13.07.23
Editorial Note
IAM notes that Western scholarship has, by and large, avoided topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians. A substantial academic industry decries Islamophobia, the purported Western fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims. In this view, the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror dramatically increased hatred of all things Muslim in Western discourse. To avoid further inflaming Islamophobia, the famously self-censoring academic community has threaded very lightly on topics of Arab and Iranian antisemitism. Iran, in particular, has so far escaped close scrutiny of its long-standing antisemitic record and persistent denial of the Holocaust.
To provide a more balanced view, IAM has taken the initiative to highlight scholars researching Middle East antisemitism.
Arguably, Dr. Matthias Küntzel, a German historian and political scientist, should be considered a leading voice in this group. He was a non-resident research associate of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University between 2004 to 2015. He is currently a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations and the German Historical Association. Kuntzel started his career some thirty years ago by exploring how Auschwitz could happen. He then moved on to investigate the impact of Nazi antisemitism on the Middle East. Küntzel’s earlier books include Germany and Iran; Jihad and Jew Hatred; Bonn & the Bomb, among others. His newest work is Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II.
By researching the Nazi archives, Kuntzel discovered that the Ministry of Propaganda of the Third Reich created an extensive propaganda network aimed at the Near and Middle East. Radio Berlin broadcasted daily programs in Arabic and Farsi, which were very popular among the public. As a young theology student, Ruhollah Khomeini listened to the Persian propaganda from Berlin and embraced it when he came to power in 1979. The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were also influenced. It became clear in their foundational writings. In those days listening to the radio was a public occasion. People sat in cafes in the town square.
In May 1942, Louis Dreyfus, the American ambassador to Iran, wrote that German propaganda “made a deep impression on the masses. The daily radio broadcasts from Berlin had been particularly effective and a film audience in the poor section of Tehran had cheered wildly for Hitler and at decidedly the wrong places when a British war film was shown. At one point, the British pressured the Iranian police to remove all radios from public places, but they were quickly restored.”
In the Arab world, the first Arabic pamphlet, Islam and Judaism, was published in August 1937 in Cairo by the Director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Egypt, who is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. In 1938 a German version of Islam and Judaism was published in Berlin under the title: “Islam – Judaism. Call of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic world in 1937”. Islam and Judaism derailed plans for a two-state solution for Palestine.
Islam and Judaism is significant because it is possibly the very first document to construct a continuity between Muhammad’s confrontation with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine, thus linking the seventh to the twentieth century. It is the first written evidence of Islamic antisemitism and the forerunner of Sayyid Qutb’s 1950 pamphlet Our Struggle with the Jews. Islam and Judaism concludes that “the verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”
According to Kuntzel, the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest antisemitic movement in the world, in 1948, with one million members, and it was determined to continue the war started by Hitler, with the help of the Mufti, to prevent a Jewish state. “Its campaign could draw on the lingering echoes of the antisemitic Nazi propaganda in which preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and wiping out the Jews living in Palestine had been constant themes.”
Kuntzel’s work provides insight into a topic that is hardly discussed.
References:
Broadcasting as a weapon: The Persian-language Nazi propaganda and its consequences
I delivered this speech on June 4, 2023 on the occasion of the Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora in Berlin
By Matthias Küntzel
Hamburg, 04.07.2023
As a German who doesn’t even read Farsi, why am I dealing with Iran? It is firstly because Iran is a particularly fascinating country with a particularly fascinating history and population. Secondly, it is because I have always followed the great uprisings of the Iranian people against Ali Khamenei and his regime and supported them in my essays: the Green Movement of 2009, the Movement of 2019, and now, of course, the Woman-Life-Freedom Uprising, which continues today while we are here in Berlin. Third, I am also particularly interested in Iran because one of my research interests is the ideology of Islamism and its connection to antisemitism.
In the beginning of my research, more than 30 years ago, I naturally wanted to know how Auschwitz could happen and why my parents were able to love Adolf Hitler as teenagers. To understand this, I focused on Nazi ideology, and specifically Nazi antisemitism.
Since the 9/11 attack in 2001, I began to study Jew-hatred in Islamic societies and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, that is, Sunni Islam. In 2005, the then Iranian President Ahmadinejad demanded that Israel be erased and disappear from the map. That same year, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was able to buy from Iranian booksellers an English written copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: the most prominent antisemitic libel and Hitler’s textbook for the Holocaust.
