Israel/Palestine

Conclusion
This article has shown that the impact of antisemitism and the role of al-Husseini linked the Nazi war against the Jews with that of 1947/48. Therefore, Hillel Cohen is correct in claiming that “there can be little doubt that the Mufti’s inflexible position and refusal to accept any partition proposal were the major reasons for the outbreak of war in 1948.“74 However, the Mufti might have ended his career in 1945, had the Western powers not allowed him to escape justice and had the Arabs not protected him out of opportunism. The cowardice of important figures paved the way for one of the most fateful turning points in twentieth-century history: the war of the Arab armies against the fledgling state of Israel.

This war was not inevitable. It happened because Nazi antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda continued to dominate the political culture of the Arab world after the defeat of Germany, thus preventing any viable challenge to the antisemitic policies of the Mufti and the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore, the war of 1947/48 appears as an aftershock of the Nazi war against the Jews. The Middle East has never recovered from this watershed. To this day, Palestinian leaders continue to refuse to recognize the Jewish state. At present, Bernard Lewis’ question, “What went wrong?” recurs more persistently than ever before. To answer this question, one cannot overlook the impact of the Nazi’s antisemitic propaganda and the inability of the key Arab actors to distance themselves from it.