N a q b a h : The Self-Inflicted Catastrophe

By Dr. Asher Eder

Co-Founder, Islam-Israel Fellowship

The Palestinian leadership, in their ongoing drive to get rid of Israel, have in the recent years developed the rule to commemorate the day Israel celebrates her day of independence as their “Naqbah” – their “catastrophe”. They blame solely Israel for it, unwilling to admit this “catastrophe” as self-inflicted.

None denies that there are sufferings and misery, and that there are still many Palestinians living in refugee camps. But blaming Israel for it is a big lie, a dirty propaganda ruse.

While tracing the roots of the evil does not yet alleviate it, it is the first step for overcoming it, and for healing.

So let’s have a look at the developments which led to the “Naqbah”.

Immediately after the Balfour-Declaration in 1918 (in which England declared its willingness to help establishing a “Jewish National Home in Palestine” without infringing on the rights of the local Arab population), Mufti Amin el-Husseini appealed to the public to prevent by all means the immigration of Jews, and to drive out those who had already settled there. In this vein, he instigated the anti-Jewish riots of 1920/21 – but the English installed him as “Mufti of Jerusalem”, thereby undermining effectively the “King Feisal/Weizman Agreement” of 1919. That “Mufti of Jerusalem” by England’s grace styled himself right away as “The Grand-Mufti of Palestine”, and used his office to organize the big riots of 1929 (during which, among others, the Jewish community of Hebron got extinguished); and then those of 1936/38. The latter were directed mainly against the immigration of Jewish refugees from nazi-Germany, but also against Arab/Palestinians who preferred normal relations with the Jews over blind hatred, but whom he accused of “collaboration” with them. (During these riots his gangs killed over 700 Jews, and over 3000 (!) “collaborators”). The English chased him out, and invited Jewish and Arab leaders to the “Round Table Conference” of 1939 in London in an attempt to find a solution – but the Arab delegates refused to sit at the same table with Jews, and to talk with them. The “Grand-Mufti” who had escaped to Iraq, instigated there the big pro-nazi revolt of 1940. When it was crushed by the English, he managed to escape to nazi-Germany, befriended there himself with its leaders, raised for them two Moslem SS-divisions (from the Moslem populations of Yugoslavia and Russia then under German occupation) in the “common struggle against the Jews as the world’s enemy number one” (in adopting this nazi slogan), and called in a 1943 broadcast from Radio Berlin on the Moslem world to wage a Jihad (“Holy War”) against the Jews [note: The State of Israel and the term Israeli did not yet exist then!], and declared: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them – this is pleasing to Allah”. After his release by the French in 1945 he went to Cairo and organized with the active help of the Arab League the battles against the Jews who lived already in the country, and against those Holocaust survivors who hoped to find a haven of refuge in the ancient home land (after WWI called “Palestine” by the English, in adopting that Latin term applied by the Romans in an attempt to wipe out the name “Land of Israel” as it was called then,, cf. Matth. 2:22). The ensuing civic war of 1946/48 led to England’s withdrawal from “Palestine” on May 14, 1948. The next day, on May 15, Israel declared its independence, foremost as a defense organism against the Arab onslaught. The following day, however, troops of seven Arab countries [Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuweit] attacked the newly born state with the declared goal to wipe it out. They called upon the local Arab peoples to leave the country so that they would not be chased into the Mediterranean Sea together with the Jews – the main cause for the ensuing “refugee problem”. All these attacking Arab armies could be driven back, with the exception of the Trans-Jordanians who conquered the territory which they called then the “Westbank” (i.e. west of the Jordan River), incl. East-Jerusalem. Israel’s peace efforts which included offers to settle the refugee problem, were rebuffed by the “threefold no’s” of the ill-famous Khartoum Conference of 1968 (“No recognition of Israel; no negotiations; no settling of the refugee problem”).

