Netanyahu backtracks on Holocaust remarks after uproar

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was forced to issue a clarification, after his comments that a Muslim cleric from Palestine persuaded Adolf Hitler to implement the Holocaust caused uproar.

In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Mr Netanyahu referred to a series of attacks by Muslims against Jews in Palestine during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time [in November 1941, when Hitler met the mufti]. He wanted to expel the Jews,” he said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here’.

“‘So what should I do with them?’ he [Hitler] asked,” according to Mr Netanyahu. “He [Husseini] said, ‘Burn them’.”

Inaccurate

The comments were widely criticised as historically inaccurate, with some Israeli politicians even suggesting they could be used by Holocaust deniers.

The controversy dominated morning radio news shows in Israel and even succeeded in shifting attention for a few hours away from the blanket coverage of the ongoing violence that has swept the West Bank and parts of Israel over recent weeks.

Coincidently, Mr Netanyahu made the comments just before a trip to Germany and he made a further statement before departing for Berlin.

“I had no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the final solution to exterminate six million Jews. He made the decision.

“ It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler and others to exterminate European Jewry.

“My intention was to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so- called ‘occupation’, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews,” he said.

Historians in Israel earlier took issue with his comments. "To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct," said Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial museum. "The idea to rid the world of the Jews was a central theme in Hitler's ideology a long, long time before he met the mufti."

Responsibility

The German government responded by saying responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans.

"All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilisation that was the Holocaust," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said.

Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said Mr Netanyahu’s comments exposed his deep hatred of the Palestinians.