Achcar The Arabs and the Holocaust

The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-86356-835-0
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

The Arab-Israeli conflict goes far beyond the wars waged on Middle Eastern battlefields. There is also a war of narratives revolving around the two defining traumas of the conflict: the Holocaust and the Nakba. One side is charged with Holocaust denial, the other with exploiting a tragedy while denying the tragedies of others. In this path-breaking book, eminent political scientist Gilbert Achcar explores these conflicting narratives and considers their role in today's Middle East dispute. He analyses the various Arab responses to the Holocaust, from the earliest intimations of the genocide, through the creation of Israel and the occupation of Palestine, and up to our own time, critically assessing the political and historical context for these responses. Achcar offers a unique ideological mapping of the Arab world, in the process defusing and international propaganda war that has become a major stumbling block in the path of Arab-Western understanding.

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Achcar, Gilbert

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

The Liberal Westernizers

As used here, ‘Westernism’ has nothing to do with the concept of ‘Occidentalism’ forged in symmetrical opposition to Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as a caricature for a certain Islamic perception of the West.1 Nor is it my intention to stand the concept of Orientalism on its head in order to paint the Westernizers as unconditional admirers of the ‘West’ and its governments. The term is, rather, patterned after nineteenth-century Russian ‘Westernism’.

The Russian Westernizers, in opposition to the Slavophiles, urged adoption of the Enlightenment values that dominated Western Europe together with the industrial civilization that, in their view, functioned properly only when accompanied by those values.2 Russian Westernism did not imply uncritical admiration of Western Europe but, rather, a set of values that might equally be described as ‘modernist’ and could perfectly well accommodate a political critique of the West.3 Thus, alongside liberal Westernism, there existed a Marxian Westernism and even a Europeanist Russian nationalism. The situation is no different in the Arab world.

Following Nadav Safran, I use the word ‘liberalism’ here not in its nineteenth-century sense, designating a limitation of the role of the state, individualism and ‘the sanctity of property,’ but rather to mean ‘a general commitment to the ideal of remolding society on the basis of an essentially secular conception of the state and rational-humanitarian values’.4

Steeped in a democratic, humanist culture, the Westernizing liberals among the advocates of independence in the Arab world opposed National Socialism from the outset – a stand that by no means mitigated their anti-colonialist hostility to Zionism. As those best qualified to criticize the premisses of Zionism while defending the values of Western anti-fascist culture, the Westernizing liberals were a deep embarrassment to the Zionist movement. They did not, however, hold the greatest appeal for the Arab masses, given the contradiction between those very values and the colonialist behaviour of the Western powers posing as their champions – a problem still acutely relevant in the Arab world today.

The twofold denunciation of Nazism and Zionism made it possible to contest the use of Nazi abominations as a way of legitimizing the Zionist enterprise. The liberals’ main argument was based on plain common sense: why should the Palestinians have to pay for the Nazis’ crimes? This objection stands as a constant in the long history of the Arab polemic against Zionism; the various ideological currents of the Arab world have all taken it up.

My own father, Joseph Achcar, a pro-independence but also Francophile Lebanese, provided an early statement of this argument. It appeared in the dissertation he submitted in 1934 to the University of Lyons for a doctorate in law, in which he deplored Hitler’s assumption of power the previous year:

It goes without saying that we condemn, as the world’s conscience has done since then, the atavistic, savage conception that … professes to purify the German nation by eliminating elements foreign to it …

A government that springs from this reactionary, antiquated attitude readily ostracized the heterogeneous minorities among the people. The result was to drive away ‘the undesirables,’ the Jews, who had to appeal to the hospitality of other countries. It was accorded to them only on precisely defined conditions, [given] the difficulty of finding them employment in the current period of economic crisis.

