The Oslo Accords, now 30 years old, began with great hopes but swiftly descended into a bloody stalemate of Palestinian terror, Israeli overtures for peace and more Palestinian terror.
Recent commentary has emphasized the lack of a viable off-ramp. Benjamin Kerstein aptly summed up this sentiment, concluding, “We do not know our way out of Oslo.”
The options do seem elusive. But if one asks what needs to change in order to find better options, an answer emerges: A new and thoroughly de-Nazified Palestinian leadership.
Strong words perhaps, but history confirms it: Since the 1930s, the pre-state Zionist community and then the State of Israel sought to share their indigenous homeland with their Palestinian Arab neighbors. For just as long, the Palestinian Arab leadership has relentlessly sought to prevent and then destroy any manifestation of Jewish sovereignty in that homeland while indoctrinating its people in genocidal Jew-hatred.
It is not widely known that, even through the 1930s, many Arab leaders, including three out of five Palestinian-Arab political parties, favored negotiations with their Jewish neighbors and were open to considering “two states for two peoples.”
One man shattered this emerging amity: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini. A notorious antisemite, Husseini was appointed Mufti by the British authorities in 1921 over two more moderate candidates. He spent the 1920s and 1930s inciting pogroms via vicious antisemitic propaganda, falsely claiming the Jews sought to destroy Muslim religious sites and exterminate the Arabs.
Husseini eventually instigated a 1936-1939 civil war in Palestine, targeting not just the British and the Jews, but also the many Palestinian Arabs who favored cooperation with their Jewish neighbors. Husseini had many of the latter viciously tortured and murdered, leaving their shattered bodies in public as a warning to moderate Palestinians.
Having emptied his community of moderate voices, Husseini filled the void with the ideology of Europe’s rising Nazi empire. Several historians have documented the Mufti’s leading role in bringing about an Arab-Nazi alliance during World War II. Husseini moved to Berlin in Nov. 1941, where he and Hitler publicly reached an accord. They jointly pledged to conquer the Middle East, annex it to the Nazi empire and build death camps to exterminate all the Jews. That this second Holocaust did not happen is owed entirely to the British-American defeat of Hitler’s North African armies in 1943.
Husseini also spent those years poisoning the Middle East’s political discourse as a leading adviser to the Nazi’s massive propaganda campaign across the region.
Husseini’s efforts were effective: An American intelligence dispatch from Aug. 1942 reported “three-fourths of the Muslim world are in favor of the Axis,” crediting “radio talks from the Grand Mufti” directing Arabs to “murder the Jews and seize their property.”
Henry Kopel is a former federal prosecutor and the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism and Defend Freedom (Lexington Books, 2021).
