On 13 November 1974, Yassir Arafat, chairman of the PLO, addressed the United Nations General Assembly. His speech was written by a Palestinian writer and PLO member named Mahmoud Darwish, and it elicited a firm reply from Israel’s UN ambassador Yosef Tekoah. “Palestine Uprooted” cites Darwish’s poetry and presents an identical version of the 1948 war to that presented by Arafat and Darwish 52 years ago. That speech presented the Palestine Arabs of 1948 as the innocent victims of Zionist perfidy. It was a justification for the resort to war and terror that was the PLO’s modus operandi when Arafat spoke. Arafat and Darwish erased the responsibility that Palestinian and Arab nationalists bore for the war of 1948 and its consequences. That denial is at the centre of the version of events now being presented at a government-supported museum for human rights in Canada.
Neither Arafat in 1974 nor the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition today mention that the Arabs had rejected all suggestions of partition before they went to war in 1948. The first of these was proposed by the British Government’s Peel Commission in 1937. The Zionists accepted an offer of what would have been a state far smaller than the one that later emerged. The Palestine Arabs rejected the proposal and left no room for negotiation. They were led by Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By the mid-1930s, his hatred of Judaism, Jews, and Zionism had attracted the attention of Nazi Germany’s consulate in Jerusalem. Between 1936 and 1939, he led an Arab revolt in Palestine against the Zionists and those Arabs who wanted to coexist with the Zionist project.
In 1937, Husseini fled Palestine after the British authorities tried to arrest him, and he elaborated his views in an important essay titled “Islam and Jewry” that was read in his absence to a pan-Arab nationalist conference in Bludan, Syria. The following year, a publisher in Berlin close to the Nazi regime published the text in German as Islam-Judentum. “Islam and Jewry” is a foundational text of Islamist ideology—a radical political interpretation of Islam that describes Jews as the enemies of Islam since the days of Mohammed. Husseini depicted the Zionist project as the latest episode in seven centuries of Jewish aggression against Islam and Muslims.
With arguments like these,
Husseini and Hassan al-Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, helped to transform a secular dispute over borders and territory into a religious campaign. This made opposition to any Jewish state in the land of British Mandate Palestine a religious obligation for all Muslims, in Palestine and everywhere else. The result, from the 1930s to the present, has been a long religious war to prevent and then to destroy the state of Israel.Husseini spent 1941–5 in Berlin, where he and his entourage produced Arabic-language radio broadcasts that the Nazi regime sent via shortwave radio to audiences across the Middle East. Husseini occasionally spoke on these broadcasts in his own name and repeated—often word for word—the arguments he made in “Islam and Jewry.” He insisted that it was the religious obligation of all Muslims to oppose the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine. He stated that the victory of Nazi Germany in World War II was in the interests of the Palestine Arabs because it would bring about the defeat of their enemies—the Allied Powers and the Jews.
https://quillette.com/2026/09/22/history-uprooted-war-of-independence-palestine-...
Forum
Pages: 