I started to study the reasons and roots of the Iranian regime’s hatred of Israel and its antisemitism. I was especially interested in the influence that Nazi Germany had taken to create and strengthen this hatred also in Iran.
In doing so, I discovered that the Nazis used very well done radio broadcasts to spread their hate propaganda in the Near and Middle East not only in Arabic, but also in Persian language, day after day from 1939 to 1945. After all, Ruhollah Khomeini was one of the regular listeners to the Persian-language propaganda from Berlin. This brings us to our topic – the Persian-language radio propaganda of the Nazis and its after-effects.
German-Iranian cooperation during World War II
Let me start with a few basic facts about the the special relationship between Tehran and Berlin. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany and Persia have made a great team. Persia needed Germany because it distrusted all the other great powers but was dependent on foreign technical assistance. Germany needed Iran because it was the only raw material-rich country as yet unconquered in the nineteenth-century struggle for colonies. These mutual interests produced an unparalleled level of cooperation between a Christian and a Muslim country.
Already in the First World War most Iranians had supported the Germans, who were fighting their common enemies, the British and the Russians. Moreover, the Germans also enjoyed great prestige as technicians and engineers. Since the mid-1920s, Germany had not only laid the foundations of an Iranian industrial infrastructure, but also exported technical education to Iran.
With the start of the Second World War, cooperation became especially close. In 1940 47 percent of all Iranian exports went to Nazi Germany, while Germany’s share of Iranian imports had reached 43 percent. During those years, eighty percent of all machinery in the country came from Germany.
Iran was of strategic importance for the Nazis’ warfare. According to Adolf Hitler’s plan the Wehrmacht would after the assault on the Soviet Union occupy the Caucasus and in so doing, open the way to the Middle East. Then Iran and Iraq would be conquered and the British Empire destroyed from the south. According to the Nazi plan, a pro-German mass-movement in Iran reinforced by a concentrated propaganda effort would prepare for the German invasion of that country. Fortunately, however, the war took a different course.
The Nazi radio at work
At the beginning of World War II German short-wave transmitters were broadcasting in 15 different foreign languages. However, of all the foreign-language broadcasting units, the “Orient Zone” was given “absolute priority”. It broadcast to Arabs and Persians, but also to Turks and Indians and employed about 80 people, including some 20 presenters and translators.
Editorial control was in the hands of the Foreign Office Radio Policy Department and the program content was determined in cooperation with the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht High Command’s Foreign Propaganda Department. The broadcasts were recorded in Berlin, Kaiserdamm no. 77 and then transferred by a special telephone line to Zeesen, a small village 40 kms south of Berlin.
The transmitter systems in Zeesen were equipped with state-of-the-art directional antennae. The American radio expert César Searchinger described the “huge” short-wave radio complex in Zeesen as “the biggest and most powerful propaganda machine in the world” and its “supremely cunning technology of mass influence” as “the most formidable institution for the dissemination of a political doctrine that the world has ever seen.”
While exaggerated, the assessment is not wholly false. While all the combatant powers in the Second World War used short-wave transmitters in different languages, the Zeesen radio had some special features.
Firstly, in 1936 the Olympics took place in Berlin. The overhaul of the Zeesen short wave equipment carried out in preparation for this event had greatly improved its long-range sound quality. No other station provided a better listening experience than Radio Zeesen.
Secondly, the Orient Zone editors succeeded in recruiting Bahram Shahrokh as their Persian announcer. He was an outstanding speaker with a good voice and excellent diction. A 1941 survey of German propaganda achievements in Iran boasted that “Sharokh [was] always praised as a brilliant speaker and was more popular than even others, including the enemy ones.”
Let me give you an example how Shahrokh’s antisemitic incitement in Berlin had at times a direct impact on the situation of the Jews in Iran. An Iranian Jewish woman, her name is Parvin, who was 17 years old at the time, remembers in particular a speech by Bahram Shahrokh on Radio Zeesen on the occasion of the Jewish Purim festival. Shahrokh urged the audience to exact revenge for the alleged massacre of Persians by Jews that the biblical Purim story mentions. Parvin recalls:
The next day some Muslim friends of my father came into his pharmacy and demanded an explanation. I was with him that day and heard them belittle and mock the Jews. When my father tried to explain the issue … they attacked him and grabbed his neck, whereupon my father told me to run home. I never asked, nor did I ever find out how he got rid of them.
