Historian: "It is not Israel's settlement blocks but rather the Palestinian ideological blockade that constitutes the biggest barrier to peaceful arrangements"

It is not Israel's settlement blocks but rather the Palestinian ideological blockade that constitutes the biggest barrier to peaceful arrangements . The Jew-hatred in this region must no longer be played down as a kind of local custom

Küntzel, M. (2023). Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War Against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
Epilogue

Ya'kub's idea of killing Jews " until not a single Jew remains on Earth " is not to be found in the Koran . A hundred years ago , no Muslim religious authority would have thought of saying such a thing. What we are dealing with here is a late echo of the Nazi propaganda. While we cannot precisely measure its impact on Arab thinking , three things are nonetheless clear: first, from 1937 onward, the Mufti's faction and their German friends pursued the goal of instilling Islamic antisemitism on a mass scale. Second, from 1945 to 1948, Arab leaders repeated many of the anti-Jewish and anti - Zionist slogans that had been disseminated by Radio Zeesen in the immediate past. Third, Jew-hatred is particularly prevalent in the regions that had once been subject to the waves of hate from Zeesen. In 2014 , the Anti - Defamation League released a study showing that 75 % of Muslims surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa agreed with antisemitic statements. In parts of Asia that Zeesen had never reached, the figure was 37%. In post - 1945 Bosnia - Herzegovina too, where the radio propaganda was not been available during the war, antisemitism has been far less prevalent than in the Middle East, where it had. Everything supports the view that the years of relentless propaganda made a huge contribution to the creation of a mass antisemitic consciousness. And not only that: the few years of exposure to Nazi ideology brought about a long-lasting change in the Arab world.

To this day the anti-Jewish passages in the Koran are incessantly repeated there, to this day the course of events is interpreted through the lens of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to this day the Palestinian Authority views every attempt to normalize relations with Israel as high treason.

It is, of course, true that fundamentalist positions have always existed in the Zionist camp too. They have, however, remained socially marginal, unlike in the Palestinian camp , where many of the Mufti's instructions remain effective. So in 2018 the current Mufti of Jerusalem refused a Muslim burial to a believer because he had allegedly sold a piece of land to Jews. In doing so, the Mufti referred explicitly to a fatwa issued by Amin el-Husseini in 1935.

El-Husseini was never a mere tool of the Nazis. As an active partner of the Germans, he was extremely creative. Indeed, he played a decisive role in the formulation of Islamic Antisemitism. It was he too who in 1938 pressurized Berlin into setting up its Arab-language broadcasting service. This shows that a substantial proportion of the Palestinian Arabs were involved in what happened between 1939 and 1945.

Today there is no conspicuous worship of the Mufti in the Palestinian territories . Only one school – the Amin Al-Husseini Elementary School in El-Bireh – is named after him. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership remains committed to his legacy. Yasser Arafat himself extolled the Mufti as a hero whose soldier he had been. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has referred to El-Husseini as a "hero" and " pioneer." In July 2019, Mahmoud al-Habbash, one of Abbas's closest advisers, posted a photo of the Mufti on his Facebook page and praised him as "leader and example." So long as the Palestinian leadership adheres to this tradition, peace is hardly possible.

Once, however, we accept the fact that Nazi propaganda made a crucial contribution to antisemitism in the region, then our view of the Middle Eastern conflict has to change. Because then it is not Jewish settlement blocks but Palestinian ideological blocks that present the biggest obstacle to a peace settlement. Then, the Jew-hatred in the region can no longer be dismissed as a kind of local color.

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