What did Palestine and Yugoslavia have in common?

Answer: Amin al-Husseini.

Related on the female side to Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, revered by radical Islamists, President Tito of Yugoslavia charged him with war crimes.

Before we discover why, it is important to know what Israel was like before Jews fleeing persecution in Europe made its deserts bloom. Indeed, over half of this tiny country was desert and much of the remainder, malarial swamps. In 1857 the British consul wrote, 'the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants.' Other visitors described it as 'desolate and unpeopled', in 'wretched desolation and neglect' (2). According to Mark Twain, who visited Jerusalem in 1867, the city was so small that one could walk around it in an hour, and hosted a mixed population of Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Copts and other Christians, Latins, Syrians and Abyssinians, speaking a variety of languages. Outside the walls, Bedouins rode wildly across the landscape. 'It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem,' Twain wrote. 'Mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here' (3).

Thirty years later, Amin al-Husseini was born into this unprepossessing community. In a quick overview of his life, one thing is apparent: he always seemed to be fleeing from something. In 1920, he fled from Jerusalem to Syria to escape imprisonment by the British for inflammatory speech during the Jerusalem riots. He was a pivotal figure in the Hebron Massacre of 1929. In July 1937 he fled the British again, disguised as a woman, for his part in the Arab revolts against them and the Jews. Later that year, he fled to Lebanon, this time disguised as a Bedouin. As his relationship with the French and the Syrians deteriorated, he fled from there to Iraq in 1939. 'In October 1941 General Wavell, commander of the British Middle Eastern forces, offered a $100,000 (25,000 pounds) reward for [his] capture...dead or alive...being under a still valid warrant of arrest of the Palestine government for the assassination of Jews, Arabs, and British, including Galilee Commissioner Andrews.' (8). From Iraq, al-Husseini fled 'to Iran and hid himself in the Japanese Embassy'. From Tehran he [fled] to Italy' (8). From November1941, we find him in Germany supported by Hitler. In May 1945 following the dictator's suicide, he fled first from Austria to Switzerland and then to Germany where he was arrested by the French (4). It was while he was in France under house arrest that the request for his indictment arrived from Yugoslavia and so, in 1946, he fled yet again to Egypt where King Farouk of Egypt granted him asylum (5, 7).

As someone who has visited the former Yugoslavia once and since its breakup, Bosnia twice, and Serbia and Croatia many times, I have observed that Bosnia, although rich in natural resources, is the worst off. It is very poor. Unemployment is high. I saw whole villages lying deserted because the inhabitants had left for a better life. Over the centuries Bosnia has been exploited by the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Nazis, and most recently by political Islam. A young sales assistant we spoke to, a university graduate, told us in perfect English that it was generally felt that a war was again approaching.

Those of you who have read the Nobel Prize winning novel by Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, will recall Turks in Bosnia with surnames like Sokolović and Branković. Though referred to as 'Turks', they were actually Bosniaks, Slavs who had converted to Islam in the centuries of the Ottoman occupation. During Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, Germany did not have enough soldiers to control Yugoslavia and, in 1942, Himmler decided to form two SS Waffen Divisions (a third was later added) from these Bosnian Muslims, ethnic Yugoslav Germans and a small percentage of Catholic Croats. (Waffen is German for 'armed' in the same way as Panzer is German for a 'tank'.) The divisions were led by German officers and became operational early in 1943. They were called the Handschar Divisions, handžar being a Serbo Croatian word for a scimitar, the curved sword of the Ottomans. They were Mountain Divisions because Bosnia is very mountainous until you descend to the plain of the Neretva River and commence the drive towards the coast.

Meanwhile in Berlin, Al-Husseini had been comfortably provided for by Hitler since 1941. He was assisting him with the Holocaust. In the spring of 1943, the Nazis flew him to Yugoslavia to help with the organizing and recruiting of Bosnian Muslims into Himmler's SS Divisions (10). Many photographs exist of al-Husseini at this time. After initial training in France, the units were sent to Germany, where al-Husseini met them again, inspected them and blessed them. Swelled by German soldiers, their numbers approached 22,000. In December 1943, the Germans returned the divisions to Yugoslavia for active service in Bosnia, and in October 1944 they were disbanded.

