“It will deal with the 1930s and 1940s and a very famous and important 1937 text by [Jerusalem Grand Mufti] Haj Amin al-Husseini titled, ‘Islam and the Jews.’ It’s one of those canonical texts of 20th-century intellectual cultural history that deserves much more attention,” Herf said.
“It is a founding text of Islamism and of the interpretation of Islam which interprets that religion as inherently anti-Jewish. This means it is hostile to Judaism, the Jewish people, and therefore, the State of Israel. So the anti-Zionism is a direct result of the antagonism,” he said.
The session will also cover the collaborations between the proponents of this anti-Jewish Islamism and the Nazi regime. Herf emphasized that there were already Islamist intellectuals writing and spreading their ideas in the Middle East and that it fused culturally with the antisemitic conspiracy theories spread through Nazi propaganda.
“This was all very famous at the time and not at all secret. If you were alive at the time and politically aware, you would have known about this,” Herf noted.
“But this has faded from memory and has not been sufficiently discussed since. Palestinian nationalists have come up with various excuses and apologia to obscure the depth and importance of those things,” he said.
According to Herf, Küntzel will talk about Israel’s War [of Independence] in 1948 and place it in this context. Herf said that Küntzel describes the war as “an aftershock” of the Nazi-Islamist alliance of World War II and sees it as a war of religion reminiscent of wars of religion in pre-modern times.
In the second session, on March 25, Herf will host Morris. The topic will be “Colonialism, Racism, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.” Herf will speak about the international context of the war, and Morris will elaborate on the main points of his 2008 book, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”
“He will examine the military history of the 1948 War and as a result the controversies about Palestinian refugees. That will challenge the argument that the 1948 War was a war of dispossession of the Palestinians, something called the Nakba [catastrophe],” Herf said.
Remembering the Farhud and the Jewish Nakba 