JERUSALEM—Israeli historians and opposition politicians joined Palestinians on Wednesday in denouncing Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying it was a Palestinian, a grand mufti of Jerusalem, who gave Hitler the idea of annihilating European Jews during World War II.

Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews.” The prime minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here,” referring to Palestine.

“‘So what should I do with them?’” Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking al-Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.’”

Professor Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, called the speech “a lie” and “a disgrace.” Professor Moshe Zimmermann, a specialist of German history at Hebrew University, said, “With this, Netanyahu joins a long line of people that we would call Holocaust deniers.”

Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition in the Israeli parliament, said the accusation was “a dangerous historical distortion,” and he demanded that Netanyahu “correct it immediately.”

Even Moshe Yaalon, the defence minister and a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said in a radio interview that “history is actually very, very clear.”

“Hitler initiated it,” he said. “Haj Amin al-Husseini joined him.”

The controversy came amid weeks of violence in which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have repeatedly accused Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, of lying, principally about Israel’s actions at a contested holy site in the Old City.

Diplomatic efforts to cool tempers led by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, who visited with Netanyahu on Tuesday and Abbas on Wednesday, appear to have yielded little. Speaking at a news conference in Ramallah, West Bank, on Wednesday, Ban said: “Our most urgent challenge is to stop the current wave of violence and avoid any further loss of life.”

Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said on Wednesday that Netanyahu’s “regrettable statements have deepened the divide” and denounced them as “morally indefensible and inflammatory.”

“Mr. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the Holocaust and completely absolved Adolf Hitler’s heinous and reprehensible genocide of the Jewish people,” Erekat said in a statement. “It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbour so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history.”

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After meeting with Netanyahu, Merkel said Germany wanted to see an end to clashes and violence. “We want to see all sides contributing to the de-escalation of the situation,” she told reporters. Merkel also reiterated that Israel’s security and existence are fundamental for Germany.

There is broad agreement that al-Husseini collaborated with the Axis powers, in part because of his opposition to Zionism. Historians differ, however, on the significance of his relationships with Nazi leaders and the meeting with Hitler that Netanyahu described. The mufti’s promotion of genocide over a mass expulsion of European Jews was discussed in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, but he was never prosecuted and died in 1974.

Netanyahu’s 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations,

says that the mufti “met Hitler in person for the first time” on Nov. 28, 1941: two months before the Final Solution was formalized and the construction of extermination camps accelerated, according to historians, but after the mass murder of Jews had begun and roughly one million had already perished.

Zimmermann, the Hebrew University historian, said on Israel Radio that Netanyahu was “doing something he must not do,” and that in “the protocol” of the 1941 meeting between the mufti and Hitler, “the text that Netanyahu speaks of does not appear.”

“He moves the responsibility of the Holocaust, for the destruction of the Jews, to the mufti and the Arab world,” Zimmermann said. “This is a trick intended to stain the Arabs of today because of the Arabs of the past. To pile on the Arabs of the past by easing up on the Germans of the past.”

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