If you are anything like me, you are used to all sorts of poorly thought out ‘gotchas’ being used to claim that the Palestinians were/are ‘Nazis’ and/or the ‘Nazis and Zionists were in bed with each other’.
I’ve been systematically addressing these myths in detail with examples by the ‘A Nazi visits Palestine’ marketing gimmick by ‘Der Angriff’ in 1934 (1) and the Haavara Agreement of 1933 (2) as well as addressed more academic attempts to support such claims such as that by the leftist jew John Newsinger in his book ‘The Blood Never Dried’. (3)
However, a common ‘gotcha’ from the other side – those who claim the ‘Palestinians were/are Nazis’ – is this photograph often presented with no context or checking whatsoever.
This is as follows (apologies for the water marks as it was the only copy, I could find):
What this shows is a bunch of men – presumably jews – in British style uniforms holding two NSDAP flags: both of which are marked ‘Palastina’ meaning they represent something to do with the NSDAP and/or the Third Reich in Palestine.
This is usually simply assumed without evidence to be Palestinian Arabs, but the problem with this is that it is ‘Palastina’ not ‘Palestine’ in English or ‘Filastin’ in Palestinian Arabic.
Why would Palestinian Arabs have NSDAP/Third Reich flags with ‘Palastina’ on them?
The lazy dismissive answer is because the Germans ‘sent them to them that way’ or some such which is a bit silly because German wasn’t widely spoken in pre-war, war time or post-war Palestine and the Germans didn’t do this with any other unit or group they interacted with. In fact, they were often careful to use local spellings, terms and contexts in this kind of propaganda and promotion work.
These flags then must have an origin other than the Palestinian Arabs.
My hunch was that they had to have been taken from either a property owned by the German Templer colonies in Palestine – which had been established by the German Templer Radical Pietist movement beginning in the late 1860s – which showed substantive NSDAP influence throughout the 1930s and 1940s but began in March 1933 with the establishment of the first NSDAP-AO chapter in Mandatory Palestine in Haifa. (4)
I was proven right when I managed to find a reference another photo featuring the same flags which dates the photograph as well as ties it to a place:
Now the key here is two things referenced in the text: the flags were captured in a house in Katamon – which is a district within Jerusalem – and they were captured by jews (‘our boys’) there. The text claims that they ‘were provided to the Arabs by their friends the Nazis’ but as we’ve seen this is almost certainly untrue and merely Zionist anti-Arab propaganda.
Part of the reason why is explained by Nicosia as follows:
‘The article in Die Warte des Tempels alluded to the problems that neutrality created for the Palastinadeutsche. While relations with the Jewish community ever since 1933 had deteriorated significantly because of events in Germany, neutrality also led to friction in Arab-German relations. At times, the Arabs tried to pressure the Templers into making financial contributions or providing German land for bases of operations or for hiding weapons and wounded insurgents. In many cases, the German settlers found it difficult to refuse. The agricultural produce of the German settlements, in some areas already subjected to a general Jewish boycott, could have been boycotted by the Arabs, thus damaging the livelihood of the Templer settlements further. The dependence of German farmers on Arab labor made them vulnerable to Arab pressure through strikes. In May, 1936, members of the Arab Strike Committee of Nazareth visited the nearby Templer colony of Bethlehem and asked for contributions to the Arab strike fund. The Templers refused, explaining that they were neutral in the conflict. In retaliation, the Arab workers on the farms in Bethlehem went on strike. The situation became tense, and relations between the German colonists at Bethlehem and their Arab neighbours deteriorated. The local NSDAP leaders went to the district police to request police protection for the colony after a German settler was attacked by an Arab worker with a knife. A compromise was reached when the Templers agreed to donate £pal 60 to an Arab charity, which enabled them to maintain their official policy of neutrality.
Similar difficulties arose for the Temple settlement of Sarona near Jaffa, where colonists were forced to seek police protection. Consul-General Dohle supported the pleas for increased police protection for the German colonies for security reasons as well as to demonstrate to the British administration that the Palastinadeutsche were trying to be neutral in the conflict.’ (5)
Nicosia’s narrative outlines that the German Templer communities were being boycotted by jews and were reliant on the local Arabs for labour as well as to buy their agricultural produce to keep the economy of the colonies going and that they stayed as politically neutral as they possibly could as well as that the local NSDAP branches actively supported their neutrality and actively used their diplomatic leverage with the British authorities to get additional police protection for the Templers.
Does this sound like a community who would be handing out NSDAP flags to the local Arabs to go murder the jews as the caption in the photo suggests?
No: it doesn’t.
The key lies in where the caption in the photo states the jews in the photos found the NSDAP flags: Katamon.
Katamon – for those who don’t know is a district of Jerusalem – that also includes part of the German colony of the city (i.e., where the Templers lived and worked) (6) and the German colony in Jerusalem happens to have had the largest of all the NSDAP-AO branches in all of Mandatory Palestine with 67 members in 1934. (7)
That is exactly where the caption says the jews ‘found’ the NSDAP/Third Reich flags so thus they without a doubt didn’t belong to ‘Arab Nazis’ but rather jews had simply broken into a (former/current) German Templer home and found them then paraded them as a way of claiming victory then claimed they were ‘from the Arabs’. When in fact they’d been stolen from the German Templer community and its former NSDAP-AO branch that was forcibly dissolved by the British government in September 1939. (8)
The British government then engaged in the mass deportation of circa 1,000 German Templers to two concentration camps (Waldheim [now ethnically cleansed of Germans by jews and called Alonei Abba] and Bethlehem in Galilee) and then on to Australia as ‘enemy aliens’. (9)
The two flags would have almost certainly have belonged the NSDAP-AO’s Jerusalem branch and would have been from a Templer’s house.
However, the question remains: when does this photo date from?
It could date from September 1939 when the internment and deportation of the 1,000 German Templers from Mandatory Palestine began, but far more likely given the context is that it comes from the Arab Israeli War of 1948 where the Katamon neighbourhood was part of Arab-dominated West Jerusalem and was then taken and occupied by the jews that year. (10)
This would make sense of both the photo and the commentary attached to it and shows that while this photo is claimed to show ‘pro-Arab Nazi flags’ in truth what it shows are simply the former NSDAP-AO Jerusalem branches old flags in 1948 that had been looted by the jewish soldiers pictured from a German-owned home in the Katamon neighbourhood of Jerusalem.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-history-of-der-angriffs-famous
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-and-the-reality-of-the-haavara
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/debunking-john-newsingers-claims
(4) https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/il-002798-4019691
(5) Francis Nicosia, 1985, ‘The Third Reich and the Palestine Question’, 1st Edition, University of Texas Press: Austin, p. 107
(6) See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Colony,_Jerusalem
(7) https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/il-002798-4019691
(8) Ibid.
(9) https://web.archive.org/web/20080606182838/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/946133.html
(10) https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78418