You don't need to have observed the recent anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre to know that there is bad blood between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. The Handschar SS Divisions did more than just fight the Yugoslav Partisans. They developed a reputation for savagery and atrocities against the civilian Bosnian population of Serbs and Jews. In addition, 'Al-Husseini ... had always preached that murdering Jews pleases Allah and is essential to salvation' (5). 

In July 1945, at the request of the Minister of the Interior and Information in the Yugoslav Government, the United Nations placed al-Husseini on their war criminals list (9). He was charged with organizing the SS divisions in Bosnia and being responsible for the massacre of Bosnian Muslims who refused to collaborate with the Germans.

He was never brought to justice. Like his father before him, Al-Husseini was a dedicated antisemite, notable for using inflammatory language and inciting riots against the Jews and the British, and for the murder of his rivals. His family had arrived in Palestine the same century as mine had arrived in Australia and, as 'Palestinian' was not used as a political term until well into my lifetime, he didn't advocate for its statehood. Given that the Koran says the Jews will return to the Promised Land (6) - Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:21) and Surah Al-Isra (17:104) - we may wonder at the extent to which the radical Islamists who admired him have created an unnecessary problem for the modern world. 

1. Taxation in the Ottoman Empire - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core

2. The Population of Palestine, circa 1875 on JSTOR

3. The Innocents Abroad, Complete | Project Gutenberg    Chapter LIII

4. Unmasking Hajj Amin al-Husseini through his wartime letters and diaries

5. From Hitler to Hamas: A Genealogy of Evil » ISGAP

6. EDITORIAL: The Koran itself says Jews will return to their land

7. The Long Shadow Over Palestine: The Terrorist Legacy of Haj Amin al-Husseini | by Jeff Cunningham | Medium

8, U.S. Dept. of State Withheld Evidence From Nazi Files, Shielded Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from Prosecution for War Crimes in 1948 | Adara Press

9. Ex-mufti of Jerusalem Placed on War Criminals List; Indicted by Yugoslav Government - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

10. 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) 

Israel, Palestine and the Australian media. Review of 'My Life as a Jew' by Michael Gawenda.

 

Has anyone read Why the Germans, Why the Jews? by Götz Ali? If you haven’t read it, you need to before reading My Life as a Jew. 

Why the Germans, Why the Jews? charts the normalization of intellectual antisemitism in Germany in the decades before World War 2 which facilitated the Holocaust. A similar normalization has been happening in literary, journalistic, educational and artistic circles across Australia, not forgetting the Labor left and the Greens. It is the hatred of an ethnic minority, a secularized diabolism (1), and one that I feel is gradually building up. 

My Life as a Jew is a fine book, personal and in places deeply harrowing. It is easy to read and I found the Yiddish culture fascinating. I devoured the whole lot in about eight hours from one afternoon to the next morning. 

In the days of my innocence, I used to wonder how the Australian media could justify publishing press releases from the Gaza Ministry of Health, because isn't that rather like reporting on the Battle of Britain by sourcing your information from Nazi Germany? Well, after Chapter One, I don't wonder anymore.

The chapter describes the presuppositions regarding Israel and Palestine that members of the Australian media are expected to hold and how these had been reinforced just in time for the October 7th 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists. Two years earlier, a booklet was commissioned for Monash University Publishing. Written by John Lyons, at the time the ABC senior news executive, it was a rant against the Israel lobby in Australia. Before the booklet was commissioned, 400 Australian media personnel signed a letter relating to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Gawenda continues: 

What this letter calls for, what it urges editors and executive producers to do, is refuse space and a voice to journalists and others who do not accept the black-and-white position of the signatories to this letter - that Israel is the villain that launches savage and unprovoked attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, on the powerless and the helpless victims of Israeli villainy.

