Arabs, the Holocaust, and Peace with Israel : Andrew Harrod
https://philosproject.org/arabs-jews-peace-holocaust-auschwitz/
Could the Holocaust have a humanizing effect upon Arabs – Palestinians in particular – and aid Israel in its quest to establish peaceful regional relations? Washington Institute for Near East Policy experts Mohammed S. Dajani and Robert Satloff sure think so, as indicated by their vision of Arab-Israeli peace rising from the Auschwitz ashes.
Dajani, a Palestinian sociologist and peace activist, and Satloff, a Jewish-American historian, recently spoke about the unlikely topic that brought Arabs and Jews together: the Nazi genocide and its legacy. Dajani, who was once a radical nationalist, related hispersonal journey “out of the cave of ignorance” from the taboo- and hate-filled Palestinian society. His Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking quest as a former professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds University prompted him to lead a Palestinian study tour of Auschwitz as an act of Israeli-Palestinian historical reflection.
While the Arab and wider Muslim world is rife with Holocaust denial, Arab historical memory emphasizes Israel’s 1948 creation as a catastrophe (“Nakba” in Arabic) for Palestinians. Dajani rejected the common Palestinian comparison between the Holocaust – a singular act of genocide – and this Palestinian suffering. As he and Satloff wrote in aMarch 2011 editorial, Israeli-Palestinian would benefit from a rejection of the “facile equation that ‘the Jews have the Holocaust and the Palestinians have the Nakba.’”
Satloff spoke about his efforts to bring Arabs and Jews together to examine the Holocaust, on the basis of his book Among the Righteous, which concerns the little-known history of North African Jews during the Holocaust. As he explained, with excerpts from aPBS documentary based on that book, 110 concentration camps under the Germans, Italians and Vichy French brutalized half a million North African Jews before the region’s 1943 Allied liberation. European majority-Christian and North African majority-Muslim populations similarly acted as “perpetrators, bystanders and protectors of Jews” amidst Axis persecution.
“Modern politics is corrupting history,” Satloff said, while speaking about the Holocaust as it concerns the Arab-Jewish relationship in question. As he pointed out, during both the recent panel discussion and in the documentary, after World War II, righteous gentileArabs “didn’t want to be found.” The documentary shows a Tunisian man’s hesitancy to accept a plaque that would memorialize his ancestor’s sheltering of the Jews because some of his family members would reject positive portrayals of Arab-Jewish relations, given the Israeli-Palestinian fighting that Tunisians see today in the media.
The duo’s editorial points out that such political corruption of history demands a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian political conflict. They said that “teaching the Holocaust to Palestinians is a way to ensure they do not go down the blind alley of believing their peace process with Israel is as hopeless” as any hypothetical “Nazi-Jewish peace process.” In the documentary, Satloff quotes a Palestinian woman as saying, “Even under the Nazis, Arabs made a choice. Surely [now] we can make a choice for reconciliation.”
The Dajani-Satloff Arab Spring editorial suggested that “Arab masses are applying the universal lessons of democracy” and should also appreciate the “universal lessons of the Holocaust.” The two said that while Arab dictatorships often tend to view history as a threat to their fictionalized legitimacy, “Arabs revere the study, writing and teaching of history, and have produced many famous historians.”
But Satloff’s panel description of Middle Eastern conflicts with Israel as a “political dispute, not a millennial dispute of religion” is questionable in light of the Arab Spring’s Islamic zealotry. Muslim groups like Hamas (with its genocidal charter) and the Islamic State, as well as a potentially nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran, all pursue Islamic supremacist agendas that target Israel. While the editorial quotes “Lord, advance me in knowledge” from Quran 20:114, Islam’s anti-Semitic canons are reminiscent of Nazi German supremacism and underlie the Arab “Holocaust glorification” discussed in Satloff’s documentary. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion of objective Arab scholarship, Arab historians like Ibn Khaldun have noted that Islam claims a mandate of world domination, a directive that historically rejects intellectual challenges.
The documentary inadequately examined Islamic anti-Semitism, although Satloff noted that Jews have lived throughout history as second-class citizens under Islamic rule, however preferable this was – at times – to Christian rule, for them. This inferior status is derived from Islam’s dhimma pact for protected monotheists like Jews and could explain the defiance of various North African Muslim authorities to Axis anti-Semitism described in the documentary. Yet such dhimmis are not supposed to assert themselves against Muslims, which is what happened when Jews reestablished their Israeli homeland on territory once controlled by Muslims.
Israel’s creation precipitated a decades-long Jewish exodus from the Middle East. North Africa’s Jewish population in particular declined to 1 percent of its pre-World War II size. Any proper Israeli-Palestinian historical reflection would have to include the Islamic anti-Semitism that exiled those Middle Eastern Jews, who have little direct relationship to the Holocaust, but constitute roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population.
Muslim Arab opposition to a Jewish settlement in Palestine, as exhibited to Adolf Hitler by his ally, Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, is also responsible for denying the Jewish people refuge from the Nazis. Yet even today, many Palestinians wrongly consider Israel’s creation as an injustice imposed upon Arabs to atone for European anti-Semitic sins such as the Holocaust. As Israeli-Arab diplomat George Deek recentlyexplained, focusing on Israel’s Holocaust history presents the country’s creation as an act of exhaustible charity and not of an inalienable Jewish right to an ancestral homeland.
Such factors explain the limited Arab support Satloff and Dajani (and his questionable interpretations of a “moderate” Islam) have received, however laudable their efforts. “We must also study the Holocaust [that] is happening in Palestine,” an angry Moroccan said to Satloff in the documentary, using an example of what he called the “Holocaust relativism” that is prevalent among Arabs.
Dajani’s Auschwitz trip led to his university resignation, which was a precursor to several death threats he has received, as well as the firebombing of his car. While admiring his obvious courage, Dan Pollak from the Zionist Organization of America told Dajani, “You are obviously still on the fringe of Palestinian thought.”
=
Comments are closed.
