In March 1944 the then leader of the Palestinian national movement said to his people: “Kill the Jews wherever you can find them. This will please God, history and religion.” The fact that the speech was broadcast by Radio Berlin was no coincidence. The Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini spent the greater part of the Second World War as Adolf Hitler’s guest in the German capital. He praised German-Arab friendship and referred to an ideological fellowship with National Socialism, based on the cult of authority, anti-communism, Anglophobia – and hatred of the Jews. One year earlier, when the Holocaust was reaching its climax, Amin al-Husseini expressed his admiration for the way in which the Germans “had definitively solved the Jewish problem”. Al-Husseini was a religious man, who usually began his speeches with quotations from the Qur’an.

There is good reason to ask the question whether something as fundamental has changed in the...