At the same time Shahrokh presented himself as brave and cheeky. He repeatedly made barbed remarks about Reza Shah, the detested Iranian ruler. Following angry protests from Reza Shah, who was a regular listener of the German radio station, at the end of 1940 the German Foreign Office had to take Shahrokh off air, but only temporarily. In August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran, ousted Reza Shah Pahlavi from his throne and installed his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, in his stead. Shortly thereafter, Shahrokh was back on air.
Thirdly, the Zeesen broadcasts employed a crude and folksy antisemitism. In 1940 Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador to Iran, complained that, “Even if we [the British] do broadcast in Persian, we cannot hope to rival the Germans in interest, as their more violent, abusive style, with exaggerated claims … appeals to the Persian public.”
And indeed: Radio Zeesen’s programs were rabble-rousing rather than factual. Their aim was not to inform, but to incite antisemitism and to boast of German successes. They were targeted at a mass audience rather than intellectuals. Thus, the United Nations was dubbed the “United Jewish Nations,” and the Jordanian king, Emir Abdullah, was mocked as “Rabbi Abdullah” for wanting to negotiate with the Zionists.
The fourth distinguishing feature of this radio propaganda was its adaptation to Islam.
Already during World War I, many Shi’ite clerics had demonstrated reverence for the German Emperor as a protector and a secret convert to Islam. Hitler, for as long as the Germans were winning, was an even better figure upon which to project such a myth. A report on this matter by the German Ambassador in Tehran, Erwin Ettel, of February 1941 is illuminating:
For months, reports have been reaching the Embassy from the most varied sources that throughout the country clerics are speaking out, telling the faithful about old, enigmatic prophesies and dreams which they interpret to mean that God has sent the Twelfth Imam into the world in the shape of Hitler. Wholly without Embassy involvement, an increasingly influential propaganda theme has come into being, in which the Führer and therefore Germany are seen as the deliverers from all evil.
The German short-wave radio station was happy to exploit these fantasies in its Farsi broadcasts. However, Erwin Ettel was not satisfied. The Imam-belief strengthened the love of Germany, but it contributed little to hatred of the Jews. Here was still work for him to do.
It was understood in Berlin that German-style antisemitism would have little resonance in Iran. “The broad masses lack a feeling for the race idea,” explained the propaganda expert of the German embassy in Tehran. He therefore laid “all the emphasis on the religious motif in our propaganda in the Islamic world. This is the only way to win over the Orientals.” But how exactly could Nazi Germany, of all countries, conduct a religious propaganda campaign? Ambassador Ettel had an idea:
“A way to foster this development would be to highlight Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews in ancient times and that of the Führer in modern times,” Ettel recommended to the Foreign Office. “Additionally, by identifying the British with the Jews, an exceptionally effective anti-English propaganda campaign can be conducted among the Shi’ite people.”
Ettel even picked out the appropriate Koranic passages: firstly, sura 5, verse 82: “Truly you will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans”; and, secondly, the final sentence of chapter 2 of Mein Kampf: “In resisting the Jew, I do the work of the Lord.”
Ettel’s proposal demonstrates that the Nazis sought to use religion to create an implacable hostility to the Jews. Again and again the program makers of the Orient Zone repeated only those verses from the Koran that are suitable for presenting the Jews as “enemies of Islam.” Let me quote the historian David Motadel:
Berlin made explicit use of religious rhetoric, terminology, and imagery and sought to … reinterpret religious doctrine and concepts to manipulate Muslims for political and military purposes. … German propaganda combined Islam with anti-Jewish agitation to an extent that had not hitherto been known in the modern Muslim world.
These, then, were the four special characteristics of Radio Zeesen’s Iranian broadcasts: First, the excellent sound quality, second, its popular speaker, third, the populist agitation, and fourth, the use and abuse of religion.
What do we know about the resonance of this propaganda among the Iranian population?
We must keep in mind that during the 1930s short-wave radios offered a medium with a great power of attraction. In his memoirs, Grand Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri recalls the installation of a radio in an Isfahan coffee house at the end of the 1930s: “Thousands of people” had come to see and hear the radio including Montazeri himself, who was wondering, “what is a radio?”
