Arab and Muslim attitudes toward European Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Mandate period and toward the Holocaust as it was happening were neither uniform nor simple. The dominant Arab political leadership in Mandate Palestine, particularly the Mufti of Jerusalem, was hostile to Jewish immigration and at the most senior level was actively collaborating with the Nazi regime. Other Arab figures, including some heads of state and many ordinary Arabs in Mandate Palestine and in surrounding countries, sheltered Jews, opposed Nazi propaganda, and in some cases protested European persecution of Jews.
The Mufti of Jerusalem
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, was the most prominent Arab leader to actively collaborate with the Nazi regime. After the failure of the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British rule and Jewish immigration in Palestine, the Mufti was forced into exile. By 1941 he had moved to Berlin, where he met Hitler in November 1941 and remained as a guest of the Reich for most of the war. He broadcast antisemitic propaganda in Arabic to the Arab world, recruited Bosnian Muslims for the SS Handschar division, and lobbied the regime against any plan that would have allowed Jewish refugees to escape Europe to Palestine. The Mufti is the major and most-discussed case of Arab collaboration with the Holocaust at a senior political level.
Less-discussed cases
Other Arab and Muslim individuals took different positions. King Mohammed V of Morocco refused to apply Vichy anti-Jewish laws to the Jewish citizens of Morocco. Khaled Abdul Wahab, a Tunisian landowner, sheltered Jewish families on his estate during the German occupation of Tunisia in 1942-43 and was the first Arab nominated for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations. Selahattin Ulkumen, the Turkish consul on Rhodes, used Turkish citizenship to protect approximately 50 Jewish families from deportation. The Albanian Muslim population sheltered virtually the entire Jewish community of Albania, with the result that Albania ended the war with more Jews than it had at the start, the only country in occupied Europe to do so.
The post-war picture
The founding of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars hardened public Arab attitudes against Jewish immigration to the region. The Jewish populations of Arab countries, which had numbered approximately 850,000 at the end of the war, were largely expelled or fled in the years following 1948. By the 1970s, the historic Jewish communities of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and most of North Africa had effectively ceased to exist. The detailed history of those communities and their dispersion is a subject in its own right.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards