The Arabs and the Holocaust Read online

  The symmetries between the various terms – Shoah/Nakba, displaced person/refugee, law of return/right of return, UNRRA/UNRWAvi (the list could be extended) – should give us pause, even if the two situations are not perfectly symmetrical. They offer a particularly striking illustration of the complexity of the issue and a partial explanation of why it arouses so much passion that some have even accused the Palestinians of imitating Israel. The accusation calls to mind the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s remark to the Israeli poet Helit Yeshurun, during a 1996 interview, that Israelis ‘are jealous of anyone whom the world recognizes as a victim. That’s an Israeli monopoly.’75

  Thus two Israeli academics, Ruth Linn and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev of the University of Haifa, have accused the Arabs of plagiarizing as it were the term shoah, without having bothered to find out which Arabic word is used to designate the Palestinian tragedy. They seem not even to have heard of the term nakba. ‘Following the Israeli use of the Hebrew word shoah “Holocaust” to refer to the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis, the Arabs employ the Arabic word karita [sic] “Holocaust” [sic] to convey the magnitude of their disaster following the establishment of the Jewish state,’76 they claim, going so far as to suggest that the Arabs borrowed the idea of the ‘right to return’ from Holocaust narratives.77

  Similarly, Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, Israeli academics affiliated with Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, contended not long ago that the Israeli ‘terminology and discourse of the Holocaust had a profound effect on the Palestinian discourse on the Nakba from its early emergence’.78 In support, they cite a source that hardly qualifies as authorized: the Arabic translator of a book by a French Holocaust denier. ‘Other aspects of Holocaust terminology’, they continue, ‘have been cast into the Palestinian discourse on the Nakba. “Destruction and redemption” (shoah u-geula), “Holocaust and rebirth” (shoah u-tehiya) turn into “Nakba and resistance” (Nakba wa-muqawama), “perseverance and resistance” (israr wa-nidal).’79 In fact, these formulas do not correspond in the slightest; moreover, the pairs of Arabic words cited are not even formulas in general use in ‘the Palestinian discourse’.

  In a recent book, Litvak and Webman extend this argument, although they now acknowledge that the use of the term nakba – a very common Arabic word – predated the Nakba itself in warnings against the impending catastrophe in Palestine. They accordingly date the plagiarism of which the Palestinians are accused to an earlier period: ‘Indeed, the terminology and discourse of the Holocaust highly affected the Arab discourse on the Nakba from the mid-1940s, when immigration to Palestine emerged as the solution for the displaced Jews in Europe.’80

  In point of fact, the Arab ‘terminology and discourse’ of the Nakba developed from 1948 on in complete independence from ‘the terminology and discourse of the Holocaust’, which had not yet come into general circulation, as the studies on the reception of the Holocaust in both the West and Israel attest. The word nakba began to establish itself in the Arab world from 1948 on as a means of underscoring the gravity of a defeat (hazīma) that some sought to minimize as a mere naksa (a setback) – a move the Nasserites would repeat in 1967 with no better success.

  The Syrian academic Constantine Zurayk (Qustantīn Zurayq), a liberal Arab nationalist, is generally credited with having put the term nakba into broad circulation as a designation for ‘The Catastrophe’ (al-nakba) in a pamphlet that had a profound effect on public opinion: The Meaning of the Catastrophe (or disaster), published in 1948 and reissued in a second edition the year after. In the introduction, the author declares: ‘The Arab defeat [hazīma] in Palestine is not a mere setback [naksa] or a simple, transitory misfortune, but a catastrophe [nakba] in every sense of the word, a calamitous ordeal among the most difficult that the Arabs have undergone in the course of a long history full of ordeals and calamities.’81

  The extraordinary complexity of the problem before us, like the passion it introduction arouses, is more than just the result of two experiences of persecution. History, after all, abounds in instances of the emigration or forced exile of persecuted people who become persecutors in their turn. Oppressed religious sects and people deported for ethnic or political reasons are among the examples that spring to mind. What makes the Israeli–Palestinian problem exceptional is, above all, that no other population actively involved in a colonial–settler project was fleeing a form of persecution as long-standing and brutal as European anti-Semitism, or was made up of survivors of such a stupefying crime against humanity.

  It was with this circumstance in mind that Mahmoud Darwish exclaimed, in his exchange above with Helit Yeshurun, ‘Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? It’s because you are our enemy. Interest in the Palestinian question flows from interest in the Jewish question. Yes. People are interested in you, not me … ! The international interest in the Palestinian question merely reflects the interest people take in the Jewish question.’82 This was, of course, an exaggeration blurted out in the heat of the moment: the Palestinian tragedy would certainly have resounded if the Westerners who settled in Palestine had been, say, members of a Protestant sect rather than Jews. How, then, are we to explain the importance accorded to the Palestinian tragedy apart from the Jewishness of Israel?