In those days listening to the radio was a public occasion. People did so in coffee houses and bazaars. Sometimes the radio would be placed on a pedestal in the town square around which the information hungry would gather. For example, the population in the center of Tehran was regularly bombarded with German news at the Maidan-I-Sepah Square. What had been heard would immediately then be talked about, further extending the reach of the programs’ message. It has been estimated that by the start of the 1940s, “about a million people were regularly listening to the radio in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Obviously, Germany’s Farsi-language wartime broadcasts enjoyed great popularity. Let me quote Iranian writer Amir Hassan Sheheltan:
In many newspapers and private notes of the time we find reports of how in the late 1930s … during the broadcast of the Farsi-language news from Berlin people would gather together on the steps of the tea houses with a radio set in order to listen to the Germans’ reports of their territorial gains on the various fronts. The reports inspired the fantasy of the crowd on the street that every victory corresponded to a defeat for the colonial powers, the Soviet Union and Britain, which they cheered and applauded.
Moreover, after the deposition of Reza Shah in 1941 by Britain and the Soviet Union, many fervently awaited the German invasion of Iran, hoping that it would put an end to the hated British-Soviet occupation. Now the Nazis’ radio propaganda was more than just commentary on the war: it was an instrument in the service of the “liberation” of Iran by German forces.
“In those days”, according to an American journalist, “swastikas were painted on the walls of many houses in Tehran. Bazaar traders sold pictures of Hitler. The new Shah recalled that, ’… the German … propaganda was very effective. … The propagandists always depicted Hitler as a Muslim and descendant of the Prophet. He was said to have been born with a green band around his body’.”
In May 1942, also Louis Dreyfus, the American ambassador to Iran at the time, was alerted:
German propaganda … made a deep impression on the masses. The daily radio broadcasts from Berlin had been particularly effective and a film audience in the poor section of Tehran had cheered wildly for Hitler and at decidedly the wrong places when a British war film was shown. At one point, the British pressured the Iranian police to remove all radios from public places, but they were quickly restored, again at British request, when it was found, strangely, that one could not tune in the British broadcasts either, without a radio.
Finally, in June 1942, the BBC reported: “Although action is been taken to make effective the ban on public listening to Axis broadcasts, it seems that listening in private houses is still widely practiced. As a result it appears that many people are still convinced that the Axis powers will win the war; Hitler, moreover, is said to enjoy great personal popularity.”
At the same time, after the fall of Reza Shah, who, despite his admiration for Hitler, did not share the latter’s antisemitism, Jew-hatred began to play a greater role in the Zeesen broadcasts. Among the regular listeners to this material was a man of whom the world was later to hear much more: Ruhollah Khomeini.
“Germany’s Persian service was, during the war, to enjoy the widest possible audience in Iran and Iraq”, writes Amir Taheri in his biography of Khomeini. When, in winter 1938 Khomeini, then aged thirty-six, returned from Iraq to Qum in Iran, he
had brought with him a radio set made by the British company Pye which he had bought from an Indian Muslim pilgrim. The radio proved a good buy. … It also gave him a certain prestige. Many mullahs and talabehs would gather at his home, often on the terrace, in the evenings to listen to Radio Berlin [= Radio Zeesen] and the BBC.
Even though Khomeini opposed Hitler and National Socialism, it is reasonable to assume that there is a link between the eruption of his Jew-hatred in 1963 and the invective from Berlin that he had imbibed over the radio 20 years previously.
Did Radio Zeesen influence Ayatollah Khomeini?
Research on the impact of the Nazi’s radio propaganda in Iran has just begun and many additional discoveries can be expected. What we can conclude today is that this radio propaganda changed the generell perception of the so-called Jewish danger.
In 1963, the Nazi seeds may have bore fruits when Khomeini enriched his anti-Shah campaign with anti-Jewish slogans. Now his religious warning cry “Attack on Islam” was replaced by the antisemitic battle cry “Jews and foreigners wish to destroy Islam!”
Khomeini’s most important book, The Islamic State, published in 1971, is full of antisemitic invective. Let me quote just one sentence: ”[T]he Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that – God Forbid – they may one day achieve their goal.”
Such fantasies about Jewish world domination were never part of the Shiite tradition. Here Khomeini has adopted a key idea of European antisemitism and linked it to his religion-based anti-Judaism. Khomeini had been a regular listener to the Nazis’ wartime Farsi-language broadcasts and, although it cannot in retrospect be proven, it would seem obvious that his fantasy had at least partly been shaped by this six-year-long barrage of antisemitic Nazi propaganda.
