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Most countries use history among their policy tools. We have just had an example of it this week: President Xi Jinping archly told our Parliament that China enjoyed the rule of law thousands of years ago — while our ancestors were still hunting and gathering around the Thames.
Sometimes the supposed lessons of history can be stretched beyond credibility. I fear that Israel’s Prime Minister did this in the course of his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress this week.
Mr Netanyahu’s speech was largely about the shocking knife attacks that innocent Israelis have had to endure in recent weeks in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. But he also made one historical leap too far. Personalising matters, Mr Netanyahu spoke of how, after his grandfather came to Jaffa in 1920, Arab attackers burned down the British Mandate’s local immigration office. They had been incited by Haj Amin al-Husseini who, ironically enough, was later appointed Mufti — or chief Muslim cleric — by the British in order to moderate the violence.
In fact, the Mufti was mainly responsible for whipping up Arab fears that Jews had designs on Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa mosque, even as he sought to restrict Jews from praying at the Wailing Wall. In 1929, this resulted in mob violence that left 133 Jewish people dead in Jerusalem and beyond. The death toll would have been greater had the Haganah forces not fought back, before the British Army restored control.
While all of this is a matter of record, what Mr Netanyahu claimed next is not.
The Israeli leader said that until Hitler met the Mufti in November 1941, he did not want to exterminate the Jews, but rather expel them from Germany. Mr Netanyahu then claimed that al-Husseini had convinced Hitler to “burn” them instead.
While most biographies of Hitler have walk-on roles for murderous foreign antisemites, such as the dictatorial Croat Ante Pavelic or the Romanian Ion Antonescu, as well as the Mufti, no serious historian would claim any of them influenced his decision to murder Europe’s Jews.
These men were remote from the decision-making inner circles of the Third Reich. Hitler’s obsessional hatred of Jews was deep and longstanding, a fire that required no further stoking by any external hand.
Nazi murderousness towards the Jews burst onto German and Austrian streets during Kristallnacht in November 1938, while its keener SS Jew-killers got ahead of themselves from day one of the September 1939 invasion of Poland. The inspiration for this was Hitler’s “prophetic” speech on January 30 of that year when he said that the outbreak of a world war would result “in the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”.
Four months before the invasion of Russia, in March 1941, the German security and military apparatus put in place the structures and the personnel for the wholesale murder of “Jewish Bolsheviks”, leaving ample latitude for that to mean Jews in general.
The SS Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers went about that task with a vengeance after Operation Barbarossa commenced on June 22 1941.
A mandate for industrial-scale mass-murder was issued on July 31, seemingly in response to pressures (for example, Jews starving to death in winter) that Nazi policy had created in the first place.
Mr Netanyahu is right not to allow the world to ignore a vicious stream of antisemitism that has long been rife within what is risibly called the “Arab world” but which extends to non-Arab Muslims too, from Iran to Pakistan.
Palestinian Arabs are not immune to this either, despite adroitly casting themselves as victims. But this should not distract from where ultimate responsibility lay for the Holocaust, which was with Germany and Hitler.
Professor Michael Burleigh is a historian who specialises in Nazi Germany
