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Originally Posted by dc_dux
Will...do you really believe there were democratic institutions in place in Palestine before Partition?
Under the defacto "government" or authoritarian rule of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (an ally of Hitler), even after he was convicted at the Nuremburg trials as a war criminal and living in exile in Egypt under the protection of Nasser) the simple answer is that the Arabs in Palestine/Israel had no right to vote on anything that affected their lives. The majority Arab population did what the Mufti ordered them to do.
In fact, there is a body of evidence that suggests that the Mufti ordered the Arab population to leave their homes after the Partition vote (with a promise that they could return after the Jews were driven from the land), which was what really initiated the Arab refugee problem. (I know there is a counter argument that the new Israeli govt ordered the Arabs to leave).
While the Mufti was in exile in Egypt after WW II, his nephew, a 17 yr old Egyptian named Mohammed Abder Rauf Arafat Al-Kudwa Al-Husseini, better known as Yasir Arafat, began to work for him and carry out his jihad against all Jews and any moderate Muslims who accepted the Jews in Palestine (this was even before Partition).
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I know the above may further feed Roachboy's comment... "history" that makes this conflict "clear" is fine in the way that any narrative of a sufficiently high level of vagueness is--it serves the purpose of making things appear "clear" by simply ignoring everything that would complicate it....but you really cant ignore the role of the Grand Mufti in creating the 20th century Pan Arab terrorist movement against the Jews in the Middle East...it is part of the history.
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dc_dux, you cite no sources to support your controversial statements.
Can we agree that the Mufti was a "bad, bad" man.....that he collaborated with the Nazis, but that his "collaboration" had no more "impact" on actual aid to the Nazi war effort, than say.....the collaboration of Prescott Bush or his partner, Harriman....or that the Mufti was any "badder" with regard to the "hands on" killing of innocents, than terrorists Menachim Begin, David ben Gurion, Yitzak Rabin, et al?
The Mufti was never tried or convicted at Nuremberg. My reading shows him to be a "distant cousin" of Arafat. Hannah Arendt, German Jewish refugee and later, prominent American political philosopher, was sent by the New Yorker magazine, in 1963, to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. She concluded that the Mufti was demonized by Israeli government intention, via that trial, and that the demonization was politically motivated and out of proportion:
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http://www.berenbaumgroup.com/ber_re...vsEichman2.htm
......... It is remarkable how small a role Hannah Arendt's work Eichmann in Jerusalem plays in Yablonka's work. Arendt's concept of the banality of evil is flawed, fundamentally flawed. While the evildoer may be banal – ordinary and routine – and far from the superhuman embodiment of evil that Israel prosecutors portrayed Eichmann to be, the evil that he and his Nazi colleagues perpetrated was anything but banal as the testimony of survivors made that vivid throughout the trial.
Several of her many insights are worthy of special note:
The Israeli establishment – Establishment with a capital letter is the way that Yablonska writes the term – was ill prepared for the trial. They were pressured by a German informant to capture Eichmann, they let a local blind man do the initial investigation in Argentine before they assigned an Israeli police official. The legal system was ill equipped to handle the trial. Laws had to be passed. Little work was done in the Educational Ministry in preparation. In 1961 Israel lacked the intellectual infrastructure of Holocaust historians capable on making an impression on the world or the political leadership had little faith in their own historians. Yad Vashem was helpful only in minor ways and the much smaller museum at Lochamei Haghettot played a much more significant role. Attorney General Gideon Hausner was trying his first criminal case yet the never harbored a moments doubt that a historian could ascertain regarding his readiness for the task. His predecessor Haim Cohen, a far more distinguished jurist, a far more nimble mind, had chosen a Supreme Court appointment over the opportunity to try the Eichmann case. Ben Gurion expressed anxiety about the appointment, but politics being what they were; there was little that he could do about it. Michael Oren demonstrated the same ill-preparedness regarding the Six Day War.
Politicians interfered with the trial again and again. <b>Ben Gurion was insistent that German Chancellor Konrad Adenhauer be protected, that his right-hand man, a former high ranking Nazi official, Hans Gloebke, be kept out of the trial and that Hausner speak of Nazi Germany and not Germany. Golda Meir, then Foreign Minister, wanted the Mufti of Jerusalem front and center even if he was peripheral to the guilt or innocence of Eichmann.</b> She wanted Nazi racist ideology included for it might impress African states, then a major interest of Israeli Foreign Policy..........
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We do know that the Mufti lived in exile in Berlin during WWII and functioned as a propagandist for the nazis. We don't know how much of the Nuremberg testimony of later executed war criminal, Dieter Wisliceny, against the Mufti, was factual.
Given all of the above, isn't it fair to say that those who disagree with the most negative assessment of the Mufti's complicity with the nazis and "the final solution", are at a disadvantage to argue that his "crimes" were less than meets the eye, both because of the Mufti's own exile in Berlin, and his support of the nazis, and the much more limited means and opportunities of his Palestinian supporters to influence the rest of the world, than those of Israelis and their western supporters?
Dc_dux, I see no more point in "saddling" this generation of Palestinians with the legacy of the Mufti, than I do in saddling this generation of Iraelis with the terrorist acts of Israel's founders, or of saddling the current president Bush with the financial activities of his grandfather that aided the nazis.
When I post about Prescott Bush and the terrorist founding leaders of the state of Israel, I do so to focus on the hypocrisy of the opposing "black or white" arguments. The "gray areas" do not seem to sap the convictions of the most resolute, because they don't often admit that they are on the map.....