During the last four decades, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has disseminated many abominable lies about World War II and the Holocaust.
Abbas' falsehoods began with his doctorate in 1982 from the Soviet Union's Institute of Oriental Studies where he wrote his dissertation "The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-45."
In 1984, he published a book in Arabic, "The Other Side: The Secret Contacts Between Nazism and Zionism." A 2002 article from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports Abbas' spurious claim that "the number of Jewish victims may be 6 million, and might be much smaller — even less than 1 million."
His book also heinously declares that "the Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule ... to expand the mass extermination."
On Sept. 3, 2023, MEMRI released a translation of a recent televised speech by Abbas to the Fatah Revolutionary Council, in which he abhorrently declared that Hitler "fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money ... and was not about semitism and antisemitism."
While Abbas' pernicious speech was denounced by many politicians and commentators in the Western democracies, their condemnations suffer from the critical defect that the distinguished historian Gerhard Weinberg identified in 2011:
"Most of those who write about the Holocaust do not pay sufficient attention to the way that the military developments of the war impacted the subject they study."
In reality, the Palestinian Arabs were atrociously led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, and they overwhelmingly supported Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Palestinian Jews were brilliantly led by David Ben Gurion, and they robustly backed the Allies.
The suppression of the Arab Revolt in British-mandated Palestine, between April 1936 to August 1939, required the United Kingdom to dispatch tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Additionally, 40,000 Jewish Palestinians battled the Arab rebels, who suffered 5,000 killed, 15,000 wounded and 13,000 imprisoned. British and Jewish fatalities totaled 800.
After the British issued the infamous White Paper in May 1939,severely restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine,and World War II erupted in September 1939 with Nazi Germany's and Soviet Union's invasion of Poland, Ben Gurion famously declared that "We will fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we fight the White Paper as if there were no war."
Indeed, during World War II, 30,000 Jewish Palestinians fought in the British Commonwealth's armed forces in the Middle East, Greece, North Africa and Italy, including Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin and Ezer Weizman.
In September 1937, al-Husseini escaped arrest by the British by fleeing from Jerusalem to Lebanon, and then to Baghdad in October 1939.
On April 1, 1941, he helped instigate a coup by a group of pro-Axis, Iraqi military officers, which toppled the pro-British government. Facing dire threats to Middle Eastern oil, Suez Canal and communications with India, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately dispatched military forces from India, Transjordan and Palestine.
Despite military support from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Vichy France, the Iraqi rebellion was quickly crushed, and the pro-Allied government restored at the end of May 1941. David Raziel, a leader of Revisionist Zionism in Palestine, was killed in the fighting.
But before British Commonwealth forces arrived in Baghdad, a vicious pogrom, the Farhud, was unleashed upon the city's Jewish residents.
In June 1941, Allied forces from Iraq and Palestine invaded Vichy-dominated Lebanon and Syria, and the French forces surrendered one month later.
Dayan, the future Israeli defense minister, lost an eye in the fighting.
In late May 1941, al-Husseini escaped for a third time in four years, from Iraq to Iran. But in late August 1941, British Commonwealth and Soviet forces invaded Iran and deposed the pro-Nazi Reza Shah Pahlavi.
Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended the baleful alliance between the two leading military powers.
In September 1941, the former mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, escaped again, eventually reaching Nazi Germany.
During a meeting in Berlin on Nov. 28, 1941, Hitler assured al-Husseini that in 1942, when the German Army and Air Force advanced through the Caucasus to Iran and Iraq, his task was to oversee the "destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power."
But the planned genocide of 1.5 million Jews in the Middle East and North Africa was again stymied, between November 1942 and May 1943, by the Soviet Army's monumental victory at Stalingrad and by American and British Commonwealth victories in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia.
In conclusion, Abbas' four decades of egregious falsifications about crucial events just before, and during, World War II are an inversion of two entwinned historical truths: Arab Palestinians were major collaborators with the defeated Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Jewish Palestinians were key partners, between 1936 and 1945, with the triumphant Allies.
Moreover, the Palestinian Arabs, under the malevolent leadership of al-Husseini, were willing accomplices, with the Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Vichy French, Norwegian Quislings and other national groups, in Hitler's genocide against the world's Jews.
Eleven million Jews, or two-thirds, survived, while 6 million were exterminated.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.
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