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Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent foray into Holocaust revisionism will probably go unnoticed among people for whom the positioning of the words “Palestinian” and “knife” within two verbs of one another is enough to set off a frisson of paranoid rage. But it is causing him some trouble among Jewish liberals who have been trained, by decades of Israeli propaganda, to blame “the Arabs” for the mortal sin of “trivializing the Holocaust” – or, still worse, of suggesting any connection between Nazi Germany and the brutal mechanisms of Israel’s occupation.

Not to worry, though. Israel’s academic apologists are prepared to rationalize even those two cardinal offenses, provided they’re committed by Israel’s prime minister and are aimed at Palestinians. Thus Jeffrey Herf, a historian at the University of Maryland (last seen propagandizing against a nuclear agreement with “delusional” Iran), has rushed to defend Netanyahu’s falsification of history with his own falsification of Netanyahu.

The latter’s insistence that the Mufti of Jerusalem, not Hitler, conceived the Final Solution “do[es] not stand up to the consensus of historical research,” Herf admits. But that doesn’t matter too much, because, according to Herf, the Mufti’s collaboration with the Germans during World War II left a “lasting impact on Palestinian political culture.”

Herf’s comments are false on several grounds, and it’s important to say so in the interest of historical truth. But there’s also a more urgent reason. Israeli propaganda has reached a desperate extreme indeed when the only way to divert attention from Israel’s increasingly vicious occupation is to minimize the guilt of Adolf Hitler. But that’s precisely where things stand; the utter failure of Herf’s attempt to defend the indefensible proves just how bankrupt Israel’s rewriting of its history has become.

First of all, Herf’s entire argument is trivial. Even if the Mufti’s 70-year-old war record really had something to do with Palestinian anger over close to a half-century of oppression in the Occupied Territories – and Herf presents no evidence for this – that wasn’t the point Netanyahu argued. Netanyahu claimed that the Palestinian Mufti invented the Final Solution. And that’s false – completely, indefensibly false. Period. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole by digging a new square hole next to it.

Second, Herf’s reading of history is scarcely more tenable than Netanyahu’s. The Mufti’s anti-Jewish fulminations over German radio are a matter of record. But Herf ignores the Mufti’s marginalization in the wake of his wartime behavior. Between 1948 and his death in 1974, Husseini played a minor role in Palestinian politics while others, of a very different stamp, eclipsed him. The emphatically secular approach of Yasser ‘Arafat (and of Fateh generally) owed little to the Mufti’s invocation of the Qur’an in his own anti-Zionism. And if Palestinian politics had followed the Nazi line, would ‘Arafat have embraced the two-state settlement he formally offered Israel in 1988, complete with an approving reference to the 1947 U.N. resolution that carved “a Jewish state” out of Mandatory Palestine?

Third, Herf’s position is hypocritical. He has ridiculed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, for entertaining the “paranoid conspiracy theory” that Israel and Western states have colluded to harm Iran. Yet this “radical anti-Semitism,” as Herf calls it, contains more than a grain of truth: the U.S. and Britain did orchestrate the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, installing in its place the repressive Shah; Israel did work closely with the Shah (and his dreaded secret police) for years afterward; and Israel’s leadership, without objection from the U.S., has repeatedly threatened a military attack against Iran for a variety of vaguely-defined offenses.

If it’s okay for Netanyahu to recast the Final Solution as a Palestinian invention, why not give Khamenei a pass for imagining that folks like Netanyahu and Dick Cheney, not to mention the raft of Jewish organizations that sponsored a recent anti-Iran hatefest – at which one speaker openly urged the U.S. to “take out Iran” – might, just might not have his country’s best interests at heart?

Fourth, and most important, Herf’s apologetics are really an effort to rationalize the demonization of Palestinians, and thus to provide cover for the criminal methods Israel is employing in order to secure an already illegal occupation. There is no mystery about the origins of the recent wave of desperate Palestinian resistance. Scores of Palestinians, many of them children, have been killed by Israeli forces this year alone, not to mention more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians who have been wounded by soldiers’ live ammunition or rubber-coated bullets. Attacks on Palestinians and their property by Jewish settlers occur almost daily, according to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions reports that 450 Palestinian homes and other structures have been deliberately demolished by Israel since the beginning of 2015; that’s not even counting the 18,000 homes Israel destroyed in last summer’s assault on Gaza. And conditions are only getting worse.

Maybe Herf really believes Palestinians would put up quietly with all this, if only the Mufti of Jerusalem hadn’t said some nasty things about Zionists 70 years ago. But if so, his assumptions about Palestinians are as faulty, and as racist, as Netanyahu’s falsification of the Nazi genocide is cynical. After all, Yitzhaq Shamir’s Stern Gang offered its services to the Nazis in exchange for German support against the British – yet apologists like Herf would never dream of holding that against today’s Israelis.

So why does Herf hold Palestinians to a radically different standard? Ultimately it’s because he, like Netanyahu, sees Palestinians as mere counters in a propagandistic narrative, the real purpose of which is to demonize their all-too-natural wish to be free. Netanyahu’s attempt to smear Palestinians as Nazis is a fig leaf for that campaign. Herf’s belated defense of him is a fig leaf for a fig leaf.