By Daniel Margrain

Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert last week confirmed what everybody except neoNazi Holocaust deniers and neoZionists like Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu have long understood when he said that the “responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans.” Netanyahu’s offensive and slanderous contrarian view made during an address to the 37th Zionist Congress, came after a day of violence that saw five Palestinians, including alleged attackers, killed in the occupied territories and an Israeli killed in a traffic incident in the West Bank.

In his speech, Netanyahu focused on incitement, saying Palestinian incitement could be traced back to before the creation of the Israeli state, and claimed that a Palestinian religious leader had encouraged Adolf Hitler to carry out the Holocaust. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, “flew to Berlin,” Netanyahu said. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.”

However, contrary to Netanyahu’s account, there is not a single reference in the entire text of the official record of the conversation between Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini to “Jew burning”. The fact that most Holocaust scholars insist the first death camps were formed before the 1941 meeting between Husseini and Hitler would seem to suggest that Hitler’s plan was already in place by the time they met.

But just as significant, Netanyahu’s lies underscore the secret history that ideologically links Zionism to Hitler fascism. This includes outright collaborations with the Nazis predicated on the notion that the formation of a Zionist state would be part of the system of colonial domination of the rest of the world.

In setting out the Zionist programme, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl in a 1896 pamphlet called The State of the Jews, called for a Jewish state to be set up in an under developed country outside Europe with the backing of one of the major imperialist powers in order to support the former’s colonizing of it. To achieve this aim the Zionists aligned themselves with notorious anti-Semites that included Count Von Plehve, the sponsor of the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia.

In 1933, The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazis and later that year the World Zionist Organization congress defeated a resolution for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43. The author Ralph Schoenman notes in the Hidden History of Zionism:

Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of the allied governments – only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.

The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes that menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the enterprise.

Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first leader, wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement that followed the 1947 partition of the country into separate Jewish and Palestinian states by the leading imperial powers. This was despite the fact that the Jews comprised just 31 per cent of the population but had been given 54 per cent of the fertile land. The end goal for Ben-Gurion and the Zionists was the aspiration towards the establishment of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) – a fascistic concept no different in principle to the aims of the Nazi’s.

The Zionist project could only be completed if the Palestinian’s were expelled from their historical homeland. In 1948 this policy was put into effect. Just as Ben-Gurion needed the persecution of the Jews in order to justify his colonization of a foreign land, Netanyahu needs to persuade modern day Israeli Jews of the racist revisionist myth that rejects Hitler’s main responsibility for the Holocaust.

Netanyahu’s outrageous speech effectively lets Hitler off the hook with the aim of putting the blame for the suffering of the Jews and Hitler’s Final Solution on the shoulders of the Palestinian people so as to self-justify his continued obliteration of them.

When in 2005 Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, allegedly denied the Holocaust, there was legitimate uproar and worldwide condemnation and media saturation coverage of his comments. This is in sharp contrast to the lack of mainstream media coverage following Netanyahu’s remarks that were no less offensive and outrageous.

Given that Netanyahu underplayed the role Hitler played in the Holocaust, neither he, or his fellow Jewish extremist fundamentalists, have any wriggle room with which to critique, with any credibility, Holocaust deniers ever again.