  It cannot fairly be said that the ‘uprooting’ of the Palestinians – to borrow the expression used by Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad to describe the rural populations ‘regrouped’ by the French army in camps in colonial Algeria83 – has been exceptionally extensive or cruel. Compare it with the Algerian case, in which some two million ‘regrouped persons’ came under the direct control of the French colonial army: measured against its standards of brutality, the Israeli army pales. None of the massacres of Palestinians carried out by Israeli forces compares in scope to the one perpetrated by the French army in May 1945 in the Algerian cities of Setif and Guelma, to cite only that case: several thousand Algerians – tens of thousands, by Algerian estimates – were massacred there in the space of a few weeks. And what the black population of sub-Saharan Africa had to endure during the long ‘civilizing’ period in the history of the colonial empires, from slavery to veritable genocides (which all too often go unmentioned even today), was far more terrible than even the Algerian horror.

  As colonial abominations go, the fate of the Palestinians is far from being the worst. The only people who can be excused for thinking differently are those who are directly subject to this fate and lack the necessary basis for comparison. The Palestinians cannot, however, advisedly and legitimately apply to their own case the superlatives appropriate to the Jewish genocide. ‘Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?’ Said exclaims in the essay cited above. ‘It would be foolish even to try.’84 Similarly, Benny Morris is correct to point out that Deir Yassin – the Palestinian village where 120 people were massacred by the Revisionist Zionist Irgun in 1948 – ‘was no Srebrenica’ (the Bosnian city in which eight thousand people were slaughtered by the forces of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia in 1995).85

  How, then, are we to explain the immense place that the oppression of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis holds among the passionately debated issues of our day? There are several reasons for this. One is that Israel is the only European colonial settler state in which the political rights of the native population have yet to be restored (apart from places like North America and Australia, where colonization all but wiped out the native population). With the disappearance of the South African apartheid system in 1994, the Palestinian question became the last major burning issue of European colonialism. Israel is currently the only state in the world that combines three modes of colonial oppression: members of the indigenous minority who remained after 1948 (the ‘Israeli Arabs’) have the status of second-class citizens; since 1967, the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza have had the status of a population under either foreign occupation or direct control by the former occupiers; and the great majority of Palestinians
have the status of people uprooted from their land and barred from returning. Most of this last group live in refugee camps on the periphery of the colonial state or in the territories it controls; others have joined the vast Palestinian diaspora; still others are living uprooted within the 1949 borders as ‘internally displaced persons’.

  The persistence of these colonialist modes of oppression makes Israel, in some sense, an anachronism. A colonial state born at the very moment in which the process of decolonization was first gaining strength, it both proved the rule and constituted an exception. Hence the profound ambiguity of a ‘war of independence’ that grew into a war of colonial conquest, by way of a declaration of independence perceived as a declaration of annexation by a majority of the people of the country – Mandatory Palestine – on whose soil it was solemnly read out on 14 May 1948.

  Even on the territory attributed in November 1947 to the ‘Jewish state’ by a United Nations General Assembly in which the future ‘Third World’ was barely represented86 – a territory that would be substantially enlarged manu militari in the course of the first Arab–Israeli war – close to half the resident population received Israel’s declaration of independence as an outrage. At the time, a yawning gulf separated those who regarded the creation of Israel as an act of liberation of the first importance – the redemption of European Jewry’s centuries-old history of oppression – and those who perceived it as the establishment of a colonial entity at the cost of the indigenous population. As the American journalist I. F. Stone wrote in 1967: ‘The fact that the Jewish community in Palestine afterwards fought the British is no more evidence of its not being a colonial implantation than similar wars of British colonists against the mother country, from the American Revolution to Rhodesia.’87

  Nevertheless, the notion of Israel as the product of an anti-colonial war of independence long held sway in the West. It was decisively modified by the June 1967 war, when the myth of Israel as a David facing the Goliath of the surrounding Arab countries gave way to an image of Israel as the state of ‘an elite people, self-assured and domineering’, as General Charles de Gaulle put it. The phrase was widely criticized because it was not free of anti-Semitic overtones: the French president was targeting what, in his view, the Jews ‘had always been’.88

  Recognition that Israel is a colonial power was long in coming in the West – longer on the left than the right – and, of course, in Israel itself. The considerable distance covered runs from the period when Jean-Paul Sartre’s review Les Temps modernes published a thick issue on the Israeli–Arab conflict on the eve of the 1967 war,89 in which the title of Maxime Rodinson’s remarkable contribution characterizing Israel as a ‘colonial-settler state’ could still be qualified by a question mark,90 to the unabashed 1999 admission by the most famous of the ‘new Israeli historians’, Benny Morris, that ‘Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement.’91 Uri Ram has summed up Israeli ‘post-Zionist’ discourse on the question:

  Israel is a settler-colonial society on a par with other white European societies such as Australia or South Africa. Whether or not the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was premeditated (the transfer issue), or an unintentional consequence of the war, Israel is largely responsible for the refugee problem. The conquest of land and labor was an avowed principle of labor Zionism, and its logical derivative is dislocation of, and discrimination against, Palestinians.92

  Against this backdrop, the Palestinian struggle appears for what it is: the last major anti-colonial struggle. The indigenous population of ‘Rhodesia’ obtained the same political rights as the population of colonial origin in 1980; the country then experienced a second independence and genuine decolonization under the name Zimbabwe. South Africa’s indigenous population, in its turn, had gained the same rights as the population of colonial origin by 1994.93 Yet the indigenous population of Palestine is still waging a bitter struggle for recognition of its right to sovereignty over as little as one-fifth of its ancestral lands – the portion that Israel did not immediately conquer in 1948, but occupied nineteen years later.

