The Nazi Roots of the Palestinian Cause
The Hitler-to-Hamas Pipeline
Only a spectacularly ahistorical generation could cast Jews as both the victims and the perpetrators of Nazism, and do it with self-righteous conviction.
Nazi symbols surface at pro-Palestine rallies often enough to be alarming. Swastikas and Hitler salutes echo the Nazis’ original hatred of Jews. Then comes the inversion: Stars of David defaced with swastikas, signs declaring “Zionists are Nazis,” and claims that Hitler’s victims are now his heirs.
Pointing out the roots that grew into the Palestinian movement is not the same as accusing everyone who supports Palestinian civilians of being a modern-day Nazi. Compassion for people in war zones is natural, essential even. The problem comes when compassion has no context, when empathy is hijacked into a legacy few realise they are carrying on.
In the West, after World War II, Hitler became our stand-in for the devil, the shorthand for absolute evil. Politicians are branded fascists, immigration crackdowns likened to Nazi round-ups, even a jeans ad accused of Nazi undertones. We see it everywhere, yet miss it in its purest form: Hitler salutes aimed at Jews; swastikas on schools, synagogues, and businesses; mobs attacking Jews in broad daylight, often in the name of a ‘free Palestine.’
The peak of absurdity is the claim that “Zionists are Nazis”. It is not an exposure of fascism but a continuation of it; a lie first forged by Nazis, repackaged by Soviets, and passed down ever since. In reality, Hitler despised Zionism because it gave Jews a path to self-determination, the exact opposite of his Final Solution.
To understand where this began, we have to start with the moment the Palestinian leadership sealed its alliance with Hitler.
Picture it: Berlin, 1941. Across from Adolf Hitler sits Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By then he was the most powerful Arab politician in Mandatory Palestine, the architect of Palestinian nationalism. He promised Hitler he would deliver the Final Solution to the Middle East. Hitler told him that once his armies advanced, “Germany’s sole objective would be the destruction of the Jewish element in the Arab sphere.”1
This relationship was years in the making. In 1933, just two months after Hitler took power, al-Husseini rang up the German consulate in Jerusalem to congratulate him. That same year the Nazis revealed they had established direct contact with Arab leaders in Palestine, hoping to adapt the Nazi program to the Holy Land. As Jeffrey Herf documents in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, they wanted to export antisemitism to the Middle East, and found willing partners.
Throughout the 1930s the Mufti was busy imitating Hitler’s playbook. His followers built parties on the Nazi model, and al-Futuwwa youth drilled in uniform, saluting like the Hitler Youth.2 By the late 1930s, Berlin was funnelling funds to the Mufti’s revolt. Hundreds of Jews were killed. The goal was clear: strangle the Jewish homeland before it was born.
The 1939 British White Paper shut the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees just as the Holocaust began. For Jews inside Europe, it was a death sentence. For Jews in Palestine, abandonment. In desperation, underground groups like Irgun and Lehi struck back with violence inside Palestine.
Once the war began, the Mufti doubled down. From Berlin he praised Germany’s “definitive solution” to the Jewish “scourge,”3 urged Muslims to drive out Jews, broadcast propaganda calling for their murder, and helped recruit thousands into Waffen-SS units.4 Berlin urged a ‘holy war,’ and demonstrations in its support were recorded. Arab sympathy for the Nazis was anything but isolated.
By then the Arab Higher Committee under al-Husseini was steeped in Nazi rhetoric. In drafts and appeals to Hitler, the Mufti urged that Palestine and other Arab countries be allowed to “solve the problem of the Jewish elements … by the same method” Germany was using in Europe.5
In June 1941, Baghdad erupted in the Farhud, a Nazi-inspired pogrom where mobs murdered, looted, and raped Jews. Across parts of the Islamic and European worlds, Jews were long forced to wear distinctive dress or badges; the Nazis revived this as the yellow star.
In 1944 the Nazis even parachuted operatives into Palestine under the Mufti’s command, with orders for sabotage and espionage. Haj Amin al-Husseini’s collaboration was so blatant he was wanted for war crimes after 1945. Yet he slipped the noose at Nuremberg and returned to the Middle East, not disgraced but hailed as a hero.
As Europe buried its Nazi legacy in shame, it was only just beginning in the Arab world. During World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the Palestinian Arab leadership saw annihilating Jews and annihilating the prospect of a sovereign Jewish state as virtually the same goal.
As war loomed, the Arab side was reinforced by veterans of fascist brigades from across Europe, including SS men, Wehrmacht soldiers and ex-Nazis, who later joined the fight when Israel declared independence.
And the pipeline didn’t end in 1948.
The Nazis’ ideological heirs in the region were the Muslim Brotherhood. They blended Islamic hostility to Jews with imported Nazi antisemitism, translating Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic and pumping them through schools and mosques.6
Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder, idolised Hitler so much he had Mein Kampf, meaning “My Struggle,” translated under the title My Jihad. The Nazis trained his followers and funded the Brotherhood until it swelled to hundreds of thousands, eventually over a million. Al-Husseini himself was deeply involved, hardwiring Nazi antisemitism into the Brotherhood’s DNA.