In addition, Radio Zeesen propagated exactly the kind of genocidal anti-Zionism which became prevalent after the Islamic revolution.
We have to keep in mind that between 1906 and 1979 no other Muslim country had such an enlightened religious leadership as Iran; a religious leadership that also accepted Iran’s good relationship with Israel.
As early as 1967, however, Khomeini started to preach a genocidal hatred against Israel. It is the “duty” of all Muslims, he told his followers during that year, “to annihilate unbelieving and inhuman Zionism.”
After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, three things happend: First, Khomeini ordered the execution of Iran’s most prominent Jew, Habib Elghanian, in a sustained effort to intimidate the Iranian Jewish community.
Second: He moderated his tone and promised to spare Iranian Jews, provided they accepted a subordinate status and radically distanced themselves from Israel.
Third: Iran’s new rulers began to concentrate their anti-Jewish hatred on Israel. They began to use the term “Zionist” the way Hitler used the word “Judas”: as a cipher for all evil in the world. “From the beginning,” Khomeini declared in 1981, “one of our main goals was the destruction of Israel.”
The real aim of Khomeini’s struggle with the Jews was, in my opinion, the wish to fight all aspects of modernity that could undermine his conservative concept of Islam. This connection between antisemitism and anti-modernism also explains the popularity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which is of Russian origin, in the Islamic world.
This text was conceived as a rallying cry against liberalism: in order to drive forward the struggle against individual freedom the latter is denounced as the main tool of a global Jewish conspiracy. Ideas originally disseminated a hundred years previously by Tsarist agents in order to save Tsarism are today being repeated by key leaders of Islam in order to secure the domination of a conservative Islam.
At the beginning of my talk I mentioned the Woman-Life-Freedom Uprising, which continues today while we are here in Berlin. The courage of the women of Iran and their persistent fight for freedom is for me still a bright beacon of hope for the future.
But for this hope to be realized, it is – I think – essential to also look back and answer the question – What went wrong? – which I at least partly tried to do today. Thank you for your attention.
(The sources of the quotes can be found in my book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II, to be published by Routledge in August 2023. Please visit the Homepage of Berlin’s Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora here.)
Bild: Rundfunkempfänger Telefunken Super “Zeesen” T 875 WK. Quelle: Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin · Lizenz: CC0 – No rights reserved · Bild wurde beschnitten und farblich angepasst.
========================================
The 1948 Arab war against Israel: An aftershock of World War II?
In introduction to some discoveries and arguments of my new book: “Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II”.
By Matthias Küntzel
FATHOM, JUNE 2023
Is there any connection between the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews that ended in May 1945 and the war of the Arab armies against Israel which started in May 1948? It’s an obvious question, but one that is rarely asked. Why?
The answer is because – at least this is my assumption – the provable existence of threads of continuity between 1945 and 1948 calls into question cherished certainties: for example, the conviction that the Arab movement against Zionism and Israel had nothing to do with the Nazi fantasies of the previous phase and that Israel, i.e. Jews, were mainly responsible for the 1948 war and antisemitism in the region.
My new book Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East(Routledge, August 2023) challenges this conventional wisdom. It offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Arab-Israel war of 1948.
The central role of Nazi antisemitism in the planning and implementation of the Shoah is well known. The impact of that same Nazi antisemitism on the Middle East, on the other hand, remains gravely under-researched.
My book aims to fill this gap to the extent currently possible. It sets forth the methods used by Nazi Germany from 1937 onwards to disseminate its antisemitism in the Middle East in the Arabic language and the role that this antisemitism would play 11 years later, when the Arab armies fell upon the newly founded Jewish state of Israel. This fateful war triggered the Palestinian refugee catastrophe that has marked the Middle East conflict ever since.
The spread of antisemitism in the Middle East did have something to do with the Zionist movement and the building of the Jewish state. There was, however, more than one way to respond to these developments. There were, for example, Egyptians who welcomed the “victory of the Zionist idea [as] the turning point for … the revival of the Orient”. Others, such as the ruler of Transjordan, Emir Abdullah, sought sometimes more, sometimes less cooperation with the Zionists. A third group may have opposed Zionism, but not Judaism, while initially it was only the supporters of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin El-Husseini, who adopted the antisemitic approach.
The Nazis exclusively backed this last group. They saw the clashes in Palestine as an opportunity to promote their form of Jew-hatred and to impose an antisemitic interpretation on the local conflict.
