Benjamin Netanyahu has placed the blame for the extermination of millions of Jewish people during World War II on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in a controversial speech. The Israeli Prime Minister told the 37th World Zionist Congress this week that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews - but was convinced to exterminate them by the Muslim leader, who died in 1974. He said that the pair met in November 1941, and claimed: "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).' According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the Mufti replied: "Burn them." Mr Netanyahu has made similar claims in the past, including during a Knesset speech in 2012, where he described Husseini as "one of the leading architects" of the final solution...

From The Electronic Intifada, by Adri Nieuwhof - I mourn the loss of Hajo Meyer, a friend who fearlessly raised his voice to combat Zionism and to express his support for the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom and equality. Hajo passed away in his sleep on 23 August, just days after his ninetieth birthday. Hajo was born in 1924 and had to flee alone from Nazi Germany at the age of 14 because the Nazis would not allow him to attend school anymore. His parents sent him to the Netherlands in January 1939. A year later, the Netherlands was occupied by Germany. In 1943, Hajo went into hiding but was captured by the Gestapo in March 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz death camp where the Nazis tattooed number “179679” on his arm. After the war, Meyer returned to the Netherlands where he had a long career as a physicist. He also took up making violins in his retirement. In a previous interview with The Electronic Intifada, Hajo said: “For as long as I can, I will continue to ...

Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors have signed a letter, published as an advertisement in Saturday's New York Times, condemning "the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza" and calling for a complete boycott of Israel. According to the letter, the condemnation was prompted by an advertisement written by Elie Wiesel and published in major news outlets worldwide, accusing Hamas of "child sacrifice" and comparing the group to the Nazis. The letter, signed by 327 Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors and sponsored by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, accuses Wiesel of "abuse of history" in order to justify Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip: "…we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can ju...

From CounterPunch How Could I Not Go? An American Jew Sails to Gaza By JANE HIRSCHMANN People often ask me why I am part of a team to organize a U.S. Boat to Gaza that will be sailing this month with the next International Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza. They often make clear they are asking because I am an American Jew, whose family survived the Holocaust with some surviving family members ending up in Israel. And my only answer is: How could I not? My parents raised me with stories about what happened in Germany and their family's escape. I came to see that Israel represented for them a safe haven should there be another attempt at annihilating Jews. And yet, at the same time, they worried it was not so safe a haven given the animosity and physical threats and violence in the area. But no one ever mentioned the displacement of 750,000 Arabs that was the result of the creation of Israel. I vaguely knew there were people living there, but I was never curious about who these ...

Suzanne Weiss, Holocaust survivor voices her support for the Canadian Boat to Gaza. http://www.tahrir.ca/

From Haaretz How natural it is for Israeli spokesmen to assert that the Nakba Day marches from Syria and Lebanon were the product of incitement and foreign calculations. The state, which bases its existence on 2,000 years of longing for and belonging to this country, shows contempt toward palpable displays of belonging to and longing for the same country of those who we expelled 63 years ago - and of their descendants. The memorial day for the Holocaust, and the memorial day for the Nakba, are behind us. So the time has come to write about them both... ...Every Jew in the world, whether a citizen of the U.S. or Morocco, has rights in this one country, from the river to the sea, that we denied to those who live in it today, and those who were born in it and grow old as refugees in Lebanon or Syria. And the Oslo process? Israel devised it as a stratagem to impose the solution of reservations. Israel makes capital out of the six million to justify policies of destruction and expulsion not...

Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, a stalwart of the fight to break the siege, is interviewed at Intifada Palestine about Zionism and anti-Zionism, her optimism about the future for Palestine and much more... Ms. Epstein, your critics claim that because you are a Holocaust survivor you should be especially sensitive to the survival of Israel. How do you reconcile that with your advocacy for Palestinian rights? In some ways my being a Holocaust survivor has nothing to do with my criticism of Israel’s policies and practices. On the other hand, it is this very experience that has sensitized me to the suffering of others, especially of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government and military. What is the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust? It is that the victims and their descendants should not become victimizers of “the other,” in this case, the Palestinians. You describe yourself as “anti-Zionist.” What is the origin of that philosophy? I was born in Freiburg, a vil...

Yesterday we accused Berlusconi of thinking nothing of the suffering of the Palestinian people, but today he is reported to have tried to make amends while visiting occupied Jerusalem. But being Berlusconi he did it in the most clumsy manner possible by comparing the holocaust to the oppression of the Palestinians. This blog is on record as being against this erroneous comparison of the industrial genocide of six million people with the history of the Zionist project in Palestine, which, for all its barbarities and injustices, does not compare to the holocaust. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, courted fresh controversy yesterday by comparing the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the suffering of victims of the Holocaust. Given that Berlusconi's rise to power in Italy has relied on the support of the 'post-fascist' National Alliance should have rung alarm bells with Israelis before they lauded him for his support for their illegitimate state. After an...

LA Times has a great article profiling holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein who we've featured on this blog before about her commitment to the cause of justice for Palestine Hedy Epstein is what some might see as a contradiction in terms: a survivor of the Holocaust and also a staunch advocate for the Palestinian people. Born in 1924 in Freiburg, Germany, Epstein was 14 when she escaped from Nazi persecution via the Kinderstransport to England. Since her 1948 arrival in the U.S., Epstein has been an advocate for peace and human rights. In 2001 she founded the St. Louis chapter of the Women in Black anti-war group that originated in Israel, and has actively advocated for Palestinian rights since visiting the West Bank in 2003. As the last decade came to a close, Epstein continued her advocacy by traveling with the women’s peace advocacy group CodePink to the Gaza Freedom March. The Dec. 31 march was a planned nonviolent demonstration to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza, with 1,000 advo...

A Hamas-aligned cleric is reported (see the New York Times ) to have claimed that attempts by the UN Releif and Works Agency to introduce the teaching of the Holocaust int o gaza schools amounts to 'marketing a lie' are to be condemned. The anger is misdirected. All people should be taught about the barbarity of so called European civilisation. What should be condemned instead is the complete lack of teaching in Israeli schools of anything to do with historic Palestine and the people that lived there prior to the catastrophe that was 1948. Indeed there is a constant refrain of anti-Arab racism that is encouraged by the state and goes largely unchallenged in civil society. Also, there is no accurate teaching of the experiences of Jewish people in the Middle East, other than a distorted picture of relentless anti-semitism that hides a rich tradition in which Arab and Jews were able to live side by side for generations. When Palestinian are dying virtually on a daily basis at the ...