Mick Hartley

Tanya Gold in the Spectator reviews Jake Wallis Simons' new book Israelopobia:

The book’s most interesting passages are on the Russian roots of anti-Zionism – a strategy to undermine America – and on the Nazism of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was on the Nazi payroll, took 900 marks a month and considered Arab and German goals to be ‘completely overlapping’ in ‘this struggle against world Jewry’. He was promised that once the British were out of Palestine, Adolf Eichmann would extend the Final Solution there, which I suppose is a kind of colonialism. When Hitler fell, al-Husseini said the Arabs ‘would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab state’.

Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was another fanatical admirer of Hitler, and Hitlerism flourished onwards to the Hamas Charter of 1988, which quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and could have been written by Julius Streicher if they hadn’t hanged him at Nuremberg. 

Wallis Simons writes of 1947:

Behind closed doors, Abdullah I, Emir of Jordan, the Egyptian prime minister Ismail Sidky, the Iraqi prime minister Muzahim al-Pachachi, and even Abd al-Rahman Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League, expressed concerns about rejecting the UN plan.

But, he adds, the spirit of pan-Arab nationalism persuaded them to take the Palestinian cause as a totem. And here we are: the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s PhD thesis claims Zionists collaborated with Nazis, and in 2016 Imad Homato, a Palestinian professor, said: ‘If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are behind it.’…

That same pan-Arab nationalism, as I noted the other day, somehow doesn't extend to the Palestinians and their descendants, still defined as refugees and still unable to assimilate into the Arab states that surround tiny Israel.

At heart, this is not a book about the Middle East. It is one about Europe’s inability to process the Shoah. Howard Jacobson, who is also quoted (‘And to those who will not weep, who would rather march, protest and boycott, I say: You are among those who wanted to see the dream blighted in the first place’), believes that demonisation of Israel is essential because it offers retrospective absolution for the Shoah, and that this is an unconscious and necessary process. Some things are not easily digested, though that brings little comfort to anyone.