JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked a huge controversy hours before a visit to Germany by saying that a Muslim religious leader in Jerusalem during the 1940s convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

Several Holocaust experts described the remarks as historically inaccurate. Critics said the statement amounted to incitement against modern-day Palestinians in the middle of violent unrest in the Palestinian territories.

Even Netanyahu’s defence minister, close ally Moshe Yaalon, said the Israeli prime minister had got it wrong.

“It certainly wasn’t (the Palestinian leader) who invented the Final Solution,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.

“That was the evil brainchild of Hitler himself.”

In a speech to the Zionist Congress late on Tuesday, Netanyahu referred to a series of Muslim attacks on Jews in Palestine during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Experts describe remarks as historically inaccurate

Husseini famously flew to visit Hitler in Berlin in 1941, and Netanyahu said that meeting was instrumental in the Nazi leader’s decision to launch a campaign to annihilate the Jews.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” the Israeli prime minister said in the speech. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here (Palestine)’.

“‘So what should I do with them?’” Netanyahu said Hitler asked the mufti, who responded: “Burn them.” Netanyahu, whose father was a historian, was quickly harangued by opposition politicians and experts on the Holocaust who said he was distorting the historical record.

They noted the meeting between Husseini and Hitler took place on November 28, 1941. More than two years earlier, in January 1939, Hitler had addressed the Reichstag, Nazi Germany’s parliament, and spoke clearly about his determination to exterminate the “Jewish race”.

“To say that the mufti was the first to mention to Hitler the idea to kill or burn the Jews is not correct,” Dina Porat, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, told Israel Radio.

“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.”

It is not clear why Netanyahu decided to launch into the issue now, but his remarks came with tensions between Israelis and Palestinians at a new peak, particularly over a Jerusalem holy site overseen by the current mufti.

A German government spokesman, asked about Netanyahu’s comments, said the Holocaust was Germany’s responsibility and there was no need for another view on it.

Responding to the criticism, Netanyahu claimed on Wednesday there was “much evidence” to back up his accusations against Husseini, including testimony by a deputy of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War Two.

Netanyahu, in a statement issued by his office, did not name the aide, but he seemed to be referring to Eichmann assistant Dieter Wisliceny, who has been quoted in news reports dating back to the late 1940s as having told the war crimes court that Husseini repeatedly suggested the extermination of European Jews to Nazi leaders.

Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, accused Netanyahu of using the human tragedy of the Holocaust to try to score political points against Palestinians.

“It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbour so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of six million Jews,” Erekat said.

Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2015

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