The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

ISBN-13: 9780312569204

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 04-26-2011

Pages: 400

Product Dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

Gilbert Achcar, who grew up in Beirut, has taught at the University of Paris-VIII and at the French-German Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. He is currently professor of development studies and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Among his many books are The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder and Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky.

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Arabs and the Holocaust

PART I

THE TIME OF THE SHOAH

Arab Reactions to Nazism and Anti-Semitism, 1933-47

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.

Like any large, diverse group, the Arab population is crisscrossed by different ideological currents that have been shaped by varied forms of education and political experience in different countries, a circumstance no well-informed work on political thought in the Arab world fails to point out. Only a perception distorted by "Orientalism," in the pejorative sense of the term made famous by Edward Said—that is the cultural essentialization of the peoples of the East that reduces them to a stereotyped immutable being or "mind"1—can obscure the very deep divisions in the Arab world.

The diversity of the Arabs' historical relations to Nazism and Zionism is no less pronounced. There have even been a few Arab allies of the Zionist movement: recall the Palestinian "collaboration"2 and the unacknowledged "collusion" of leaders who had ties to the British, such as King Abdullah of Jordan,3 or allies motivated by the idea of making common cause with the Zionists as "enemies of their enemies," notably some Christian Maronites in Lebanon.4

In the Arab anticolonial independence movement, whose opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine reflected what was by far the dominant Arab attitude in the 1930s and 1940s, we may distinguish four basic ideological currents:

1. The liberal Westernizers

2. The Marxists

3. The nationalists

4. The reactionary and/or fundamentalist Pan-Islamists

Note that none of these currents has a monopoly on the central value inspiring it. Thus there is widespread adhesion to Islam among liberal Westernizers and nationalists. Nationalism, moderate or radical, animates Westernist liberal advocates of independence and, in a specifically religious form, Pan-Islamists as well. Similarly, it can be argued that both Marxists and most nationalists are Westernizers who even, at times, embrace the same liberal values.

Moreover, each current comprises several distinct variants, and there are a number of intermediate and combined categories. Regarding nationalism in particular, we may distinguish a right wing that often works in close alliance with Islamic fundamentalism, a left wing influenced by Marxism, and a liberal version.5 On certain questions, the positions of these subgroups can differ sharply.

Nevertheless, a qualitative difference sets each of the four major categories apart: the nature of its guiding principle, its determinant system of political values. Each chooses its political positions with reference, first and foremost, to a distinctive political and ideological system of thought—liberalism, Marxism, nationalism, or Islam conceived as a source of political inspiration adapted to contemporary conditions.

Copyright © 2009 by Gilbert Achcar

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Introduction: Words Laden with Pain 5

Shoah, Holocaust, Jewish Genocide 5

Zionism, Colonialism, Uprootedness 9

Nakba 22

Part I The Time of the Shoah: Arab Reactions to Nazism and Anti-Semitism, 1933-47

Prelude 33

1 The Liberal Westernizers 35

2 The Marxists 51

3 The Nationalists 64

The Baath Party 65

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party 74

The Lebanese Phalange 76

Young Egypt and Egyptian Nationalism 78

The High School Student Movement Futuwwa in Iraq 85

Iraqi Arab Nationalists and Nazism 87

Syrian Arab Nationalists and Nazism 91

Arab Nationalism and Anti-Semitism 94

The June 1941 Pogrom in Baghdad: The Farhud 99

4 Reactionary and/or Fundamentalist Pan-Islamists 104

Pan-Islamism and Fundamentalist Counterreformation 105

The Religion of Islam and the Jews 108

Rashid Rida 111

Shakib Arslan 120

"My Enemy's Enemy": Alliances of Convenience, Affinity, and Complicity 125

Amin al-Husseini: The Grand Mufti 131

'Izz-ul-Din al-Qassam 134

Amin al-Husseini and the 1936-39 Arab Revolt in Palestine 137

Amin al-Husseini's Exile and Collaboration with Rome and Berlin 145

Amin-al-Husseini and the Jewish Genocide 150

Amin al-Husseini, Architect of the Nakba 158

Amin al-Husseini's Divergent Legacies 162

Part II The Time of the Nakba: Arab Attitudes to the Jews and the Holocaust from 1948 to the Present

Prelude 177

The Nakba as Seen by Benny Morris-a Symptomatic Trajectory 182

5 The Nasser Years (1948-67) 192

"Throwing the Jews into the Sea"? 195

Nasserism and Anti-Semitism 201

The Eichmann Trial, Reparations, Comparisons, and Holocaust Denial 208

6 The PLO Years (1967-88) 221

The Programmatic Redefinition of the Palestinian Position toward the Jews 223

Transposing the Image of the Holocaust: The Battle of Comparisons with the Nazi Past 231

7 The Years of the Islamic Resistances (1988 to the Present) 244

Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamized Anti-Semitism 248

From the Garaudy Affair to the Ahmadinejad Affair: Reactive Exploitation of the Memory of the Holocaust 256

Conclusion: Stigmas and Stigmatization 273

Of Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Philosemitism, Islamophobia, and Exploitation of the Holocaust 274

Of Zionisms, the State of Israel, Racism, the End of Denial, and Peace 286

Acknowledgments 297

Notes 299

Bibliography 343

Index 359