Exactly 73 years ago, the last two planes covertly carrying Jews from Yemen touched down in Israel, concluding Israel’s clandestine airlift operation nicknamed Operation Magic Carpet that brought 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.

After the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Muslim Yemenite rioters launched a series of pogroms against the Jewish communities in Yemen, resulting in 82 dead and countless homes destroyed. Soon after, false accusations of the murder of two Muslim Yemenite girls led to another pogrom that resulted in the destruction and looting of many Jewish homes and stores.

In light of these events, the Jews of Yemen came to an agreement that they must leave Yemen and move to Israel, whereupon Operation Magic Carpet (officially named On Wings of Eagles) was launched.

Over the course of a year and 380 flights, Israel carried out one of, if not the most, complex immigration operations in history. Eighty percent of Yemenite Jews were scattered throughout small villages, making it extremely difficult to gather everyone together.

It was also calculated that the money needed to absorb all the immigrants was more than the country could afford. Despite all the hardships, the operation was a success and Israel was able to provide a safe haven and freedom to all those who sought it.

(Published on Im Irtzu)

“Knowledge of the connection, embodied in the Mufti between the Palestinian national movement and National Socialism would complicate the identification with the Palestinians as well as the projection of the German policy of extermination onto Israel.”

Full piece on Jewish News Syndicate

“Chills go through my body even today as I recall what I heard back then from police officials and mufti supporters [when General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was about to enter Egypt as part of the 1942 El Alamein campaign].Haj Amin Husseini was preparing to enter Jerusalem at the head of the Muslim Arab Legion squadron he’d created for the army of the Third Reich. The mufti’s grand plan was to build huge Auschwitz- like crematoria near Nablus, to which Jews from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa would be sent and then be gassed, just like the Jews were by the SS in Europe.”

– Faiz Bay Idrisi, a senior Arab officer in the Mandate Police and a Jerusalem area district commander.

Full article: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/the-grand-muftis-nazi-connection-347823

The mass exodus of MENA Jews was equal to or greater than the flight of Arab refugees from then-Palestine. These Jews and their descendants now comprise over half of Israel’s Jewish population. Yet Israel is held solely responsible for the Palestinian “nakba,” even though the Palestinian flight was a consequence of the Arab rejection of the Partition Plan of 1947 and a wholly avoidable invasion of Israel by multiple Arab armies.

Ethnic and religious apartheid is the scourge of the Muslim Middle East. While Israel has over a million Arab citizens, some 99% of the Jewish population of Arab and Muslim countries was driven out by state-sanctioned discrimination or violence, leaving just 4,000 out of a pre-1948 population of a million.

Read full article by Lyn Julius on Jewish News Syndicate.

Things were extremely sensitive, and so for anything that had to do with Islam, they generally tried to keep it as it was. But there was an issue. There was a problem in that the link with Constantinople, with Istanbul, had been severed. And now you’ve got this Christian power running the land. And worse than that, this is a Christian power from an Arab perspective, this is a Christian power that’s declared before the world that it intends to create a Jewish national home in this land.

[…]

And later on in the testimony, Herbert Samuel basically says: “I did not want to alienate the Husseinis and their friends throughout the country, especially in places like Gaza and Acre.” That is the real reason the present mufti was appointed. So at first he tries to say, “Well, he was the most qualified and this and that.” The truth is that the mufti, Haj Amin, had very limited religious training. He was only about 25-26 years old. His opponents in the race for mufti were much older and much more experienced. And then later on in the testimony, Herbert Samuel just kind of speaks a little more honestly and says: “Look, the Husseinis are powerful. We needed to appease them. And they were lined up behind this guy, and that’s why we appointed him.”

Read the whole interview with Oren Kessler here.

“It was only from the early 1950s onward, as the Palestinians and their Western supporters gradually rewrote their national narrative, that Israel, rather than the Arab states, became the Nakba’s main, if not sole, culprit.

The ex-Mufti led the way by casting his countrymen as the hapless victims of a Jewish grand design to dispossess them of their patrimony, as a steppingstone to regional domination, and this fantastic claim was quickly picked up by many of his contemporaries. Some ascribed these supposed designs to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a virulent anti- Semitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century, from which the Jewish leadership allegedly drew inspiration and operational guidelines; others attributed them to religious and historical sentiments.

All viewed Zionism as omnipotent, with tentacles that reached the world’s most powerful spots. In the words of the prominent Islamist leader in mandatory Palestine, Muhammad Nimr Khatib:

“We are fighting an organized, educated, cunning, devious, and evil people that has concentrated the world’s wealth and power in its hands…. We are fighting the forces that have prevailed over the entire world, we are fighting the power that buried Hitler and defeated Japan, we are fighting World Zionism that has Truman in its pay, enslaves Churchill and Attlee, and colonizes London, New York, and Washington.”

