Sparking an
uproar in 2015, Netanyahu argued prominent Palestinian leader 'played an
important role' in Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews, but Prof. Mustafa
Abbasi says Palestinians were 'not at all' looking to aid the Nazis
Arab
rookies line up in a barracks square for their first drill under a British
soldier, in Mandatory Palestine, December 1940
Sparking an
uproar in 2015, Netanyahu argued prominent Palestinian leader 'played an
important role' in Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews, but Prof. Mustafa
Abbasi says Palestinians were 'not at all' looking to aid the Nazis
In 2015,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an uproar when he claimed that Mufti
Haj Amin al-Husseini was the one who’d urged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. In
the wake of the criticism this elicited, Netanyahu said his intention was not
to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust, but to note that “the
Mufti played an important role in the Final Solution.”
But it
turns out that there was another side to the story that also escaped mention by Netanyahu,
the historian’s son:
the forgotten role played by thousands of Palestinians who did not heed the Mufti of
Jerusalem’s call to support the Axis countries, and went so far as
to take up arms to fight the Nazis, often shoulder to shoulder with young
Jews from Mandatory Palestine.
Professor
Mustafa Abbasi, a historian at Tel Hai Academic College, has spent years
tracing their story. Having recently published an academic article on the
subject, this week he suggested an opposite narrative to the one that Netanyahu put
forward. The prime minister had sought to paint the Palestinians as
supporters of the Third Reich, but Abbasi says, “The Mufti did not find a
receptive audience among the Palestinians for his call to aid the Nazis. Not at
all.”
The subject of Abbasi’s research
is unusual. Many studies have been published about Jewish volunteerism in the
war against the Nazis, which reached a peak with the formation of the Jewish
Brigade. But “the thousands of Arab volunteers are hardly mentioned and
sometimes the record is often distorted,” Abbasi says.
In
an article in the latest issue of the periodical Cathedra (“Palestinians
Fighting the Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in World War II”), he
explains why these Palestinian fighters have been left out of the history
books.
On the one hand, Zionist historians
naturally placed an emphasis on the role played by Jewish volunteers in the
fight against the Nazis. On the other hand, their Palestinian counterparts were
focusing on the struggle against British rule and were not eager to glorify the
names of those who cooperated with Britain not so many years after the British
put down the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, and thereby indirectly helped the Jews
establish a state.
“Neither side
wished to highlight this subject,” says Professor Abbasi. “But I think it’s the
historian’s job to be faithful to the sources and to try to describe history as
it was, without being hostage to any national narrative that would limit him
and prevent him from writing history freely.”
One has to wonder
why no organization was ever established to commemorate the actions of these
Palestinian volunteers. “Many of them were killed and many others are still
listed as missing. But no memorial has ever been established for them,” says
Abbasi. In fact, the records of the Palestinian volunteers, along with much of
their personal archives and papers, have disappeared, much of it lost in the
War of Independence.
Over the last few
years, Abbasi was able to learn of their story in Palestinian newspapers from
the Mandate era, in memoirs and personal journals, and through interviews he conducted
with a few of the last remaining volunteers who are still alive. He also
collected material from various British archives, from the Zionist Archive, and
the archives of the Haganah and the IDF.
Abbasi estimates that about 12,000
young Palestinians enlisted in the British Army in World War II. Hundreds
became POWs, many others (the exact figure is unknown) were killed. “Compared
to other peoples, this is not an insignificant number,” he says, and also
points out that, unlike other groups, the Palestinians volunteered for the
British Army from the first stage of the war.
Initially,
the Palestinian and Jewish volunteers served in mixed units. “They received
training and drilled at the same bases and in many instances fought shoulder to
shoulder, and were also taken prisoner together,” says Abbasi. And as reported
here two years ago, the proximity of the Jewish and Palestinian fighters
sometimes led to unusual outcomes, as in the case of Shehab Hadjaj, a
Palestinian who enlisted in the British Army, was taken prisoner in Germany and
died in 1943. To this day, he is listed at Mount Herzl as “a casualty of
Israel’s wars” because someone mistakenly thought his surname indicated that he
was Jewish.