What does it mean that journalists and media workers who work for the ABC and SBS signed the letter?

In the more political chapters of the book (and I say this to distinguish them from the personal ones in which a bias is less evident), Michael Gawenda too writes about the Israel and Palestine conflict from a similar starting point to these journalists - that Israel is the tyrant. Yet, there is so much more to be understood if you are a nobody like me and can write whatever you like without having to fend off attacks by an irate literary community. 

As a Christian, I say that antisemitism exists because, in the words of Jesus: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. This is the reason, no doubt, that the Koran and the Hadith dismantle anything about Judaism and Christianity that relate to God’s plan for the salvation of a troubled world, even to threatening hell fire for a Muslim who believes that the Messiah is the son of Mary. (The many kind and motherly Muslim women I have met are unaware of this, I’m sure.) Edward Flannery (1) insists that the conflict cannot be understood without a knowledge of the Koran and this belief is echoed in the works of Richard Landes, Ayann Hirsi Ali, Narbeel Qureshi and Derek Prince among many others. I have read the relevant verses in the Koran and they are not encouraging. If imams continue to preach what it says about Jews and Muslims, then there will never be peace in the Middle East. 

If you’re an atheist, as I’m told journalists are, then what do you do with the salvation question? How do you explain the infiltration of the Jewish problem into all levels of our society? 

Meanwhile, the catastrophic effects of British colonialism in the Middle East are forgotten or ignored. Churchill splitting Kurdistan between three countries, making the Kurds an ethnic minority in their own land and opening the path to their persecution. British oil exploration and exploitation in the Middle East between 1908 and WW2. The British Mandate of Palestine. The British Mandate of Mesopotamia. Britain creating Iraq. Churchill giving 75% of its Palestine Mandate to create Transjordan to please the Arabs and protect British oil supplies. The UN creating Israel out of the dregs of what remained amidst threats of Arab oil embargoes. Britain abstaining from the vote to partition Palestine in 1947. Britain arming the Arabs in the Jewish war of Independence.

Why obsess over Israel? 

Because religion is at the heart of the matter and this is a stumbling block for atheists who lump all religions into the one basket, toss it in the trash and look for a logical, Western solution to the problem. Not finding any, they blame Israel, and I doubt whether this attitude is actually helping the people of Gaza. To quote Hamza Howidy whose article is listed below, 'If their heart bleeds for Gaza, why are they not outraged at all of the violence that Gazans face—including the violence of Hamas? The sad truth is, when Israelis aren't involved, no one is interested in advocating for the Palestinian rights they claim to care about so deeply.'

Some knowledge of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Palestine might help Australian journalists. They could discover what Palestine was once like by reading about the famous visit of Mark Twain in 1867 The Innocents Abroad, or research the origin of the term Al Nakba (the catastrophe) in Daniel Szeftel’s A History of the ‘Settler Colonialism’ charge. They could pinpoint who has actually lived in Palestine during the last century, by reading The Smoking Gun: Arab immigration into Palestine, 1922 to 1931 by Fred M. Gottheil. Richard Landes might explain to them how eliminating Israel will restore the honour of Islam that its foundation has shamed in Why the Arab World is lost in an emotional nakba. And how we keep it there. Or they could be really radical and discover how the Palestinians feel themselves in Why Does the Media Ignore Hamas' Crimes Against Palestinians? by Hamza Howidy. 

But back to the book.

The definitions of an anti-Zionist, and even of a Jew, that consumed Gawenda did not consume me, but I was quite rivetted by his observations of what is antisemitism and what it isn't according to the judgements of contemporary society. Fueled by the media, we are directed to the conclusion 'that it is not antisemitic to compare Israelis to Nazis', page 103. 

Those of us who are old enough to remember Yasser Arafat might find page 201 as strange as I did. I thought Gawenda was harsh to blame Israel for 'some of' the suffering of the Palestinians without mention of either Arafat or Hamas. In 2004 as Arafat lay dying, Ed O'Loughlin of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about 'the corrupt and self-serving political elite which has prospered from the donor-funded Palestinian Authority while the common people suffer economic and political strangulation under occupation.' (I have the clipping.) It should be remembered that Gaza and the West Bank are not modern welfare states, and that the governments who profess to lead them can best be compared to the House of Lords at the time of the First Fleet. 

