Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of "trivialising the Holocaust" by saying Hitler only wanted to deport Jews. Netanyahu claimed the Nazi leader, who presided over the systemic killing of six million Jews, was only talked into carrying out the genocide by a Palestinian nationalist who said Jews would emigrate to the Middle East unless they were killed.
The chief executive of the world's only Jewish state told The 37th Zionist Congress: "Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. 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.'" Opposition leader Isaac Herzog demanded Netanyahu retract the comments, saying: "This is a dangerous distortion of history that trivialises the Holocaust."