Bizarre Tablet book review asks: Did Zionism cause the Holocaust?

In Tablet, there is a book review of Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz. The reviewer, David Mikics, makes what appears to be some valid points disputing the book. However, one point he makes - that became the title of the review - has no evidence behind it:

Rubin and Schwanitz make the astonishing claim that al-Husaini is nothing less than the architect of the Final Solution. Rather than being a garden-variety pro-Nazi, they say, the mufti had so great an influence on the fuehrer that he might as well have authored Nazi Germany’s most demonic project, the mass murder of European Jewry.

The claim that al-Husaini was the hidden hand behind Adolf Hitler is implausible, even silly. Rubin and Schwanitz are historians with a political agenda: They want to show that eliminationist anti-Semitism animates the Islamic Middle East, and so they paint al-Husaini as so devilishly anti-Semitic that he can contend with Hitler himself.

Yet Rubin and Schwanitz’s claim also has serious, troubling implications. Where did al-Husaini’s passionate hatred of Jews come from? Indisputably, from the Jewish colonization of Palestine. So, if you follow Rubin and Schwanitz’s logic—as they themselves fail to do—Zionism is responsible for the Holocaust. No Zionist colonization of Palestine would mean no Arab anti-Semitism, which means no al-Husaini, which means no Final Solution. The authors use a historical life to advance their political reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict—without thinking through the risks of loading their political agenda onto historical analysis.

Mikics insists - and says that it is indisputable! - that Arab antisemitism only exists because of Zionism.

This is, to put it mildly, crazy.

The Mufti was by any account a rabid antisemite. Mikics agrees:

That al-Husaini was a radical anti-Semite is not the real news in Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. We knew that already. Though al-Husaini was put in power by Britain, he eagerly embraced Nazism and rivaled Hitler in his fanatical anti-Semitism—and frequently proclaimed that the Middle East needed to rid itself of its Jews.

So why does he assume that Husseini's antisemitism would not have existed if Zionism hadn't existed? It's not like every anti-Zionist Arab pushed for genocide of the Jews of Europe. It is an astonishing theory that a anti-Zionism alone can make a person want to wipe out all Jews, or that somehow virulent antisemitism as a result of anti-Zionism is understandable.

The idea that Arab antisemitism was a result of Zionism is completely unsupported. The Mufti himself worked hard to ensure that Jews would have no access to the Kotel - does that sound anti-Zionist or antisemitic?

The Mufti wrote for the journal Suriyya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria) in 1919. In that year, the British suspended the publication of that journal for a month because it was stirring up "race hatred." Not because it was anti-Zionist, but because it was antisemitic.

Of course, Arab antisemitism predates Zionism by centuries, as I have documented many times. It is anything but "indisputable" that the more recent anti-Zionism spawned antisemitism.To be sure, Zionism sharpened existing Arab antisemitism and gave it more of a focus, but it existed and was rampant way before Herzl and Rothschild.

It is a shame that such a ridiculous charge be published on the day that Barry Rubin passed away. His rebuttal would have been fun to read.