The Arabs and the Holocaust Read online

  GILBERT ACHCAR, who grew up in Beirut, is Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His many books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (Saqi Books, 2006), published in thirteen languages, The 33-Day War: Israel’s War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Aftermath (with Michel Warschawski, Saqi Books, 2007), and Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book of dialogues with Noam Chomsky.

  ‘A work of breath-taking empathy, examining one of the most painful and emotion-laden topics in the modern world with dispassion, sensitivity and high erudition … [A] magisterial study’ Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University

  ‘Essential reading for anyone who seeks a balanced understanding of the place of Jews and the Holocaust in Arab thinking today. Whether or not one agrees with Gilbert Achcar on every issue, he provides a welcome and well-informed counterpoint to caricaturists and hate-mongers and fear-promoters of every persuasion.’ Michael R. Marrus, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto

  ‘An erudite, perceptive, and highly original study that shines much-needed light on a field which has tended to be dominated by partisanship and propaganda’ Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford

  ‘A sensitive and insightful exploration of an important dimension of the Middle East conflict … Achcar’s book, which combines meticulous scholarship and an engaging style, is a significant contribution to the mutual understanding that is in such short supply.’ Peter Novick, Professor Emeritus of Modern History, University of Chicago

  ‘A penetrating analysis of the multiplicity of attitudes and responses in the Arabic-speaking world toward Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust’ Francis R. Nicosia, Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Vermont

  ‘A courageous undertaking … [Achcar] succeeds in treating the subject of the relationship of Palestine and the Nazi Holocaust with original thinking, profound scholarship, and meticulous analysis.’ Naseer Aruri, member of the Palestine National Council; Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

  ‘In a field fraught with bad faith and sheer propaganda, Gilbert Achcar’s book stands out as scholarly and even-handed.’ Idith Zertal, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Basel

  ‘A systematic and scholarly refutation of the simplistic myths that have arisen following the formation of Israel … the best book on the subject so far’ Tariq Ali, Guardian

  ‘A refreshing and original study, showing clearly that Muslim anti-Semitism is neither universal, nor inevitable, nor subject to pat explanations.’ The Economist

  ‘Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust is for the most part a fascinating, subtle and original analysis of Israeli and Arab historical narratives.’ Simon Sebag Montefiore, BBC History Magazine

  ‘Achcar is in full mastery of both the Arabic and the Western sources on his subject. His exhaustive survey of Arabic sources is particularly important in correcting the many distortions circulated by polemicists seeking to paint Arabs and Muslims as anti-Semites … Policy makers would do well to heed Gilbert Achcar’s call for a more balanced approach to the tragedies that make the Palestinian-Israeli conflict so intractable.’ Eugene Rogan, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Lucid and penetrating’ Stephen Howe, Independent

  ‘[Achcar] carefully examines the long history of Arab-Jewish conflict back through the 19th century, illuminating the range of opinions’ The Washington Post

  ‘Calm and judicious in tenor yet unyielding in its intellectual rigor, this selection may show the path out of a seemingly intractable dispute.’ Booklist

  Gilbert Achcar

  The Arabs and the Holocaust

  The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives

  Translated from the French

  by G. M. Goshgarian

  SAQI

  First English edition published in 2010 by Saqi Books

  This ebook edition published in 2011

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-86356-835-0

  Copyright © Gilbert Achcar, 2010 and 2011

  Translation copyright © G. M. Goshgarian, 2010 and 2011

  Originally published in France by Actes Sud as Les Arabes et la Shoah

  Indexer: [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  SAQI

  26 Westbourne Grove, London w2 5RH, UK

  www.saqibooks.com

  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

  MATTHEW 7:3

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: Words Laden With Pain

  Shoah, Holocaust, Jewish Genocide

  Zionism, Colonialism, Uprootedness

  Nakba

  PART 1: THE TIME OF THE SHOAH

  Arab Reactions to Nazism and Anti-Semitism 1933–1947

  Prelude

  1. The Liberal Westernizers

  2. The Marxists

  3. The Nationalists

  The Baath Party

  The Syrian Social Nationalist Party

  The Lebanese Phalange

  Young Egypt and Egyptian Nationalism

  The High-School Student Movement Futuwwa in Iraq

  Iraqi Arab Nationalists and Nazism

  Syrian Arab Nationalists and Nazism

  Arab Nationalism and Anti-Semitism

  The June 1941 Pogrom in Baghdad: The Farhūd

  4. Reactionary and/or Fundamentalist Pan-Islamists

  Pan-Islamism and Fundamentalist Counter-Reformation

  The Religion of Islam and the Jews

  Rashid Rida

  Shakib Arslan

  ‘My Enemy’s Enemy’: Alliances of Convenience, Affinity and Complicity

  Amin al-Husseini: The Grand Mufti

  ‘Izz-ul-Din al-Qassam

  Amin al-Husseini and the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine

  Amin al-Husseini’s Exile and Collaboration with Rome and Berlin

  Amin al-Husseini and the Jewish Genocide

  Amin al-Husseini, Architect of the Nakba

  Amin al-Husseini’s Divergent Legacies

  PART 2: THE TIME OF THE NAKBA

  Arab Attitudes to the Jews and the Holocaust

  from 1948 to the Present

  Prelude

  The Nakba as seen by Benny Morris: A Symptomatic Trajectory

  5. The Nasser Years (1948–1967)

  ‘Throwing the Jews into the Sea’?

