(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 65, No. 3, Chanukah 2010)
This comprehensive and pivotal work by Jeffrey Herf details the dissemination of propaganda from Nazi Germany into the Middle East and North Africa during the Second World War, and the influence this has had to this day on Arab and Islamic antisemitism/anti-Zionism. During the war, Germany circulated millions of printed leaflets and broadcast thousands of hours of shortwave radio (all in Arabic) in order to disseminate it’s anti-Jewish ideology throughout he Arab world. It was at pains to demonstrate that it was anti-Jewish but in no way hostile to other Semitic peoples such as Arabs, for whom it professed great admiration and affinity with.
What Herf does is document the ideas, individuals and institutions behind this initiative. The first Axis broadcasts in Arabic were pioneered by Fascist Italy in its radio broadcasts on Radio Bari in 1934. At the same time Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Heinrich Himmler and officials in the Reich Security Main Office demonstrated a strong desire to appeal to Arabs and Muslims. Nazi Germany stressed that it was an uncompromising foe of Zionism, which was to bring it much Arab support.
In June 1939, Saudi King Ibn Saud Khalid al-Hud-al Qarqani met with Hitler, who assured him of his long-standing sympathy for the Arabs and his willingness to offer them ‘active assistance’, especially in supporting the Arab cause in Palestine and preventing the realization of a Jewish national home there.
Nazi shortwave broadcasts in Arabic commenced in October 1939, and continued until March 1945 on the Nazi German Arab language radio station, the Voice of Free Arabism (VFA). The Nazi regime saw extreme antisemitism and anti-Zionism as pivotal points of entry into the Arab world. As the author explains:
Throughout the war Nazi Arabic radio repeated the charge that World War II was a Jewish war whose purpose in the region was to establish a Jewish State in Palestine that would expand into and dominate the entire Muslim and Arab world. Moreover, the broadcasts asserted that the Jews in the mid-Twentieth Century were attempting to destroy Islam just as their ancestors had been attempting to do for thirteen centuries…An Axis victory would prevent the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The same way Nazi propaganda exploited hundreds of years of Christian antisemitism to create its venomous propaganda, so did it make the same use in the Arab world of the antisemitism inherent in Islamic thought. This dissemination was to be a moulding force in the ideas of both anti-Zionist Arab nationalism and Islamist radicalism, and is today echoed in the propaganda of such Islamist groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad Islamist regime in Iran and a plethora of Islamic media. The same way the Nazis decried and despised the elective affinity between English Puritanism and the Jews, so did they take pride in the affinity between National Socialist ideology and what it selected from the traditions of Islam.
Hitler assured Palestinian Arab leader Haj Aminel Husseini that once he had defeated Soviet Russia and moved south from the Caucuses, the “policy of destruction of the Jewish element” would be extended to Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. In the event of an Axis victory in North Africa, Einzatsgruppen SS units were being prepared to be sent to the region to annihilate the Jews of Palestine and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, in collaboration with the Palestine Arabs. This would certainly have happened had the German forces been victorious in North Africa, as they would then have overrun Egypt and from there invaded the Holy Land. Plans were made between the Mufti and the Nazi leadership for this extension of the Final Solution, which is illustrated in detail in Klaus Michael-Mallmann’s ‘The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine’. The Mufti’s collaboration with SS officials extended to a close collaboration with Himmler himself, and with Adolf Eichmann. VFA, in its broadcasts to Egypt, urged greater militancy to prevent Palestine “becoming a Jewish colony”.
Axis-backed incitement intensified in 1942, with El Husseini and Yunus Bahri urging Arabs in Egypt and Palestine to “rise, murder the Jews and seize their property”. In October of that year, The Arab Nation broadcast from Berlin the message that the Arabs would refuse any sort of coexistence with the Jews. As Herf points out, “Refusal of any compromise on the Palestine issue was another logical outcome of the intertwining of political and religious themes in Axis propaganda”.
On 19 October 1943, the above station attacked Chaim Weizmann: “Perhaps this despicable usurer is hoping that the Arabs of Palestine will leave their country to the Jews. But wait, dirty Jew, Palestine will remain a pure Arab country as it has always been. It is you and your dirty relatives who will be kicked out and this will come about by the grace of Allah”.
Nazi propaganda presented Zionism as a component of a supposedly ancient Jewish vendetta against Islam. VFA declared that Jews hoped to use Palestine to expand and rule over a vast empire, from the Tigris in Iraq to as far as Morocco. On 21 November, it proclaimed, “Since the days of Mohammed the Jews have been hostile to Islam … Hatred of Islam and of the Arabs is the main reason for the desire of the Jews to have Palestine for their own and if they take Palestine they will be in a good position over the other Arab countries”. Thousands of pamphlets and broadcasts disseminated the idea that the Jews kindled World War II, that the Arabs had been enslaved by the Jews of Palestine and that this fate awaited the Arabs of North Africa unless the Axis was victorious.
As evidence of the annihilation of the Jews in Europe filtered to the world in 1943, the Arab Nation and VFA referred to this evidence as lies – an early example of Holocaust Denial – and asserted that the Jews “would not be able to take Palestine unless the world believes they are worthy of sympathy”. Thus was the stage set for the centrality of Holocaust denial in anti-Zionism.
Propaganda was also disseminated to the effect that the Jews were the glue that held together those earmarked as enemies of both Nazi Germany and the Arabs – Britain, the USA and the Communists. Arab religious leaders referred to Hitler as the reincarnation of Jesus (Isa) who, as predicted in the Koran, would return as a warrior to defeat Islam’s enemies. Shiites in Iraq were told that Hitler was the incarnation of the Eleventh Iman who would bring victory to Islam. On 1 March 1944, el-Husseini broadcast from Berlin to Palestine: “Arabs, rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion”.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the British declined to let the Mufti and other pro-Nazi Arab leaders be prosecuted as this would lose them much-needed Arab support. Hence, the Mufti was not brought to trial for incitement and actions that at times had been more inflammatory than those of German officials, such as Otto Dietrich, who were tried at Nuremberg.
After the war the Palestine Arab Party, which supported the Mufti and was led by his cousin, Jamal al-Husseini, put pressure on the British to release all the incarcerated Axis leaders. It saw the Mufti’s wartime activity as a source of pride. Propaganda began by the Axis broadcasts was continued by the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as the governments of Syria and Egypt. The fact that Colonel Nasser hired Nazi propagandist Johan von Leers to oversee Egyptian information agencies illustrated his determination to continue to support ideas and propaganda about Jews and Israel that were rooted in Nazi propaganda and ideology.
The author has produced a very important work tracing the history of Islamic propaganda against Israel and Jews, one that demonstrates to both Islamic and Leftist anti-Zionist propagandists the company and legacy that they share.