  The persistence of Israeli colonial oppression, flying in the face of the prevailing tendency of world history, has been made worse by a rising curve of violence. Israel has fought seven major wars in its six decades, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and 2008–9, the latter two the most brutal of all. Each one profoundly alarmed the world because of the strategic location of the conflict. (Contrast the 5.4 million war-related deaths in the Congo in the ten years since 1998 – 45,000 a month or 1,500 a day in 2008, on the estimate of an American NGO.94 Black skins are of small worth in comparison with black gold.)

  The international implications of the conflicts in the Middle East do not, however, alter the fact that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is now at its highest level ever. In recent years, it has soared from one peak to the next, beginning with Ariel Sharon’s assumption of the leadership of the Israeli government in 2001, followed by the 2002 reoccupation of the West Bank for the purpose of crushing the Second Intifada, continuing to the 2006 blockade of Gaza and the repeated assaults on it since. Zionist colonial power clings to its 1967 conquered territory in the face of resistance of an intensity and tenacity that would surely have beaten back other forms of colonialism, at considerable cost to Israeli society.

  The result is hardly surprising: Israel’s image has, inevitably, deteriorated. According to a BBC poll conducted in thirty-four countries and published on 2 April 2008 – several months before the cruel assault on Gaza unleashed at the end of the year, which has surely had a powerfully negative influence on perceptions of the country – Israel was, after Iran, the state with the poorest image: 54 and 52 per cent cited the influence of Iran and Israel, respectively, as negative.95 Another poll, in 2003, indicated that 59 per cent of Europeans considered Israel a threat to peace, whereas only 53 per cent thought Iran was.96 The more the image of the ‘Jewish state’ suffers – above all in the West, where its image counts for a great deal – the more it turns to the Holocaust to shore up its legitimization.

  The reason is that the West (vestiges of Judeophobia and anti-Semitism aside, which today persist only among a minority) continues to regard the Shoah from the standpoint, and sense of responsibility, of the culprits, whereas introduction 35 the Arab world and most of the Third World regard the state that claims to represent the victims of the Shoah from the standpoint of the victims of both the Nakba and Israel’s subsequent acts. This fact weighs very heavily on the reception of the Holocaust in the Arab East, which got ever more complicated from the time of the Shoah itself to the time of the Nakba up to our own day.

  i

  The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website points out that the term that the museum itself has chosen to use won out over its competitors in the USA in a way typical of that society of the spectacle par excellence: it came into common use thanks to the 1978 television series Holocaust, directed by Marvin Chomsky from a screenplay written by Gerald Green. In France, the term Shoah, now widely employed, was made popular by another audiovisual work, the solemn sobriety of which sharply distinguished it from the common run of fictional treatments of the Jewish genocide: Shoah, a documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann that was first broadcast in 1985.

  ii

  Yishuv, a Hebrew word meaning ‘settlement’ or ‘population’, is the name given to the community of Jews living in Palestine.

  iii

  Michel Abitbol speaks in similar terms of the attitude of the ‘Zionist mainstream establishment’ of the Jewish communities of North Africa, ‘which, faithful to the Herzlean dialectic, welcomed the rise in consciousness triggered by anti-Semitic agitation’ in 1936.34

  iv

  The attitude of the British Jewish organizations was even worse than Ben-Gurion’s. Raul Hilberg describes the reaction of the latter to the influx of Jewish refugees that followed Kristallnacht in Nov. 1938: ‘At this point, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, declared at a ca
binet meeting that the Jewish organizations did not want an inundation of Jews, lest anti-Semitism increase. They also did not wish publicity about the number of refugees admitted, lest the Jewish leadership become the target of criticism that there were either too few or too many. From this moment, Britain’s Jewish organizations no longer played a major, let alone leading, role in the rescue of the European Jews.’38

  v

  A fundamentally identical attitude, as well as the conviction that it was urgently necessary to find a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazism, motivated Isaac Steinberg, former People’s Commissar for Justice in the first government headed by Lenin after the 1917 ‘October Revolution’ and another activist in the ‘territorialist’ cause.45

  vi

  The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), created in 1943, concerned itself with ‘displaced persons’ in Europe until 1947; the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949, continues to concern itself with Palestinian refugees.

  PART I

  THE TIME OF THE SHOAH

  Arab Reactions to Nazism

  and Anti-Semitism

  1933–1947

  Prelude

  It ought to be a truism that ‘the Arabs’ do not exist – at least not as a homogeneous political or ideological subject. Yet such use of a general category known as ‘the Arabs’ is common in both journalism and the specialist literature. ‘The Arabs’ are supposed to think and act or react in unison. Of course, like ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Muslims’, ‘the Arabs’ as a politically and intellectually uniform group exist only in fantasy, engendered by the distorting prism of either ordinary racism or polemical fanaticism.