Palestinians Have No Holocaust

I know a Palestinian woman in East Jerusalem who every week crosses the city into West Jerusalem to visit her ancestral home, now owned by Israelis. She stands outside the gate in a vigil of memory, refusing to accept her family’s loss. Recently, during renovations, she found discarded tiles that her father had installed; she carted them away and laid them in the courtyard of her house.

Even as Jewish organizations celebrate the Swiss decision to compensate Holocaust survivors, they should begin preparing for an unintended consequence of that victory. For the last few years, the Palestinian Authority has been compiling lists of expropriated Arab property dating back to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, planning to bill the Jewish state for tens of billions of dollars in reparations. Now, with the Swiss settlement, Palestinians believe they have found their precedent.

In fact, no moral or rational connection exists between the Swiss scandal and Palestinian demands. Swiss banks profited from genocide and withheld accounts deposited by those who later died in the Holocaust and left behind verifiable heirs.

By contrast, the Palestinians lost their properties in a war instigated by their own leaders. When the U.N. voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the mainstream Zionist movement accepted the compromise, while the Palestinians and the Arab world attacked the Jewish state the day it was born. In the ensuing war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees. In some areas, they were expelled by the Israeli army; in other areas, they fled. The property left behind was taken over by the Israeli government. The Palestinians gambled on war and lost.

When the Palestinian Authority presents its demands for reparations--perhaps as early as next year, if the scheduled final-status talks with Israel occur--the Jewish state will retaliate with a bill of its own to the Arab world. The creation of Israel didn’t only uproot Palestinians but also nearly a million Jews from Arab countries, almost all of whom had to abandon their properties.

Unlike Palestinians, most of whom were villagers, Jews in Arab countries were often urban residents, and many owned valuable properties. Though technically not refugees but immigrants returning to their ancestral home, they lived in tents and shacks and on meager food rations in Israel’s early, impoverished years.

But while Israel eventually resettled its uprooted Jews, the Arab world, with the exception of Jordan, kept the Palestinian refugees in camps to maintain political pressure against the Jewish state, and even denied Palestinians the right to citizenship. The Palestinian Authority, which has received several billion dollars in international aid, hasn’t dismantled the refugee camps under its jurisdiction or even bothered to repair the sewage running through the alleys, deliberately maintaining the refugees’ misery to dramatize their claim for resettlement in what is now Israel.

There is something deeply cynical in the Palestinians’ attempt to link their cause with Nazism’s victims, not least because of the Arab world’s unresolved attitude toward the Holocaust. Support among Arab intellectuals is growing for Holocaust “revisionists,” the neo-Nazi historians who either minimize the genocide of the Jews or deny that it ever happened. So far, only one Palestinian intellectual, Columbia University Prof. Edward W. Said, has courageously challenged the Arab Holocaust denial movement; he has been widely denounced by Palestinian colleagues as an Israeli “collaborator,” despite his long history of anti-Zionist polemics.

Even among those Palestinians willing to concede that the Holocaust occurred, there is a tendency to distort history. Palestinian leaders like to say that their people bore no responsibility for the Holocaust but paid its price with the creation of Israel. Yet Adolf Hitler’s chief ally in the Middle East was the Palestinians’ religious and political leader Haj Amin Husseini, who spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Muslim volunteers for the Nazi cause and broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. And Palestinian pressure on the British to block Zionist immigration to Palestine resulted in the deaths of untold thousands of Jews.

Of course, the crimes of Husseini and the distortions of Palestinian intellectuals don’t obscure the personal tragedies of Palestinian dislocation. Whatever the merits of their cause, Palestinians would do well to show a measure of modesty and restraint when it comes to evoking the Holocaust.