Newsweek reports, If Hitler's troops had reached the Middle east, he had a deal with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, which they made when they met in Berlin,
that a German occupation of Palestine and other mandated territories would result in the annihilation of their Jewish population, adding well over half a million Jews to the 6 million European Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.
Roosevelt dispatched a lot tanks, weapons and support to help the Brits turn back Rommel. My father first went to North Africa when he left the states as an enlistee.
Rommel was stopped in Egypt and never made it to the middle east to carry out the deal the Palestinian religious leader made with herr Fuhrer. Newweek reports,
Had Rommel not been defeated, he would have encountered little opposition between El Alamein and the mandated areas of western Asia. Once occupied by the German military, Iraq, Syria and Palestine would have been fertile ground for the implementation of the Berlin agreement reached by Hitler and the grand mufti in November 1941. A documentary recently broadcast by the respected German television station ZDF reveals that in July 1942, just after Tobruk, an SS killing squad, headed by the notorious Walter Rauff, designer of the mobile gas van used to kill countless thousands of Jews, was created to operate just behind Rommel's front line—similar to the murderous Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe—for the express purpose of killing Jews in occupied territory.
I wonder how much things have changed in the middle east. We still have Iran's Ahmadinejead calling for the wiping of Israel from the face of the earth, and Palestinian children are taught with books that do not include Israel in the maps. And supporters of the plighted Palestinian people villify Israelis, Zionists and Jews.
Jews, Zionists or Israelis never cut deals to wipe out all the Palestinians. Yes, there are extremist, fundamentalist, ultraorthodx Jews who approve of violence, who seem to seek it out, building settlements in occupied territories.
Yes, there are ultra-orthodox and fundamentalist fools and fanatics on both sides. They should not be the ones making the decisions. But then again, there are fundamentalist coddling rulers in the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and much of the middle east. It will take removal of those leaders from power for the fundamentalist war mongers to be defanged. And it will help to shut up the hate mongers on both sides. Only then, when the extremist religious zealots, with their crusade and kill the infidel agendas, are removed from the power equation, will peace in the middle east be possible.
For now, US and UK support for Totalitarian, fundamentalist coddling regimes will only maintain the horrible status quo. Jews and Muslims who want peace and justice in the middle east must do all they can to bring secular leadership and sanity to the governments and diplomatic efforts. It's the only way to make peace and justice happen.