I was moved by the unfortunate employee of the Anne Frank Museum who was asked to replace his kippeh with a baseball cap. Gawenda pours vitriol on those who would de-Jewify the Holocaust, as this example illustrates, transforming 'it into a universal metaphor for the capacity of human beings to do terrible things to other human beings', page 94. He criticizes Hollywood and popular Auschwitz literature, rightly so as the child of Holocaust survivors, born in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria. (I must add, Mr Gawenda, that I have read Exodus by Leon Uris twice, but I have never seen the movie.) 

As I left the supermarket yesterday morning with a loaded bag and my library copy of My Life as a Jew sitting under the bananas, a woman handed me a pro-Palestinian flyer. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I pray for Israel, and also for the people of Gaza and an end to the hostilities.’ She just stared at me as if she couldn’t understand my attitude.

1 The Anguish of the Jews, Flannery E.   Cambridge University Press 1985.

Margaret Walker - War in the Balkans: The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

 

The Holy Land - from old maps and literature.

The modern Middle Eastern crisis began, in part, because Turkey was on the losing side in World War 1. For six hundred years the Ottoman Turks had supported Islam across North Africa, through the Levant and into Europe where their wave of success was finally brought to a halt at the gates of Vienna in 1683 – note the date, September 11th. The long slow decline had begun. The red, green, black and white 'Flag of the Arab Revolt', replicated in many forms throughout the Middle East today, originated in 1916 when the Arabs were trying to leave the failing Empire. Instead, they found themselves in a more dismal situation. By the time the Ottoman Empire was finally dissolved in 1922, two of the victors of World War 1 had claimed much of its remaining territory, France in Syria and Lebanon, and Britain in Iraq, Jordan, Kurdistan, Israel and the territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

I am the proud possessor of a 1915 Australian Atlas, and an AMP Map of the World published shortly before the outbreak of World War 2. I am including them in my blog 'War in the Balkans' because the task of reconstructing the Middle East following the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire was a problem much considered by the West throughout the nineteenth century and particularly after the First and Second Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Why the West should have embraced it as their problem says a lot about the thinking of the time. It was also due to the discovery of oil in the Middle East in 1908 by the British and their establishment of oil fields during the 1920's and 30's. 

        The Middle East in1915

   

1939

The Middle East in 1939

The British Mandate of Palestine 1920 - 1948

Palestine compared with Tasmania, Australia

In 1922, Winston Churchill gave away 75% of the British Mandate of Palestine to create the modern Arab nation of Jordan.

In 1948, the remaining land was partitioned to create the State of Israel. 

In 1867, Mark Twain made his famous visit to the Holy Land

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is… The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants...The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic assail you on every hand. To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here


Herodotus – The Histories (c. 446 BC)

The Syrians of Palestine (and the Phoenicians) have a tradition that in ancient times they lived on the Persian Gulf, but migrated to the Syrian coast where they are found today. This part of Syria, together with the country that extends southward to Egypt, is all known as Palestine…They practise circumcision…[and] the custom is evidently a very ancient one.

 Suetonius – The Twelve Caesars

An ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judea at this time would come the rulers of the world…The rebellious Jews read it as referring to themselves, murdered their Governor, routed the Governor of Syria when he came down to retore order, and captured an Eagle. To crush this uprising the Romans needed a strong army under an energetic commander…The choice fell on Vespasian (66AD).

Pliny the Elder – Natural History (AD 23 – 79)

On the west side of the Dead Sea, away from the cost, lives the solitary tribe of the Essenes…Below them was the town of Engeda (Joshua 15,62), second only to Jerusalem in the fertility of its soil and in its groves of palm trees but now, like Jerusalem, another heap of ashes