In the following years, raids into Israel with all kind of terror attacks increased. Rauf el-Chodbi el-Husseini, an ardent disciple of the above “Grand-Mufti” and head of the “El-Fatah” gang, evolved as their main leader. Realizing that war against Israel under religious auspices would not be favoured widely in the Western world after the Holocaust, he gave his gang a national garb by renaming it PLO = Palestine Liberation Organization, but adopted for himself the word Arafat as his pseudonym, even nom de guerre. This term is the name of a hill next to Mecca which every Moslem pilgrim has to climb up to complete and crown his pilgrimage. With the help of this name he could assume the role of the symbol figure in the Jihad efforts against Israel. Underlining this aspect, he called his late “Minister of War” Abu Jihad = Father of the Holy War. In fact, he is only the executive organ of the Arabs’ Jihad against Israel (its goal and modus operandi were outlined in “The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research”, held in 1968 at Cairo’s Al Azhar on the behest of Gamal abd-el-Nasr, then President of Egypt). We reap only the fruits of the hatred and incitement preached there. “Oslo” did not make Arafat into a lamb; rather, it came in handy for his rhetoric. The present hostilities are termed “El-Aqsa-Intifada” - to whip up further the religious feelings of the Muslim world. The suffering of both the Jewish and the Arab/Palestinian peoples continues, and will continue till the Moslem world realizes that Jihad against Israel is a grave deviation from the teachings of the Koran, and a crime against both peoples. Abolishment of the Jihad is a pre-condition for peace.

See on this point my essay

PEACE IS POSSIBLE BETWEEN ISHMAEL AND ISRAEL

ACCORDING TO THE TANAKH AND THE KORAN

with a supportive foreword by the Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi.

Dr. Asher Eder

Jewish Co-Chairman, Islam-Israel Fellowship, Root Branch Association Ltd, Jerusalem

The essay is available from its e-mail address rb@rb.org.il; or at its web site:: www.rb.org.il or: avrason@netvision.net.il

Responding to a reader’s question about the truth of the above, Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi answered on 21/10/01 as follows:

As-salamu 'alaykum wa rahmat-Ullahi wa barakatuH.

Dear Sister,

Unfortunately it is absolutely true.

The pseudo-mufti of Jerusalem of old, Amin al-Husseini, was a very cruel man, who was appointed by the British, and then betrayed them by becoming one of Hitler's collaborators, and by broadcasting Nazi-propaganda in Arabic from Radio Berlin. He was such a bloodthirsty man, that even some of the generals of the Wehrmacht were nauseated by his idea of a "total extermination of the Jewish people".

Today's pseudo-mufti of Jerusalem, 'Ikrimah Sabri - appointed not by the British but by Yasser Arafat - is not less barbaric and criminal than his predecessor was, and the tone of his genocidal anti-Jewish propaganda is also very similar. Some months before September 11 he openly said from the pulpit "Let's exterminate all of those Jews, and LET US ALSO KILL THOSE AMERICANS WHO ARE THEIR ALLIES". Even so, the US government and the EU country are so interested in introducing his boss Arafat as a "moderate former-terrorist", that those words of the chief Mufti of PLO are regularly passed under silence. The reality of Middle East is something which must be hidden from the eyes of the world. The public opinion of civil countries must be denied the right to an objective information, otherwise the Americans and the Europeans while distrust their corrupt politicians who - because of dirty interests - openly go hands in hands with an impenitent gangster like Yasser Arafat, and even massively fund his criminal gang (PLO) thus helping it to massacre both the innocent Jewish population, and those innocent Muslims who consider living in the only democracy of Middle East a blessing, and want to live in peace with the Jewish majority.

The world must be brainwashed to the point of accepting the idea that cutting Israel into pieces in order to absurdly give a part of his to Arafat and to his bandits means "defending the rights of the Palestinians", while on the contrary means condemning them to live under the most corrupted regime which is possible to conceive (harmed cleptocracy), and also condemning the Israelis to live in danger of sudden extermination, exactly like it happened with the Nazis.

Wa-s-salamu 'alaykum wa rahmat-Ullahi wa barakatuH.

Shaykh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi

Director, Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community

e-mail: islam.inst@alice.it