“Relations
among the fighters were generally good, and if there was any friction it was
mainly over service conditions, like mail and food,” Abbasi says. However,
there were certain key differences between the two groups, too. For example,
while the Jews were united in their goal of fighting the Nazis to promote the
establishment of the Jewish state, the Palestinians “had no clear national
agenda,” Abbasi writes. For this reason, unlike the Jews, they did not seek to
form separate Palestinian units and there was no “Palestinian Brigade” parallel
to the Jewish Brigade, in which thousands of Jews from Mandatory Palestine
served.
So who were the Palestinians who
volunteered for the British Army to fight the Nazis? Abbasi says they mostly
came from the Palestinian elite and that, contrary to what many think,
represented “an important and central part of the Palestinian public.” A part
of the public that believed it was necessary to stand by Britain at this time,
and to temporarily put aside the Palestinian national aspirations – akin to the
Jewish idea to “fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and fight the
White Paper as if there were no Hitler.”
They
did this at a time when the Mufti of Jerusalem had left Palestine for exile in
the Arab countries and Europe, where he met with Hitler and congratulated the
Muslim volunteers of the Free Arab Legion – an Arab unit established in the
army of Nazi Germany. “He left Palestine for a decade in 1937. What kind of
leader abandons his people at such a time?” Abbasi wonders. “He had no
influence on the public. He was detached and the public was already tired of
him and his methods. They didn’t see him as a leader,” he says. “Anyone who
says differently is distorting history,” he adds in a not so subtle dig at
certain politicians.
In
his research, he documented pro-British propaganda conferences that were held
from 1940 on in Abu Dis (next to Jerusalem),
in Jenin, in villages in the Nablus area, in Tul Karm and in Lod. Among the
supporters of Britain’s fight against the Nazis were the mayors of Nablus and Gaza. Radio Palestine broadcast the comments of
an Egyptian writer who said, “The war is between the lofty and humane values
represented by England and the forces of darkness represented by the Nazis.”
Motivations for
volunteering were varied. “Some did it for ideological reasons, out of
opposition to the Nazi ideology and loyalty to the British and the values that
they represented,” says Abbasi. This motivation was common among upper middle
class and highly educated Palestinian volunteers from urban backgrounds. Rural
Palestinians were motivated largely by financial reasons. “And there were also
those who were seeking adventure and wanted a chance to travel abroad,” he says.
Abbasi found that some Palestinian
women also volunteered to fight the Nazis. Almost 120 young women did so as
part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British
Army, alongside Jewish women. A British recruiting poster in Arabic, published
in the Falastin newspaper in January 1942, read: “She couldn’t stop thinking
about contribution and sacrifice, she felt ongoing pride and exaltation of
spirit – when she did what she saw as her sacred duty for her nation and its
sons. When your country is crying out to you and asking for your service, when
your country makes it plain that our Arab men need your love and support, and
when your country reminds you of how cruel the enemy is – when your country is
calling you, can you stand by and do nothing?”
Abbasi
is one of the only researchers in Palestinian society who is studying this
area, which was also the subject of a 2015 article by Dalia Karpel in Haaretz Magazine. He came
to it thanks to his maternal grandfather, Sa’id Abbasi, who was one of the
volunteers in the British Army during the war. “The family didn’t talk about
it, until one day when I asked my grandmother why there was such a big age difference
between her children,” he says. “Her answer was: ‘Don’t remind me of the time
your grandfather left me for so many years.’” Abbasi decided to find out more
about that time, and came to see that his family story was part of his people’s
history.
In
the future, he hopes, the original material he has collected will be developed
into a book that, for the first time, will tell the optimistic story of a rare
moment in history in which Jews and Palestinians joined forces for a lofty
shared goal.
Ofer Aderet
https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/When-Palestinian-Arabs-and-Jews-fought-the-Nazis-side-by-side-592200
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-historian-12-000-palestinians-fought-for-u-k-in-wwii-alongside-jewish-volunteers-1.7309369
