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editor for Enigma Books told me that “The title was picked by Enigma
Books, not the translator; it means to indicate what would have happened if
Palestine and the rest of North Africa had been conquered by the
Germans.” 2 The book does paint the disastrous probable outcome of a
“Nazi Palestine,” but it is much more than that. It is a book about what did
happen, not a fantasy. It makes clear that the outcome of a success of the
Arab/Nazi coalition in WW II would have been genocide of the Jews, led
by Germans and enforced by Arabs.
Nazi Palestine is one of the first of a shower of post-2001 books on the
relationship between the Muslim world and the Nazis. Other books at the
top of the list, filling that story out—by Matthias Küntzel, Ephraim Karsh,
and Jeffrey Herf, and some chapters in Robert Wistrich 3 —are invaluable to
understanding what actually happened in that part of the world during and
after WW II.
Since history is not a snapshot of an event but more like a film—a
continuous and sequential set of ongoing happenings—it is crucial to find
out what has led up to contemporary events. Nazi Palestine does that by
revealing some of the underpinnings to the intractable problems between
Israel and Palestine. When it seems clear that reasonable men and women
could come to a solution to a problem of boundaries and assets, Mallmann
and Cüppers show us the irrational roots of history. The authors discuss
how useful the irrationality of Jew-hating was as a tool for uniting Muslims
and Nazis. In addition, Nazi Palestine displays the toxic mix of Nazi and
Muslim antisemitism, showing how the Germans exploited its pragmatic
and historical tendency in the Middle East. The debate about how intrinsic
antisemitism is in Muslim orthodoxy is not dealt with here, however. The
relevant discussion between writers like Bassam Tibi, Bernard Lewis versus
Andrew Bostom, 4 and others might be expanded by this work.
Did the Nazis bring genocidal antisemitism to an Arab culture that
previously had a very negative view of Jews, or is there a genocidal message
in the core of Islam that the radical Islamists are bringing to the fore?
Although Nazi Palestine does not approach this philosophical question
2. Robert Miller, personal letter to author, March 15, 2011.
3. Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew Hatred (New York: Telos Press, 2007);
Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009); Ephraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010); Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession (New York: Random House,
2010).
4. Bassam Tibi, From Sayyid Qutb to Hama: The Middle East Conflict and the
Islamization of Antisemitism (New Haven: YIISA, 2010); Bernard Lewis, “The
New Antisemitism,” The American Scholar, Vol. 75, no. 1 (Winter 2006); Andrew
Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008).