https://isreview.org/issue/74/arab-responses-nazism
Arab responses to Nazism
Review by Sherry Wolf
Issue #74: ReviewsShare
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The Arabs and the Holocaust:
The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
By Gilbert Achcar
Metropolitan Books, 2010 · 400 pages · $30.00.
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SINCE 9/11, the term “the Arab street” has been used in the United
States to caricature opinions across the Arab world, mashing together
the thoughts of tens of millions as if they have one mind with a common
worldview. This funhouse mirror image of a complex tableau of opinions
among a huge swath of humanity has been further distorted in the bigoted
clamoring against the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” in lower Manhattan.
Gilbert Achcar’s scholarly but accessible work, The Arabs and the
Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, is a powerful antidote to
these ahistorical notions of Arab public opinion, specifically regarding
the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Achcar’s writings on Palestine, Israel,
and Islam are familiar to those who’ve studied the Middle East, and in
The Arabs and the Holocaust he again applies a Marxist analysis to Arab
reactions to both Nazism and anti-Semitism to explain the competing
narratives on Israel-Palestine. Even for those well versed in the field,
this work contains real gems and useful insights.
By laying out the distinctive histories of the liberal Westernizers,
Marxists, nationalists, and fundamentalist pan-Arabists, Achcar allows
readers to sort through—and cut against—the dominant trends in
English-language historiographies that virtually ignore all but the most
extreme reactionary writings. The outsized attention often given the
right-wing anti-Semitic Islamists such as Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti during
the Second World War, Amin al-Husseini of “your enemy’s enemy is your
friend” fame regarding Nazis, is set against the position of the vast
majority of the Arab world at that time. During the war, even throughout
the 1939–1941 Stalin-Hitler pact, most nationalists, liberals, and
communists of the Middle East rejected Nazism and anti-Semitism outright.
The most compelling story that exemplifies this political trend took
place in Iraq in June 1941. Baghdad’s Jewish community was set upon by a
mob in a pogrom that killed between 129 and 180 Jews. Yet during this
two-day assault, Arab Muslims opened their homes to safeguard their
Jewish brethren, the government deployed troops against their fascist
attackers, of whom hundreds were killed in retaliation for their
anti-Semitic violence, and the Jewish victims were paid compensation by
the Iraqi state. What’s more, it was the pro-British prime minister of
Iraq, Nuri al Sa’id, whose threats to expel Jews after the war led to
the exodus of 135,000, the largest Jewish community of the Arab East. As
Achcar cites from Robert Satloff’s pro-Israel work, Among the Righteous:
At every stage of the Nazi, Vichy, and Fascist persecution of Jews in
Arab lands, and in every place that it occurred, Arabs helped Jews. Some
Arabs spoke out against the persecution of Jews and took public stands
in unity with them. Some Arabs denied the support and assistance that
would have made the wheels of the anti-Jewish campaign spin more
efficiently. Some Arabs shared the fate of Jews and, through that
experience, forged a unique bond of comradeship. And there were
occasions when certain Arabs chose to do more than just offer moral
support to Jews. They bravely saved Jewish lives, at times risking their
own in the process. Those Arabs were true heroes.
In a theme that echoes throughout, it is often the Arab forces most
aligned with the interests of imperialism, first British then American,
that express the deepest hostility toward Jews. The Saudi monarchy,
perhaps the only family to name a country after itself, lies at the
heart of the most reactionary pan-Islamism. Oil wealth from what is now
Saudi Arabia is the source of Western governments’ silence about the
sharia law of the Wahhabi monarchy, which is hostile even to non-Sunnis.
As Achcar explains, its “close and enduring ties with the United States
go a long way toward explaining the curtain of silence drawn, with
American complicity, around the basic features of the Saudi state, the
most obscurantist, antidemocratic, and misogynistic in the world.”
