40 No. 72 JUSTICE [The] Wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clearer, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400,000,000 Arabs oppose this criminal American involvement… Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you.15 [emphasis in original] Already in the last year of World War II, Brooklyn Congressman Emmanuel Celler urged that Husseini and other foreign collaborators with the Nazis be included among those to be indicted in war crimes trials that were then in the planning. Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation magazine, I. F. Stone, writer for The Nation, and Alexander Uhl of the New York Post, joined Stephen Wise and Abba Silver in the American Zionist Emergency Council in an unsuccessful effort to bring “the Mufti” to trial. Without success, they urged the French government, which held him under house arrest from May 1945 to June 1946 to extradite him to Britain or to a war crimes trial.16 In the process, they produced a remarkable amount of material regarding his wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany, certainly enough to justify an indictment. Nevertheless, as the files of the French Foreign Ministry make clear, the French government decided that sending Husseini to be tried for war crimes would damage French interests in North Africa and the Middle East.17 His house arrest at a villa outside Paris was so lenient that he was able to escape in disguise and fly to Cairo. The government of Egypt granted him asylum and provided a security detail around his residence. The Allies’ refusal to bring Husseini to trial after World War II should be understood as a chapter in the larger history of the beginnings of the Cold War in Europe. The collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition, and its replacement with the Cold War fronts, fostered a desire to displace the mentalities of anti-fascism in the past, and the serious reckoning of the Nuremberg interregnum of 1945 to 1949, with a willingness to integrate former Nazis and their collaborators.18 Even during the most serious years of postwar reckoning, the American, British, and French governments declined to bring Husseini and other Arab collaborators into court. A trial of Husseini would have done much to reveal the depth of his collaboration and his Jew-hatred to a global audience as documented in 15. Cited in Herf, Nazi PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD, 213, supra note 10. 16. Jeffrey Herf, “Zionist Momentum and the War Crimes Issue in the United States,” in ISRAEL’S MOMENT: INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT FOR AND OPPOSITION TO ESTABLISHING THE JEWISH STATE, 1945-1949, 24-68 (Cambridge UK, and N.Y.: Cambridge University Press 2022). 17. Jeffrey Herf, “Haj Amin al-Husseini and the French Government, May 1945-May 1946,” ISRAEL’S MOMENT 106-130 (N.Y.: Columbia University Press 2022). 18. Magnes Bretchken ed., AUFARBEITUNG DES NATIONALSOZIALISMUS; EIN KOMPENDIUM (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2021); see also Norbert Frei, ADENAUER’S GERMANY AND THE NAZI PAST (N.Y.: Columbia University Press 2002); Mary Fulbrook, RECKONINGS: LEGACIES OF NAZI PERSECUTION AND THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE (Oxford and N.Y.: Oxford University Press 2018); Jeffrey Herf, DIVIDED MEMORY: THE NAZI PAST IN THE TWO GERMANYS (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press 1997); Tony Judt, POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 (New York: Penguin 2005); Henri Rousso, THE VICHY SYNDROME: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN FRANCE SINCE 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991). 19. Supra note 15. the files of Allied governments and in captured German records. It might have damaged his ability to renew his political activities without the slightest effort to express regret for his activities in Nazi Berlin. That, at any rate, was the view of liberals and leftists in the United States, who were aware of the failure of their efforts to bring Husseini to justice.19 Instead of reckoning, Husseini received a hero’s welcome from Hassan al-Banna, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, when he returned from France in June 1946. On June 11, al-Banna issued the following statement: … The hearts of the Arabs palpitated with joy at hearing that the Mufti has succeeded in reaching an Arab country. The news sounded like thunder to the ears of some American, British and Jewish tyrants. The lion is at last free, and he will roam the Arabian jungle to clear it of the wolves… What a hero, what a miracle of a man…Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. German and Hitler are gone but
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=