Nazis in Palästina

Am 29. Mai 1946 war Hitlers Verbündeter, der ehemalige Großmufti von Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, gerade aus der französischen Kriegsgefangenschaft geflohen und per Flugzeug und einem falschen Pass in Ägypten gelandet. Seit 1920 hatte er in Palästina Pogrome organisiert und mit Adolf Hitler am 28. November 1941 den geplanten Holocaust im Nahen Osten besprochen. Husseini war auch die treibende Kraft hinter dem pro-nazistischen Putsch im Irak gewesen, der im Juni 1941 zu dem Farhud genannten Massaker an Hunderten von irakischen Juden führte.

Nun wandte er sich wieder seinem Lebenstraum eines judenreinen Palästinas zu. Im Dezember 1947 wurden dort zwei große Freiwilligenarmeen gegründet, die Krieg gegen die Juden führten: Die Arabische Errettungsarmee, deren Emblem ein Krummdolch war, der einen Davidstern durchsticht, wurde von der Arabischen Liga aufgestellt und unterstand dem Kommando von Fausi al-Kawukdschi, der während des Arabischen Volksaufstands von 1936 bis 1939 ein gefürchteter Guerillaführer war. 1941 war er im Irak am Farhud beteiligt gewesen. Die Nationalsozialisten flogen den vor den Briten fliehenden al-Kawukdschi nach Deutschland aus, wo er in Berlin mit einer Wohnung in der Cuxhavener Straße, einem Dienstwagen samt Chauffeur und dem Rang eines Wehrmacht-Oberst ausgestattet wurde. Fausi al-Kawukdschi war ein wichtiger Faktor für die deutsche Propaganda in der arabischen Welt.

Der Spiegel schrieb im Dezember 1947 und dem Titel »Mit deutschem Gruß für Palästina«, al-Kawukdschi sei der »prädestinierte Oberbefehlshaber einer Freiwilligenarmee für Palästina«. In Palästina habe er eine Sitte der Nationalsozialisten übernommen, die ihm »damals so gut gefiel: Unter der grünen Fahne des Propheten werden seine Freiwilligen mit dem ›deutschen Gruß‹ vereidigt.« 

Die andere Miliz war Amin al-Husseinis Dschihad-Armee, die von seinem Cousin Kadir al-Husseini befehligt wurde. Mehr noch als al-Kawukdschi galt Kadir al-Husseini als exzellenter Stratege und hatte fanatische Bewunderer. Beginnend im Dezember 1947 hatte er einen Belagerungsring um das jüdische Jerusalem gelegt, um die Juden auszuhungern und Palästina ethnisch zu säubern.

Eine Serie in elf Teilen veröffentlicht auf MENA-WATCH:

Teil 1: Exodus

Teil 2: Bab el-Wad

Teil 3: Kyrus

Teil 4: Ad Halom

Teil 5: Liebesgrüße aus Moskau

Teil 6: Jan Masaryk

Teil 7: Operation Balak

Teil 8: Gold Meyerson in Amerika

Teil 9: Jaffa Oranges

Teil 10: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, I

Teil 11: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, II

Teil 12: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, III

Teil 13: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, IV

Teil 14: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, V

Teil 15: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, VI

Teil 16: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, VII

Teil 17: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, VIII

Teil 18: Die Geschichte von Frank Greenspun, letzter Teil

Teil 19: Land and Labour

Teil 20: Fliegende Festungen

Teil 21: Ein Schauprozess in Prag

Teil 22: Verschwörung gegen Amerika?

Teil 23: “Was hätten sie ohne uns getan?”

“Adolf Eichmann, for example, saw the Muslim world’s war on Israel as a continuation of the Nazi struggle against the Jews. “I have not managed to complete the task of total annihilation of the Jews, but I hope that the Muslims will complete it for me,” he wrote in his memoirs.”

Read full article here.

Husseini then became the leading purveyor of Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. As historian Jeffrey Herf documented in his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, this included millions of leaflets and thousands of hours of radio broadcasts. The central theme of these efforts is captured in Husseini’s repeated exhortations to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

At the same time, Husseini aggressively silenced moderate Arabs, often by having them assassinated. (His successor, Yasser Arafat, would adopt the same practice.) In this way, he ensured that there could be no compromise with the Zionists.

The Nazis also financed, armed and collaborated with the violently antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, which continued to admire the Nazis after World War II. In 1946, the Brotherhood’s founder Hassan al-Banna lauded Husseini as a “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

Husseini did just that, his reputation burnished by his Nazi collaboration. According to historian Bernard Lewis, pro-German sentiment was so strong in the Arab world “that even after the final defeat of the Third Reich it did not fade away and—what is perhaps more significant—it was not concealed. On the contrary, a pro-Nazi past was a source of pride, not shame.”

Read the whole article on JNS by clicking here

“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/