  Nasserism and Anti-Semitism

  The Eichmann Trial, Reparations, Comparisons and Holocaust Denial

  6. The PLO Years (1967–1988)

  The Programmatic Redefinition of the Palestinian Position toward the Jews

  Transposing the Image of the Holocaust: the Battle of Comparisons with the Nazi past

/>   7. The Years of the Islamic Resistances (1988 to the Present)

  Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamized Anti-Semitism

  From Garaudy To Ahmadinejad: Reactive Exploitation of the Memory of the Holocaust

  Conclusion: Stigmas and Stigmatization

  Of Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Philosemitism, Islamophobia and Exploitation of the Holocaust

  Of Zionism, the State of Israel, Racism, the End of Denial and Peace

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  This book had its inception early in 2006, when my friend Enzo Traverso asked me to contribute a chapter on the reception of the Holocaust in the Middle East to the monumental work on the history of the Shoah that he and three other scholars were co-editing for the Italian publishing house UTET in Turin.1 The editors were looking for someone who could write about the reception of the Holocaust in the Middle East. I accepted the invitation, but only after much hesitation: the short six months I was given to complete my essay – an author who had been approached before me had bowed out late in the day – made the task, given its scope and complexity, a perilous one.

  I took it on nonetheless, motivated by what might be called a sense of duty. The work being put together would, I knew, be a good one, and I did not want to see the issue I had been asked to discuss – a delicate question if ever there was one – treated incompetently or left aside. Out of a concern for intellectual rigour, I limited the field of my research to countries that lay directly in my area of competence, countries whose language I knew – those of the Arab world from which I come. After my editors had approved this restriction, I began intensively researching and writing, and I eventually turned out the long chapter that closes the second and final volume of that work.2 Enzo was the first to suggest, insistently, that I work this chapter up into a book. At the time, I was not particularly inclined to plunge back into intensive research on the same topic.

  But I continued to give it thought, since the questions raised were being posed ever more sharply in the Middle East. For example, late in 2006 a Tehran conference called ‘Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision’ promoted Holocaust denial, with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contributing his own deliberately provocative statements. Urged on both by readers of the original chapter – including the publishers of the French, British and American editions of the present book – and by my own desire to discuss the problem in a form more widely accessible than the voluminous compendium published solely in Italian, I undertook the project of transforming the chapter into a book.

  It was obvious that it was going to take enormous effort to depict the reception of the Holocaust in the Arab world, where the diversity of countries and conditions is multiplied many times over by the diversity of political tendencies and sensibilities, even as the inhabitants’ views of the Jewish tragedy are rendered infinitely more complex by their relationship to the Palestinian drama, the Nakba. The Introduction to the book is accordingly devoted to this very complex relationship between the Holocaust and the Nakba.

  To make my task somewhat more manageable, I have focused on the countries most directly affected by the creation of the state of Israel, those of the Arab East. Maghreb countries – those of the Arab West, in North Africa – are treated only incidentally. This restriction notwithstanding, the slim volume initially envisioned has mushroomed into a thick book. The discussion of the Holocaust period – the 1930s and 1940s – takes up more than half of it. I have construed the Shoah (the ‘catastrophe’) broadly in the following pages, not restricting it to the post-January 1942 phase of systematic liquidation that the Nazis called the ‘Final Solution’ but including the entire period of Jewish persecution – both in Germany and, later, in the lands conquered by the Nazis – that began with Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.

  I have privileged these years over the following decades for several reasons. First, they are the main object of the historical controversy fought out in the battle of the narratives. (Wherever good secondary sources were not available, I have explored primary sources.) Second, it was between the end of the First World War and that of the Second that the main ideological currents of the Arab countries took shape; their diverse relations to the Holocaust provide an excellent index of their own nature. As a result, this book provides an ideological mapping of the Arab world – and, as I see it, as much of its interest lies therein as in the title subject. Finally, a detailed discussion of the attitudes toward the Holocaust that have taken shape in the six decades since the state of Israel came into being is impossible here, for the simple reason that it would fill several volumes.

