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Dershowitz: Palestinians ‘Played A Significant Role In The Holocaust’

Matt Duss says most of what needs to be said about the bizarre Avigdor Lieberman / Alan Dershowitz team-up to suggest that somehow “the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.”

Let me just add, however, that if we’re going to cite alleged Palestinian complicity in the Holocaust as justification for dispossessing them of their claims to East Jerusalem that what this mostly does is bolster the argument, often heard from anti-Zionist Arabs, that the Jewish state should be located in Europe where obviously a much-greater degree of complicity existed. Obviously in the real world whatever the rights and wrongs of decisions made in the 1940s there’s no practical or humane way to turn back the clock and put Israel where Kaliningrad is or some such. But it just goes to show how nonsensical the entire line of inquiry is in the first place. As a historical matter, there’s a link between the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel, but to try to ground Israeli claims to sovereignty over Middle Eastern land on the basis of some kind of decades-old collective guilt for events in which Arabs were extremely peripheral players is bizarre.

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