Following widespread condemnation, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally sought to “clarify” remarks he made earlier this month suggesting that Adolf Hitler had gotten the idea for exterminating the Jews from a Palestinian in 1941, Jerusalem’s then-grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. In a Facebook post the prime minister dumped on Friday, Netanyahu insisted that “contrary to the impression that was created, I did not mean to claim that in his conversation with Hitler in November 1941 the mufti convinced him to adopt the Final Solution. The Nazis decided on that by themselves.”
On October 20th, Netanyahu had said that Hitler originally only wanted to expel the Jews, not exterminate them, until he spoke with al-Husseini, who according to Netanyahu, told Hitler to “burn them” instead. Following the remark, historians both in and outside of Israel rejected the prime minister’s assertion, and as the New York Times summarizes, “declared his account to be a lie that appeases Holocaust denial[.]”