  I certainly have not titled my book The Arabs and the Holocaust because I share the grotesque view that the Nazis had no closer collaborators in their persecution of the Jews than the Arabs. I do not even suggest that ‘the Arabs’ participated in the crime, actively or passively, as many population groups across Europe did.3 Yet as a result of the Zionist enterprise and Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Arabs were deeply affected by the Holocaust, and my main ambition has been to render the complexity of their relation to it. To be sure, one finds many odious attitudes toward the Holocaust in the Arab world; but one also finds absurdly distorted interpretations of the Arab reception of the Holocaust in Israel and the West. My aim is to open up avenues of reflection that make it possible to go beyond the legion of caricatures, founded on mutual incomprehension and sustained by blind hatred, that plague discussion of the subject.

  Finally, though it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive account of Arab reactions to the Holocaust, I do believe that a more narrowly focused investigation of Palestinian perceptions of the Shoah is both possible and necessary. I would hope that a Palestinian scholar will soon produce, on this subject, the equivalent of what Tom Segev and Peter Novick have produced, respectively, on the Israelis’ and the Americans’ relationship to the Holocaust,4 with the same admirable concern for objectivity and the same critical distance from nationality and ethnicity that they demonstrate. And, in the interests of mutual comprehension, I would also hope that an Israeli scholar will soon produce an in-depth study of the history of the Israeli receptions of the Nakba, the drama of the Palestinian people.

  LONDON, AUGUST 2009

  A note on the transliteration of Arabic

  I have transliterated Arabic names and terms using a simplified version of the rules for romanization applied in the specialized literature, with the aim of making them more accessible to lay readers yet still recognizable to those who know the language. To the same end, names of well-known individuals are transliterated in accordance with common practice. Finally, in the case of Arab authors who have published in a European language, their own transliterations of their names have generally been respected. However, the romanization of Arabic names by the various authors is respected in the citations, as is the rule.

  INTRODUCTION

  Words Laden With Pain

  Anyone who sets out to write about the genocide of the Jews by the National Socialist state confronts a delicate terminological problem. What name should be given a calamity that, from the standpoint of a humanist ethics, will remain forever ‘unnameable’?

  Shoah, Holocaust, Jewish Genocide

  All the words used to name the genocide of the Jews are heavily connoted; none is neutral. Even formulas apparently inspired by Émile Durkheim’s scientific imperative to avoid ‘prenotions’ in approaching ‘social facts’, such as Raul Hilberg’s title The Destruction of the European Jews,1 are plainly the result of a difficult choice: subjecting the object under study to a distanced, clinical gaze. Hilberg clearly declares, in the preface to the first edition of his book, ‘We shall not dwell on Jewish suffering … ’2 This is an entirely respectable and even ineluctable choice when, as in the case of his monumental work, keeping a scientific distance does not indicate a lack of empathy but, rather, reflects a desire to control it so
as to remain as objective as possible. The aim in such cases is to ensure the credibility of the facts on which subsequent empathy may be solidly based without incurring the suspicion that empathy has tailored the facts to its needs. This attitude, of course, is utterly different from the pseudo-scientific detachment of the deniers’ approach, which is hard put to hide the antipathy that is its basic motivation.

  The most satisfactory objective designation seems to me ‘Jewish genocide’, an expression that makes use of the generic term ‘genocide’ while particularizing it by invoking the identity of the victims, as do the terms ‘Armenian genocide’, ‘Roma genocide’ and ‘Rwandan genocide’. These terms by no means contradict either the contention that every genocide is a singular occurrence or the undeniable fact that the Jewish genocide surpasses all other twentieth-century genocides in scope – an objective observation that can and should be acknowledged without entering into the ‘competition of the victims’ that Jean-Michel Chaumont has admirably studied in his book of that name.3

  Naturally, the designations sanctioned by public discourse and the media are not motivated by this same quest for rigour. Two terms have become established as designations of the Jewish genocide in its singularity: ‘Shoah’ and ‘Holocaust’. The first is a Hebrew word generally translated as ‘catastrophe’: employed with the definite article in the singular (Ha-Shoah), it is the natural expression in the language of the Jewish religion for the terrible tragedy that befell the European Jews (along with other, non-European Jews, who are all too often forgotten). It is not, to be sure, a ‘scientific’ term, but a way to accentuate the singularity of the Jewish genocide.

  Esther Benbassa, however, criticizes the use of the term Shoah, arguing that, with its biblical origins, it designates a punishment inflicted by God. She also emphasizes that the expression used in Yiddish, the language of the majority of victims and survivors of the Jewish genocide, was different.4 Despite its secularization, she asserts, the term Shoah contains all the ingredients of a ‘secular theology’ of the Jewish tragedy. Her objection is well-founded, but she herself, paradoxically, uses the term Holocaust, to which the same criticisms apply a fortiori.