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

Gilbert Achcar

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9780805089547: The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805089543 ISBN 13: 9780805089547

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2010

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An unprecedented and judicious examination of what the Holocaust means—and doesn't mean—in the Arab world, one of the most explosive subjects of our time

There is no more inflammatory topic than the Arabs and the Holocaust—the phrase alone can occasion outrage. The terrain is dense with ugly claims and counterclaims: one side is charged with Holocaust denial, the other with exploiting a tragedy while denying the tragedies of others.

In this pathbreaking book, political scientist Gilbert Achcar explores these conflicting narratives and considers their role in today's Middle East dispute. He analyzes the various Arab responses to Nazism, from the earliest intimations of the genocide, through the creation of Israel and the destruction of Palestine and up to our own time, critically assessing the political and historical context for these responses. Finally, he challenges distortions of the historical record, while making no concessions to anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial. Valid criticism of the other, Achcar insists, must go hand in hand with criticism of oneself.

Drawing on previously unseen sources in multiple languages, Achcar offers a unique mapping of the Arab world, in the process defusing an international propaganda war that has become a major stumbling block in the path of Arab-Western understanding.

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About the Author:

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.

Arabs and the Holocaust
PART ITHE TIME OF THE SHOAHArab Reactions to Nazism and Anti-Semitism, 1933-47PreludeIt 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.4In 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 Westernizers2. The Marxists3. The nationalists4. The reactionary and/or fundamentalist Pan-IslamistsNote 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

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