Only in recent years has the significance of the Nazis’ Arabic-language propaganda in the Arab world been brought to light, notably through the pioneering work of Jeffrey Herf. In 2009 he introduced us to the content of the manuscripts of the Nazis’ Arabic-language broadcasts in his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. Five years later, David Motadel published further important findings in his study Islam And Nazi Germany’s War.
Building on these studies, the current book presents a series of new facts that have the potential to change our view of the past and present of the Middle East conflict.
1937: Islam and Judaism
Firstly, I set out what is currently known about the origin and dissemination of the pamphlet Islam and Judaism, which was first published in 1937 in Cairo in order to derail plans for a two-state solution for Palestine. It is a shocking text that uses religion for the sole purpose of inciting Jew-hatred.
Islam and Judaism is significant because it is, as far as we know, the very first document to construct a continuity between Muhammad’s confrontation with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine, thus linking the seventh to the twentieth century. It is the first written evidence for what I call Islamic antisemitism and the forerunner of Sayyid Qutb’s 1950 pamphlet Our struggle with the Jews.
Islam and Judaism concludes with the following words:
[T]he verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.
“Free of the Jews” – “Judenfrei” – is a typical Nazi expression which we do not find in early Islamic writing.
The first Arabic version of Islam and Judaism was published in August 1937 in Cairo by the Director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Egypt, who is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents.
In 1938 a German version of Islam and Judaism was published in Berlin under the title: “Islam – Judaism. Call of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic world in 1937”.
Finally, during the Second World War, this brochure was printed and distributed in large numbers by German forces and translated into several languages. A translation of this document appears as an appendix to my book.
The very date of the pamphlet’s publication and dissemination – 11 years before the foundation of Israel and 30 years before Israel’s assumption of control in Gaza and the West Bank – is important. It contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds.
It was not the behaviour of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text but rather the very first attempt to implement a two-state solution for Palestine. This fact suggests that Jew-hatred was a cause, not a consequence of the crises in the Middle East conflict.
1938/39: Goebbels and the Muslim Brotherhood
Secondly, I present new archival discoveries relating to the collaboration between German Nazi agents and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Documents from the British National Archive reveal that this collaboration was known about at the highest levels in Germany and that, according to one note, “GOEB. [Goebbels] has spoken about it with much praise.”
Nazi agents not only transferred money to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also attended conferences of this organization, held common “Palestine meetings” with it and gave lectures to its members on “the Jewish question”.
After 1945, this Nazi operation paid off when that very same Muslim Brotherhood, now grown into an influential mass movement, pushed the Arab rulers into war against Israel.
1939-1945: Arabic-language radio propaganda
Thirdly, I analyze the six years of antisemitic radio propaganda in Arabic that the Nazis broadcast from the small town of Zeesen near Berlin which – unlike the written text – could reach the Arab masses. Back then, listening to the radio was a public affair: The men listened to it at the bazaar, in marketplaces and in coffee houses. The content of the programs would become the dominant topic of conversation, multiplying their impact.
This is what the British secret service reported on the impact of Radio Zeesen:
In general it may be said that the middle, lower middle and lower classes listen to the Arabic broadcasts from Berlin with a good deal of enjoyment. They like the racy, ‘juicy’ stuff which is put over. … What the average Palestine Arab does imbibe, however, is the anti-Jew material. This he wants to hear and to believe; and he does both. To that extent German propaganda is definitely effective.
The “anti-Jew material” was effective because the Nazis could build on the patterns of early Islamic anti-Judaism and instrumentalize the local conflict with the Zionists. In addition, the BBC and the other Allied broadcasters gave in to the Nazis by failing directly to challenge their anti-Jewish incitement. None of them wanted to be seen as defenders or even “accomplices” of the Jews – thus confirming aspects of the Nazi propaganda.
My book shows that in retrospect, those six years of daily radio propaganda marked a turning point dividing Middle Eastern history into a before and an after. These years worsened the image of the Jews in the Arab world. They fostered an exclusively anti-Jewish reading of the Qur’an. They popularized the European world-conspiracy myths. They shaped a genocidal rhetoric towards Zionism. A consequence of this propaganda was that by 1948 large swathes of the Arab public viewed a Jewish state as a mortal threat that had to be violently destroyed.
