“Fifthly, 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, 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.”
This is an excerpt from the new and upcoming book by Matthias Küntzel which will be published in August 2023 by Routledge Press. You can find the announcement on their website here: https://www.routledge.com/Nazis-Islamic-Antisemitism-and-the-Middle-East-The-1948-Arab-War-against/Kuntzel/p/book/9781032437767 as well as an introductory discussion on the Fathom Journal’s website: https://fathomjournal.org/the-1948-arab-war-against-israel-an-aftershock-of-world-war-ii/
Remembering the Farhud and the Jewish Nakba 