From this soil, Hamas grew. Its 1988 charter (which leaders have since insisted still stands despite later cosmetic revisions) blames Jews for both world wars, cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and declares Judgment Day will not come until Muslims kill Jews. At rallies its members chant about Muhammad’s army slaughtering Jews, sometimes even praising Hitler by name. Is it any wonder Hitler salutes and Nazi imagery appear among their Western counterparts, and under the Palestinian flag?
In captivity, Hamas forced at least one Jewish hostage to dig his own grave, a ritual lifted straight from the Holocaust and filmed by Hamas itself. The same activists who cry Nazi at a jeans ad had nothing to say.
The message has not changed: finish what the Nazis started. It should shock no one that Mein Kampf has circulated widely in the Palestinian territories, ranking high on Palestinian bestseller lists in the late 1990s,7 and still found in Hamas hideouts, annotated and studied.
The same imagery now spills into Western streets, history repeating itself under the noses of those protesting Israel’s “genocide” with slogans first penned by fascists. What they chant today was once the language of Hitler’s Europe, now revived without irony in London, Sydney, and New York. The Iranian regime continues to export antisemitism, and its proxies still act it out openly.
Instead of reckoning with this history, much of the movement has swallowed a different story entirely: that it was Zionists, not Islamic leaders, who collaborated with the Nazis.
This inversion relies on two shaky pillars, and the evidence against them is overwhelming. The Haavara Agreement of 1933 was no alliance but a desperate escape route. It gave 60,000 German Jews one of the only legal pathways out of Europe. It wasn’t collaboration any more than negotiating with Hamas today to free hostages would be. It was about survival.
As for Lehi (the “Stern Gang”) they were a fringe of a few hundred fighters. Twice they tried to reach out to Nazi Germany, and twice they were ignored. German policy documents made it clear: no Jewish state under any circumstances, strengthen the Arabs instead. The Nazis would never have partnered with Jews of any stripe.
The idea that Zionism equals Nazism didn’t spring from history but from propaganda. It was floated by the British in 1945, taken up by the Soviets in the Cold War, and carried into the Arab world.
From the late 1960s, Soviet disinformation reframed Zionism as racism and even Nazism, cultivating PLO ties and pushing the line through international forums. It culminated in the UN’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution, later repealed in 1991. Its echoes even reached the political mainstream, most notoriously in Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, whose PhD thesis portrayed Zionism as a Nazi-like project.
The actual record of Zionist resistance speaks for itself. From the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Bielski partisans, Zionist youth groups formed the backbone of Jewish armed resistance across Europe. In Palestine, the Haganah cooperated with the British against Hitler, while the Irgun declared a truce from 1940 to 1944. About 30,000 Palestinian Jews enlisted in the British Army, many in the Jewish Brigade Group. Chaim Weizmann helped push through the Kindertransport, saving ten thousand children.
Yet the lie that Zionists were born from the Nazis now passes as protest. Clementine Ford, a feminist commentator in Australia, has made the “Zionists are Nazis” line practically her mantra. Adam Bandt, leader of the Australian Greens, has echoed the same trope, casting Zionism as a form of fascism. These aren’t fringe neo-Nazis; they are left-wing figures presenting themselves as progressives and humanitarians.
This is what happens when history is ignored or inverted. People convinced they are anti-fascist march under banners that echo propaganda once pumped out of Berlin and from Cairo, home of the Muslim Brotherhood. They chant slogans born of Nazi and Soviet disinformation, believing they are standing for justice while parroting the same lines that justified genocide.
We can want the best for the Palestinian people and be anti-Hamas. In fact, we should. But that does not mean linking arms with those determined to finish Hitler’s work. Compassion does not require blindness.
The Nazi thread runs unbroken from Hitler to the Mufti, through the Muslim Brotherhood, into Hamas, and out into Western streets today. It is not whispering from the past but screaming in the present, and too many cover their ears.
The Mufti’s Conversation with Hitler, November 28, 1941, Jewish Virtual Library: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-mufti-rsquo-s-conversation-with-hitler. See also Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 96–101.
Benny Morris, *Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999* (Random House, 1999), p. 124
Jeffrey Herf, *Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World* (Yale University Press, 2009), detailing al-Husseini’s 1943-44 radio broadcasts.
The Mufti and the Holocaust, Hoover Institution: https://www.hoover.org/research/mufti-and-holocaust
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Grand Mufti Husseini Asked Hitler to Help with Arab Final Solution,” citing al-Husseini’s annotated draft to Hitler.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Evolution of Jihadist Antisemitism*, ISGAP Flashpoint, October 2018: https://isgap.org/flashpoint/the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-evolution-of-jihadist-antisemitism/
Mein Kampf in East Jerusalem and the PA,” Jewish Virtual Library: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/mein-kampf-in-east-jerusalem-and-the-pa. See also: Palestinian Media Watch, “Mein Kampf still a bestseller,” https://palwatch.org/page/53
Thanks for making this available to all subscribers! Anyone who has studied WW2 in any detail ought to know that Hitler and the Muslim Brotherhood were really natural allies. There's a lot of history to cover from the end of the war to the current day, and school history programs simply don't have time to go into such detail - hence the ignorance that is so rampant today. Keep up the good work, this was a great piece of writing.
Race superiority is definitely not what Zionism stands for, since Jews are not a race, Jews do not believe they are superior, and there is no cost of Zionism for another race. It is not the Zionists who want to get rid of all Arabs in the Middle East, but rather Islamic radicals who want to get rid of not only Israel, but all Jews in the Middle East.