The founder of the Palestinian movement in the run-up to the Second World War was a proud Nazi and friend of Adolf Hitler. Haj Amin al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the religious leader of the Muslims in what is now Israel but was then called Palestine, and, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, governed under a British Mandate. It was Husseini who turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.

Husseini decided it was against Islamic sharia law to allow Jewish sovereignty over even an inch of what had previously been Ottoman territory, which he decreed was forever religious Muslim land, part of an endowment, or "waqf," to be held in trust for Allah. He opposed the creation of any Jewish state, regardless of how small, even if it was part of a two-state solution that offered a far larger percentage of the land to a state for the Palestinians.

Husseini spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler's guest, plotting to extend Hitler's genocide against Jews from Europe to the Middle East. He participated in the genocide of Jews and others in the Balkans. For this, he was designated a Nazi war criminal at the end of the war, and had to escape to Egypt to avoid being tried and hanged.

Following his death, he was succeeded by his mentee Yasser Arafat, who relied on terrorism against civilians as his primary methodology for destroying the nation-state of the Jewish people. Arafat turned down offers of a two-state solution because he could never accept the existence of a state for the Jewish people.