1944: weapons “for the battles to follow”
Fourthly, I describe certain measures taken by the Nazis in 1944/45 to prepare for the forthcoming war against Israel. With their own defeat looming, they wished to preserve their antisemitic legacy by taking steps to prevent the future establishment of a Jewish state.
Thus, in his memoirs, Amin el-Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, relates that in October 1944 the Wehrmacht provided aircraft to store ammunition and weapons in Palestine as “preparations for the days after the end of World War II” and “for their preparation for the battles to follow”.
On 6 October 1944 five Nazi parachutists did indeed fly out from Athens to land in the Jordan valley with the task of hiding crates of weapons that they had previously dropped from the plane. Ten days later they were captured by the British. While this may have been an isolated and ineffective action, it nonetheless provides a direct link between the Nazis’ world war and the “battles to follow” in Palestine.
1947/1948: Arab hesitation, Islamist mobilization
Fifth, my book shows that Arab attitudes toward Zionism were less monolithic than has often been assumed. Thus, already in 1937, there were many Arabs who supported the two-state solution for Palestine. Admittedly, in 1947 the Arab League unanimously opposed the two-state solution for Palestine advocated by the United Nations in November 1947.
Even so, how to react to this decision was disputed until the last minute: on several occasions the Arab League ruled out the possibility of an attack by regular Arab forces on the Jewish state. Egypt, for example, questioned this war, which began on May 15, 1948, only a few days before it began: “We shall never even contemplate entering an official war”, declared General Muhammad Haidar, Egypt’s Defence Minister, at the beginning of May 1948. “We are not mad”.
Why did an “official war” against Israel nevertheless take place? My book provides evidence that it was primarily pressure from the “Arab street” and the antisemitic campaigns of the Muslim Brotherhood that led the Arab rulers to overcome all their doubts and attack Israel.
In 1948 the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest antisemitic movement in the world, with one million members. It was determined to continue the war to prevent a Jewish state started by Hitler and the Mufti. Its campaign could draw on the lingering echoes of the antisemitic Nazi propaganda in which preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and wiping out the Jews living in Palestine had been constant themes.
This war was not inevitable. It took place despite many countervailing considerations because the Nazis’ antisemitic Arabic-language propaganda had shaped the postwar political climate. In this feverish atmosphere, no Arab leader felt able to successfully resist the Brotherhood’s warmongering.
There are, therefore, good grounds for interpreting the Arab war against Israel as a kind of aftershock of the previous Nazi war against the Jews. Amin el-Husseini embodied the continuity of the two events. His religiously packaged antisemitism, which had cost thousands of Jews their lives in 1944, was four years later directed against Israel.
Why the ignorance?
So why then is the role of Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies largely ignored in debates on the roots of antisemitism in the Middle East? A plausible hypothesis is that this pattern of omission reflects a desire to protect a proposition that is accepted as dogma in many academic circles: the idea that Israel, i.e. Jews, bears sole responsibility not only for the war in 1948, but also the antisemitism in the region. Claims such as “The spread of antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is the consequence of the Palestine conflict” are widespread.
From this paradigm, numerous Middle East experts derive mitigating circumstances for Arab antisemitism. “Is the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists … the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupation and/or destruction of Arab lands?”, is the rhetorical question of the British-Lebanese anti-Zionist Gilbert Achcar. “Arab antisemitism, in contrast to European anti-Semitism, is at least based on a real problem, namely the marginalization of the Palestinians,” insists German Islam researcher Jochen Müller.
This paradigm, which distinguishes between a Nazi-like European antisemitism and an “at least” understandable hatred of Jews in the Middle East, hides the Nazi influence on the image of Jews held by many Muslims in the Middle East. And it has political consequences: The basic assumption that antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is merely a response to Israel and can therefore be downplayed as a kind of local custom is one of the foundations of German and European Middle East policy and may be one of the reasons why the latter refuses to decisively combat the Jew-hatred of, for example, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.
It is, however, necessary to understand how strongly modern Middle East history is shaped by the aftermath of National Socialism. Only then will we be able to properly understand and adequately counter the antisemitism in this region and its echo among Muslims in Europe and address the political realities of the Middle East realistically and effectively.
Please find the original Fathom publication here.
Image: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, greeting Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS volunteers with a Nazi salute. November 1943. Source: Wikimedia Commons · Author: Mielke · License: CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Image is cropped and color graded.