Benjamin Netanyahu’s bit of revisionist history about the origins of the Holocaust certainly deserves the outraged response it got this past week. One wonders why he chose to push this line given the well-established and easily cited historical fact — which many of his critics did cite — that the Nazi regime’s mass killing that would become known as the Holocaust was well under way before the meeting to which Netanyahu referred, between Adolf Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
One further wonders why, given that if Netanyahu wanted to make a sharply negative comment about the mufti — who, as also has been well established, was a strongly anti-Jewish collaborator of the Nazis — he could have done so without adding his historically inaccurate twist about the significance of the meeting, and it would have been in order and unremarkable for him or any other prime minister of Israel to have done so.