The Arabs and the Holocaust exposes the well-financed propaganda machine
out of Washington, with Web sites such as that of the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI) that translate and pull Arabic and Persian
documents out of context to create a tapestry of anti-Semitism out of
anti-Zionist writings. Achcar, however, makes no excuses for those
liberal Arab forces that in their zeal to oppose Zionism conflate it
with anti-Semitism. He writes, “Every Arab who recognizes that these
anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust, far from
undermining the Israeli cause as their authors intend, in fact help
Israel produce anti-Arab propaganda has already taken a big step toward
understanding why they are so inept.”
Today’s Palestine solidarity activists, daily inculcated with lies and
half-truths in the mainstream media, could make great use of the
documents cited here from early movements like that of the main leftist
armed organization of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, headed by George Habash. In 1969,
the PFLP wrote, “The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is the
establishment of a national democratic state in Palestine in which the
Arabs and Jews can live as equal citizens with regards to rights and
duties.…”
Achcar has once again provided leftists with a useful ideological tool
in the battle against Zionism. Perhaps the best way his publisher can
gain attention in the current U.S. environment is to mail off copies to
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin. After all, its title has two
of the most incendiary words in the English language today—“Arabs” and
“Holocaust.” Perhaps if these clowns were to attack it, as they surely
they would (without cracking it open), more scholars and activists will
discover this treat.
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Issue #90
july 2013
Will the revolution be tweeted?
Mass struggles in an age of social media
Issue contents
Top story
Mayor Michael Bloomberg: A depreciation
Danny Katch .
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Features
Will the revolution be tweeted?
Brian Lenzo .
.
Working-class women's liberation and rank-and-file rebellion in steel
Candace Cohn .
.
Pioneers in the fight for disability rights
Keith Rosenthal .
.
A critique of social practice art
Ben Davis .
.
The political economy of Mexico's drug war
Helen Redmond .
.
Interviews
Corporate power, women, and resistance in India today
Arundhati Roy interviewed by David Barsamian .
.
Debates
One democratic state in historic Palestine
Tikva Honig-Parnass .
.
In defense of Political Marxism
Paul Heideman and Jonah Birch .
.
Reviews
A systematic theory of economic crisis
Hadas Thier reviews The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory
of the Cycle by Pavel Maksakovsky .
.
Redistribute the wealth
Danny Katch reviews Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of
Epic Inequality by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks .
.
Voices of the union rank and file
Darrin Hoop reviews We are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at
Boeing by Dana Cloud .
.
The democratic deficit laid bare
Lance Selfa reviews The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and
the Broken Promise of American Democracy by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney
Verba and Henry E. Brady .
.
Consolidating the narco-economy
Gabriel Chaves reviews Cocaine Death Squads and the War on Terror: US
Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia by Oliver Villar and Drew
Cottle .
.
Struggle in the fields
Alexander Schmaus reviews Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle
in the Fields of California by Bruce Neuburger .
.
Ireland's uneven development
Shaun Harkin reviews Ireland’s Economic History: Crisis and Uneven
Development in the North and South by Gerard McCann; Ireland in the
World Order: A History of Uneven Development by Maurice Coakley and
Towards A Second Republic: Irish Politics After the Celtic Tiger by
Peadar Kirby and Mary P. Murphy .
.
Uncovering Black Marxist feminism
Keegan O'Brien reviews Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American
Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by Erik S. McDuffie and
Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
by Carole Boyce Davies .
.
An antiwar poet and activist
Deborah Roberts reviews A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise
Levertov by Donna Krolik Hollenberg .
.
The struggle of farm workers
Avery Wear reviews From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of
Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement by Matt Garcia .
.
The role of Lincoln's Republican Party in ending slavery
James Illingworth reviews Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery
in the United States, 1861–1865 by James Oakes .
.
A social theory of disability
Noreen McNulty reviews The New Politics of Disablement: 2nd Edition by
Michael Oliver and Colin Barnes .
.
.....
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The International Socialist Review is published quarterly by the Center
for Economic Research and Social Chang