APOLOGIA: Chapter 3 of Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments

March 25, 2024

Chapter 3 of Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments

Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War

Note to readers: See previous APOLOGIA post for Chapter 2. (Also, Table of Contents with links is listed below. Or download pdf of the whole book here.)

Note to critics: Please read the whole of my little book (including notes) before offering criticism. Thanks.

Chapter 3: Israel is not a legitimate state?

Objection: Israel’s formation in 1948 wasn’t agreed to by Palestinian Arabs and the Arab League, so Israel is not a legitimate state.

Reply: No. It’s true that Palestinian Arabs led by the Arab League disagreed with Israel’s formation in 1948. In fact, Palestinian Arabs went immediately to war with the newly formed state of Israel to destroy Israel. But, in fact, too, the Palestinian Arabs led by the Arab League lost that war. Significantly, losing a war that one has started has political and territorial consequences. Moreover, and more importantly, Palestinian Arabs and the Arab League also lost their right to disagree about Israeli statehood. How so? Not merely because they lost the war that they started against Israel, but also—and more importantly—because they morally forfeited their claims against Israel.

To make my case that the Palestinian Arabs led by the Arab League morally forfeited their claims against Israel, it should be noticed and emphasized that the Arab Higher Committee (founded in 1936) was chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini, a.k.a. the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was also leader of the Palestinian people. Why should this be noticed and emphasized? Because the Grand Mufti was pro-Nazi. In fact, he was a Nazi collaborator. He visited with Adolf Hitler (the German Nazi dictator), became friends with Adolf Eichmann (a major organizer of the Holocaust), and attempted to organize a Muslim SS (an elite military guard of the Nazi Reich/Empire). The Grand Mufti characterized his friendship with Eichmann as their being united in wanting to get rid of the Jews. This sheds important light onto the situation in which the Israeli state was born: Palestinian leaders were as antisemitic as Nazis! Reasonably, then, just as the Nazis morally forfeited their right to rule after their defeat in World War II, so too pro-Nazi peoples—including pro-Nazi Arabs—morally forfeited their right to rule after World War II. So Palestinian Arabs should not have any say in the United Nations as to whether or not the formation of a Jewish state is legitimate.

Is this just Hendrik’s opinion? Consider this. In the recent essay “A Historian for Our Moment” author Sol Stern discusses important insights by historian Jeffrey Herf concerning the pro-Nazi influence in Palestine before and after the founding of Israel. Here are some significant snippets from Stern’s article:

Herf’s most important scholarly discovery was of Nazi Germany’s campaign to win ideological and political adherents in the Arab world by using radio broadcasts and printed materials. This massive propaganda effort was supervised by Haj Amin al-Husseini—also known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—who was the undisputed political and religious leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1921–49….

As Herf has shown, what occurred in Berlin was “a meeting of hearts and minds—a cultural fusion of Nazism and Islamism.” Husseini personally contributed to the efforts of the German war machine by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen SS and organizing intelligence operations in the Middle East. In turn, the Nazis celebrated him in an official proclamation as “one of the great personalities of the Islamic world who had led the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against onrushing Jewry.”

After the military defeat of Germany and the ideological defeat of Nazism, the center of radical Jew-hatred shifted from Europe to the Middle East….

[A]fter World War II, revolutionary antisemitism enjoyed a second life in the Middle East, specifically “in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in Husseini’s leadership of the Palestine Arabs in the 1947–1948 war to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Hamas Covenant of 1988, the ideology of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Islamic state.”¹

After surveying the relevant historical evidence concerning Haj Amin al-Husseini, Harvard Professor of Law (emeritus) Alan Dershowitz writes the following:

It is fair to conclude that the official leader of the Muslims in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a full-fledged Nazi war criminal, and he was so declared at Nuremberg….. [He] helped to organize many former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against Israel.

It is also fair to say that Husseini’s pro-Nazi sympathies and support were widespread among his Palestinian followers, who regarded him as a hero even after the war and the disclosure of his role in Nazi atrocities. According to his biographer, “Haj Amin’s popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis,” because “large parts of the Arab world shared this sympathy with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.” Nor was it merely a hatred of Zionism that animated this support for Nazi ideology. The grand mufti’s “hatred of Jews…was fathomless, and he gave full vent to it during his period of activity alongside the Nazis (October 1941–May 1945).” His speeches on Berlin Radio were anti-Semitic to the core: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them—this pleases God, history and religion.” In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected Husseini as its president, even though he was a wanted war criminal living in exile in Egypt.²

All this to say: Just as the Nazis lost their political and moral right to have a legitimate say as to whether or not Jews could become an independent state, so too did the Palestine Arabs. The Nazi-like antisemitism of the Islamist Palestine Arabs is sufficient grounds for thinking this.^3,4,5

NOTES

1. Sol Stern, A Historian for Our Moment, Quillette, January 10, 2024. Also see Jeffrey Herf’s “The Importance and the Limits of Husseini’s Influence in Nazi Berlin” which is chapter 5 in Jeffrey Herf, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (London and New York: Routledge, 2024).

2. Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 56.

3. For a much more detailed defence of the legitimacy of the formation of the state of Israel, see Ruth Gavison (professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), The Jews’ Right To Statehood: A Defense, Tikvah, Summer 2003.

4. For a helpful video documentary (52 minutes) on the birth of the state of Israel, see Israel—Birth of a State, DW (Deutsche Welle), May 13, 2023. Also see Whose Land Is It? Jewish Claims Explained, The 700 Club, October 19, 2023 (YouTube video, 14 minutes). And see Whose Land Is it? Palestinian Claims, The 700 Club, August 17, 2017 (YouTube video, 15 minutes).

5. In thinking about the legitimacy of the formation of the state of Israel, it is important to keep the following in mind: prior to World War I, the geographic region called Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Empire was defeated militarily in World War I by the British and its allies (the Ottomans had sided with Germany which was defeated and which was primarily responsible for World War I); after World War I, in which the Ottomans were defeated, the British had legitimate control over the Palestine region via the “mandate” system; subsequently, because there was much Jewish migration to Palestine and because Palestinian Arabs were greatly concerned and annoyed, the British legitimately (albeit controversially) sought to divide Palestine into two states (a Jewish state and an Arab state); leading up to and during World War II, the Arab Palestinians were led by the Jew-hating Nazi-embracing Haj Amin al-Husseini, a.k.a. the Grand Mufti; World War II and the Jewish Holocaust (in which 6 million Jews were murdered) ended in 1945; subsequently, many European Jews sought the safety of a Jewish state in the Palestine region. Keeping the previous points in mind, we can see that the situation was, for lack of a better word, messy. And volatile. In this context the British thwarted Jewish immigration to appease the Arabs, Jewish activists resented and sometimes violently resisted the British for this, and Arab and Jewish paramilitary groups were often in violent conflict with each other. On November 29, 1947, the UN voted in favour of an independent Jewish state in Palestine along with an independent Arab state, much to the chagrin of the Arabs (whose leadership was as anti-Jewish as the Nazis). Israel declared itself an independent state on May 14, 1948. Immediately the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. That is to say, immediately Israel was attacked by Palestinian Arabs—led by the Nazi-collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, a.k.a. the Grand Mufti, and Nazi-collaborator Fawzi al-Qawuqji—along with five Arab countries (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) whose Islamic ideology was also antisemitic. A Jewish state was anathema to the prevalent Islamist ideology of the Arabs. This Arab-Israeli war lasted ten months. Significantly (and surprisingly), the Arabs, who started the war against Israel and expected victory, were defeated by Israel. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled or were pushed out of Israel expecting to return after the Arabs destroyed Israel. As a result, too, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled or were pushed out of nearby Arab countries to find safety in Israel. As a result, too, Israel established and continued its existence as an independent state—a legitimate independent state.

For additional thought, more detail, as well as historical background about the formation of the state of Israel, see Einat Wilf and Dan Senor, Exploring Israel's Statehood and the Palestinian Refugee Issue: A Conversation with Dr. Einat Wilf, StartUp Nation Central, February 28, 2024 (77 minute video). Einat Wilf has a PhD (Cambridge) in political science, is a former Israeli politician and a long-time critic of UNRWA, and she is co-author of the book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing/ All Points Books, 2020). See too Noa Tishby’s chapter “A State Is Born” in her book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (New York: Free Press, 2021). And see Mitchell Bard, Israel War of Independence: The Capture of Deir Yassin (April 9, 1948), Jewish Virtual Library, no date.

Table of Contents (links)

Introduction

Chapter 1. Israel is engaging in colonial retaliation?

Chapter 2. Israel is a powerful state and thus the oppressor?

Chapter 3. Israel is not a legitimate state?

Chapter 4. Israel occupies Gaza?

Chapter 5. Gaza is like a Jewish ghetto?

Chapter 6. What about Gabor Maté?

Chapter 7. What about Gabor Maté, again?

Chapter 8. Israel targets a hospital?

Chapter 9. Israel’s attack on Gaza is as bad (or worse) as Gaza’s attack on Israel?

Chapter 10. Israel is wrong to cause Gaza to suffer?