The Zionist leaders accordingly returned to the assault on the obstacles to creating a Jewish state in Palestine …

It is not possible to redress one injustice, if an injustice has been committed, by another, more serious and more costly injustice. That the Jewish people inhabited Palestine more than twenty centuries ago is beyond doubt. That it should aspire, after so long an interval, to take the country back and lay down the law there is sheer utopia.5

This point of view was anything but exceptional. Indeed, there is every reason to wonder why liberal Westernist anti-colonialism, the vehicle of the Enlightenment in the Arab world, has attracted so much less attention than the most reactionary Arab currents, even those that were infinitely less influential.

Israel Gershoni, a specialist in Egyptian intellectual history at the University of Tel Aviv, has taken up the task of ‘deconstructing the hegemonic narrative’ that maintains, contrary to all the documentary evidence, that a majority of Egyptians supported Nazism in the 1930s.6 His research established that ‘the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices – in the political arena, in the liberal westernizers 43 intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular culture – rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”’7

The Egyptian public’s attitude toward fascism and Nazism was expressed principally through three types of representation. The first, , viewed fascism and Nazism as imperialist forces; the second, , perceived the Third Reich and the fascist regime in Italy as extreme forms of modern totalitarianism. And the third, , scathingly denounced the ideology of Nazism and its racist theories and practices.8

Gershoni paid special attention to the Islamic variant of liberal Westernism in Egypt. In a study on Egyptian liberalism’s attitude towards Nazism from 1933 to the outbreak of the Second World War, he focuses on the weekly review , the first issue of which appeared in 1933.9

Boasting a circulation that rose, late in the decade, to 40,000 copies, a third of which were sold in Arab capitals beyond Egypt’s borders, provided a forum for some of the most prestigious Egyptian and non-Egyptian Arab intellectuals of the period: its contributors included Ali‘Abdul-Raziq, Ahmad Amin, ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim,10 Mahmud Taymur and Sati‘ al-Husri.11 Together with a clear Arabist and Islamic orientation ( means ‘the message’ – an allusion to that of the Prophet Muhammad) along reformist lines,

it regularly devoted space to a methodical, highly critical review of internal developments in Nazi Germany and in fascist Italy, as well as of the policies of Hitler and Mussolini in the international arena. It was not a solitary voice in doing so. Consistent support of liberal democracy and liberal values, attended by the rejection of fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, can also be found, for example, in the monthly , in the daily , and in the illustrated weekly [] throughout the entire decade.12

Gershoni shows that the critiques appearing in the review were comparable to the best analyses and refutations of Nazism published in Europe. The review denounced not only the racial exclusion organized by National Socialism, but also the ‘racist madness’ of its scientific pretensions and their translation into medical practice. Avoiding the trap into which ultranationalists and religious conservatives fell, it struggled against all forms of the illusion that Nazi Germany was pro-Arab because it was anti-Jewish: denounced Nazism ‘as a “white imperialist attack” on the Semitic peoples, first and foremost against the Arabs and Muslims’,13 while assailing the specific form of anti-Judaism peculiar to Nazi anti-Semitism. Yet all this went hand in hand with fierce denunciation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.14

Gershoni insists that was in no sense marginal or exceptional: ‘It was actually the pro-fascist and pro-Nazi intellectual voices that were peripheral.’15 He offered further proof a few years later in a study of another liberal Westernist publication, the Egyptian monthly (The Crescent), which played a key role in shaping culture in the Middle East.16

Like , methodically denounced the totalitarian, imperialistic and racist nature of Nazism and Italian fascism. Gershoni dwells in particular on two essays that appeared in July and August 1933, one about the great mass slaughters of history, the other about anti-Semitism; warned that the Jews might fall victim to a massacre on a scale with the one that had decimated the Armenians, which it cited as the most terrible in modern history.17

Gershoni thus corroborates what his colleague at the University of Tel Aviv, Ami Ayalon (not to be confused with the Ami Ayalon who has moved from the head of Shin Beth, the Israeli internal security service, to the highest levels of the Labor Party), noted in an earlier essay on Egyptian intellectuals in the 1930s:

The voices of democracy’s champions were louder than those of its...