Hitler’s ally, the Grand Mufti, and the roots of Hamas’s anti-Semitism

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who lived from 1897 to 1974, was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who initiated the Arab struggle against Jewish settlers and who not only allied himself with Hitler but also helped to spread Nazi anti-Semitism throughout the Jewish world. His figure had already been examined by Renzo De Felice in his book "Fascism and the East", which, however, also analysed fascism’s relations with revisionist Zionism and Indian nationalism. A detailed biography of him has now been published in the volume "Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Priest of Terror: The Islamic Project of Extermination from Mussolini to 7 October” by Carmen Dal Monte and Ilaria Sechi, which is being presented this evening at the Il Pitigliani Italian Jewish Centre in Rome. The event features contributions from Pierluigi Battista and Andrea Carteny, and is moderated by Della Rocca.

Ilaria Sechi is an independent researcher in historical sciences, with a particular focus on socio-political issues. Carmen Dal Monte is CEO of Takeflight, a company operating in the field of artificial intelligence for schools and businesses; she also specialises in contemporary history and the history of anti-Semitism, and, as president of the Progressive Jewish Community of Bologna, organised a public event in the square to commemorate 7 October. As she reminds us, “Hajj Amin al-Husseini devised a fusion between Islamic tradition – based on Qur’anic verses and the Hadith relating to the conflict between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Medina – and European-origin conspiracy theories, of which the Protocols of the Elders of Zion constituted the foundational text. The result was anti-Semitism transformed into a theological obligation, rooted in the word of God and therefore immune to being disproved by experience or altered by circumstances”.

He then organised the Hebron pogrom of 24 August 1929, which is presented as the starting point of the path leading to 7 October 2023. And yet, “despite al-Husseini’s central role in 20th-century history – demonstrated by his collaboration with Hitler and Himmler, his role in recruiting Muslim SS divisions in the Balkans, and his contribution to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Arab and Islamic world – his figure has been largely obscured by Western historiography”. This attitude, in some respects, continues the favourable treatment al-Husseini had already received during his lifetime. “When the Nuremberg Tribunal convened to try the architects of the Nazi genocide, one name was conspicuously absent from the dock. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had been included by Tito’s Yugoslavia on the United Nations’ list of war criminals. The tribunal knew where he was. No one went to arrest him. On the day Germany’s surrender was signed, al-Husseini flew to Switzerland. The Swiss said, ‘No, for heaven’s sake, we haven’t seen you,’ and sent him on to France. He stayed there for a year; everyone knew where he was, but no one went to fetch him.”

So? “The dominant historiographical interpretation reduces al-Husseini to a minor opportunist seeking Nazi patronage for his own nationalist ends. Yet al-Husseini was not a collaborator but an active ideological partner: the man who enabled Nazism to survive its military defeat in 1945 by transforming it into a political-religious framework rooted in Islamic theology”. “This transformation operated through three fundamental moves: the reframing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as documentary confirmation of the Qur’anic warnings about Jewish wickedness; the reduction of the biography of the Prophet Muhammad to a single, obsessive theme of eternal enmity towards the Jews; and the theorisation of doctrinal parallels between National Socialism and Islam that enshrined political violence as a religious duty. The result was an ideological framework that did not die with the Reich. It transformed, migrated and reproduced itself — through the Arabic broadcasts of Radio Zeesen, through the recruitment of Bosnian Muslim divisions into the Waffen-SS, through the systematic recycling of Nazi cadres into the secret services of Egypt and Syria after 1945, through the founding documents of the European networks of the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally through the Hamas charter and the massacre of 7 October 2023”.

So, a specific reference to current events. “On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest terrorist attack against Israel since the Holocaust, killing 1,195 people in a single morning. The underlying causes of that attack have remained largely unexplored in Western public debate. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism has returned to the streets of European capitals with an intensity not seen since the Second World War. Universities, the media and public squares have revived narratives about the Middle East conflict that are rooted, often unconsciously, precisely in the ideological framework that this book reconstructs. The book therefore provides the historical tools to understand what is happening today. Not as a political pamphlet, but as a well-researched essay that reveals to the reader the causal link between the past and the present.”

Consequently, anti-Semitism is not a reaction to Israel. “Modern Islamic anti-Semitism did not emerge as a reaction to the founding of Israel in 1948, nor to the 1967 occupation. It arose in 1937, eleven years before the State of Israel came into existence, as a deliberate tool to preclude any peaceful compromise. Al-Husseini’s text "Islam and Judaism", delivered at the Bloudan Conference in Syria in 1937, is identified by the historian Matthias Küntzel as the founding document of modern Islamic anti-Semitism. Al-Husseini was the man who enabled Nazism to survive its military defeat by bringing it to the Middle East and introducing it into both the political and religious frameworks of Islamic theology. After working as a propagandist for the Axis on Radio Zeesen and Radio Bari, and having recruited Muslim SS members after the war, he helped to facilitate the resettlement of Nazi leaders in Middle Eastern countries.”

Generally speaking, the perception is that Nazi leaders ended up mainly in South America… “Many did, some in the United States, some even in Russia, but it’s not as though they’re starting to do what they did before there. Al-Husseini, on the other hand, recruits them to do in the Middle East what they did before, for example by collaborating on Nasser’s missile programme. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged from al-Husseini, and Hamas emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood. There really is a direct line, a lineage to which even the PLO is not entirely unrelated, given that Arafat claimed to be related to al-Husseini. This is probably true, although the matter remains vague: at times he said he was his uncle, at other times he said he was his cousin. But he needed this connection, because that kinship allowed him to gain credibility. Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood, the PLO and Hamas all use the same economic networks and the same methods of economic exploitation that al-Husseini used. It is currently reported that Hamas executes alleged collaborators and terrorizes the population. Al-Husseini employed the same strategy: upon becoming Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, he dispatched squads to Arab villages suspected of cooperating with the Jews. Those who did not cease collaborating were publicly hanged, with their bodies left as a warning: this is the fate of those who collaborate with the Jews. Even the lie that the Jews wanted to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque – which also gave its name to Hamas’s operation on 7 October – was invented by al-Husseini. Al-Husseini was also the man who, between 1942 and 1944, toured the mosques of Yugoslavia to recruit Bosnian Muslims. They were organised into three regiments, and two of these went on to hunt down partisans and Jews using methods that made even the Germans shudder.”

As De Felice rightly pointed out, based on the principle that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, al-Husseini was not the only opponent of colonialism and imperialism practised by the Allied powers who sought support from the Axis. We find similar movements and leaders in Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, India, the USSR, and for a time even within so-called revisionist Zionism… “But in him there is precisely this additional factor of anti-Semitism, which led him to write his pamphlet Islam and Judaism, in which he recycled the theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and grafted them onto the tradition of the Qur’anic surahs. A great many imams contested this, but in the end it was his interpretation that gained ground.”

Moreover, similar but ultimately lesser instances of Ukrainian nationalism are being used not only by Russia to justify its aggression under the banner of ‘denazification’, but also to reject Ukrainian symbols at the 25 April demonstrations by groups which, conversely, appear to have no qualms about the role of the pro-Nazi al-Husseini in the history of the Palestinian movement.