Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that a Nazi-era Palestinian leader convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews has spurred outrage from Palestinian officials and rebukes from Israeli historians.

At a conference of global Jewish activists on Tuesday, Netanyahu mentioned the 1941 meeting in Berlin between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi sympathizer. The allusion was intended to create a historical context for a recent surge in Arab attacks on Israelis that the prime minister has blamed on Arab incitement.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al- Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them’.”

Several Israeli historians accused the prime minister of trying to make political capital from the Palestinian violence by exaggerating the mufti’s role in the Holocaust. “It’s ludicrous, this claim,” Yehuda Bauer, a professor emeritus of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Army Radio. “Netanyahu’s comments trivialize Hitler; he didn’t need an Arab from the Middle East to tell him what to do.”

Holocaust-Deniers

Isaac Herzog, leader of Israel’s opposition Zionist Union party, said on his Facebook page that Netanyahu’s words “fall like ripe fruit into the hands of Holocaust-deniers and inject them into the conflict with the Palestinians.”

Even the Palestinians found themselves in the ironic role of accusing Netanyahu of diminishing Hitler’s evil. “It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and longtime negotiator in peace talks with Israel.

The prime minister defended himself against the uproar on Wednesday before leaving for an official visit to to Germany. “It is absurd. I had no intention to absolve Hitler of his responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry,” he said. “It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler and others, to exterminate European Jewry.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, declined to comment directly on the controversy Netanyahu’s comments had stirred in Israel.

“For the German government, I can say that we Germans are very well aware of the historical origin” of Nazi policies and the Holocaust, he said. “It must never be forgotten. I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that there’s a fundamental German responsibility for this crime against humanity.”

Netanyahu has come under criticism at home and abroad before for invoking the Holocaust in connection with Israel’s present-day enemies, including Iran.

The recent violence that triggered Netanyahu’s controversial statement has killed at least eight Israelis and about 50 Arabs so far this month. Many of the Arabs were killed after attacking Jews with knives, guns and cars, and others died in clashes with Israeli troops.

In the latest incident on Wednesday, a Palestinian was shot to death after he and a second assailant stabbed a female Israeli soldier in the West Bank. United Nations chief Ban Ki- moon, visiting Israel and the West Bank in a bid to restore calm, warned both sides they “stand on the brink of another catastrophic period of violence.”