Mallmann, K., Cüppers, M. (2010). Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine. United Kingdom: Enigma Books, pp. 37-39.
https://books.google.com/books?id=vjsLAqafdQ8C&pg=PA39
On March 31, 1933, the Mufti visited the German consul general, Heinrich Wolff, in Jerusalem and assured him that the Muslims “welcome the new German regime and anticipate the spread of fascist anti-democratic state leadership to other countries.” A German boycott, to target the wealth of the Jews, would find “enthusiastic support throughout the entire Mohammedan world.”
Just three months later, he was able to report on the “intended establishment of an Arab National Socialist party.” The swastika was frequently seen on leaflets and walls during the October 1933 Arab strike protesting Jewish immigration. “Efforts to organize Nazi Associations have been revived,” reported the British police in the summer of 1934, and in the fall they saw constant Nazi propaganda in the Arab press.
In Palestinian literature, Jews were portrayed as money-hungry, devious, and unscrupulous, and as cowards, “new Shylocks,” and “sons of clinking gold.
There were lyrics such as these: “Step on the Jews’ heads / to free Buraq and Haram. / You young men, close ranks; / attack them by the thousands. / O God [Allah], how beautiful death is / in the freeing of Haram and Buraq...
The “[Allah]-fearing freedom fighter” Hanaf Hassan wrote to the German consul in Haifa, the “representative of Hitler the Great”: “God protect him and all Germany. [...] No Arab will forget the friendship of the Germans throughout the world for the help they granted in aid of the Arabs in Palestine. The land of Palestine does not belong to us Arabs alone, but also to the Germans, and I hope, Mr. Consul, that you will help us free the Holy Land from the Jews, and I hope that we are all brothers, God willing.” [...].
The Third Reich also enjoyed strong support among the students at a private secondary school in Bir Zeit, near Ramallah. When an English teacher gave her students a novel by Benjamin Disraeli to read, the class rebelled. “But he’s a Jew,” the students protested. The teacher then tried to steer the discussion to the question of what makes a man important. Most of the students named Adolf Hitler first.
According to the German consul in Jaffa, Timotheus Wurst, in late March 1936 the Muslim Palestinians were “deeply impressed by fascist, particularly National Socialist, teachings and views. National Socialism, with its anti-Jewish notions, has struck a chord among the Arabs of Palestine... Among the Arabs, fascism and National Socialism have in many cases become the standards against which all other political systems and teachings are measured, and, in the eyes of many Arabs, Adolf Hitler is without a doubt simply the most important man of the 20th century. Our Führer’s popularity is so great that there can hardly be a single Arab, even the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t know the name of Hitler.”
Like the Boy Scouts, the Istiqlal Party in particular has “embraced the National Socialist theses to the greatest extent. The Istiqlal Party organ, The Defense, has a markedly National Socialist orientation.” One year later, the Völkischer Beobachter printed an interview with the party’s president, Auni Abd el-Hadi. In the interview, he admitted proudly that while he was interned by the British he had thoroughly worked through the English translation of Mein Kampf.
It should not be surprising that the Arab revolt did not change such attitudes after 1936, but rather strengthened them. The rebels often displayed the swastika as a challenge to the Jews and the British, and on Muhammad’s birthday on June 4, 1937, in Palestine as well as in many other parts of the Arab world, German and Italian flags and pictures of Hitler and Mussolini were on view. “A critical factor in the Arabs’ current sympathy toward Germany is the admiration that our Führer enjoys,” reported Doehle, Wolff’s successor as consul general in Jerusalem, that same year. “The periods of unrest often gave me the opportunity to discover just how widespread this sympathy is. When confronted with threatening behavior by an Arab crowd, an individual who identified himself as a German would generally be allowed to pass unhindered. But if a person identified himself using the German greeting ‘Heil Hitler,’ the Arabs usually became enthusiastic, cheering the individual and fervently returning the German greeting. The enthusiasm for our Führer and the new Germany is likely so widespread because the Palestinian Arabs, in their struggle for existence, long for an Arab Führer, and because they feel that they are on the same side as Germany in the battle agsinst the Jews.”
By Joseph M. Levy, wireless To the New York Times. Sept. 15, 1938.