Germany lost territory as a consequence of the Second World War so too should the Arabs in the Land of Israel. However, they did not. The undeniable historical fact is that they were offered two Arab (Jew-free) states in the Land of Israel, once in 1937 and twice since the end of the Second World War, once in 1947 and again in 2000-2001. All three times they declined and chose instead the path of death, war and destruction.
The Jewish nation has every right to live in its homeland, in the homeland of its forefathers; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We never left voluntarily, we were forcibly exiled and we never gave up our right to return home. This is our land; we have historic and religious connections to the land. We are the only people who have resided in this land without a break, in sometimes smaller and sometimes bigger numbers, but we have always had a presence here since the exodus from Egypt.
The Jewish nation has the right to settle in its homeland and to join fellow Jews who never left. While there were Arabs who did leave the Land of Israel following the State of Israel’s foundation, the blame for that migration does not lie with Israel. Rather, it was the result of a war started by the Arabs with the sole purpose of expelling Jews from the entire Middle East.
The Arabs should have paid the price for siding with the Nazis, but as always they have been shielded from the consequences of their own misdeeds. The Arabs did not suffer as a result of the Jewish nation returning home. On the contrary, it is where the Jewish people settled that democracy, freedom, prosperity, medical care and education have bloomed – for Jew and Arab alike. The People of Israel were going to re-establish their State of Israel in the Land of Israel with or without the Holocaust, and as Benjamin Netanyahu said, had we just established our homeland a few years earlier, there would have been no Holocaust.
It is the simplest facts that are often overlooked by egocentric politicians with an eye on personal glory rather than lasting solutions based on principle and honesty. Foreign dignitaries would do well to return to the history books and learn to speak less but say more.
