Imperfectly symmetrical: a discussion of Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust

Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust focuses on two key issues: the attitudes of various thinkers and political activists within the Arab East to the Holocaust (and, by extension, to fascism, Nazism, anti-Semitism, the Jews in general and Israel) and the absurdly ‘distorted’ western and Israeli representations of how Arabs have treated these topics. The book is divided into two parts, ‘The time of the Shoah: Arab reactions to Nazism and anti-Semitism between 1933 and 1947’, with chapters on liberal westernisers, nationalists and reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists, and ‘The time of the Nakba: Arab attitudes to the Jews and the Holocaust from 1948 to the present’, with chapters on the Nasser years (1948–1967), the PLO years (1967–1988) and the years of the Islamic resistances (1988 to the present). Achcar concentrates on mapping the principal Arab ideological currents of the 1933–1947 period, ‘whose diverse relations to the Holocaust’ provide ‘an excellent index of their own nature’. We are presented with two broad, internally diverse, but subsuming categories: that of Marxists, liberals and nationalists, whose anti-Zionism was not likely to be linked to anti-Semitism and fascism or Nazism; and that of reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists, whose anti-Zionism was indeed thus linked. I will summarise Achcar’s overview of these two categories and then proceed to an evaluation.

Marxists, including many indigenous and immigrant Jews, were consistently hostile to Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the Jews were often more militantly anti-Zionist than their comrades. The Arab Communist parties followed the lead of the Soviet Union in supporting partition in 1947, but not without considerable inner turmoil. Although they lost popular support because of this stance, they were able to revive somewhat through the alliances of the Soviet Union with revolutionary pan-Arab nationalist regimes of the 1950s and 1960s.

The liberals, steeped in ‘a democratic, humanist culture’, opposed Nazism from the outset, a position that did not lessen their hostility to Zionism. Liberal perspectives were widespread, and Achcar delights in citing the Israeli historian Israel Gershoni’s conclusion that

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices [in the 1940s] – in the political arena, in 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’.

This liberalism was apparent at the highest levels of Arab political practice, as manifested in the proposals of the League of Arab States (in 1946–1947) for the integration of the Jews living in Palestine into what would effectively become a bi-national state. Although the liberals shared a number of views with the Marxists, they placed particular emphasis upon ‘plain common sense’, asking, invariably, why Palestinians should have to pay for Nazi crimes.

The attitude of nationalists was more varied. The Lebanese-based Syrian Social Nationalist party, founded in 1932, and promoting the unity of Greater Syria, was a ‘Nazi clone’. Although the Lebanese Phalange, founded in 1936, was predisposed to anti-Semitism by its fascist and Maronite sources, it ‘cannot fairly be accused of it’, and it ultimately forged an alliance (during the Lebanese civil war) with Israel. Young Egypt, founded in 1933, aped Nazi organisation and paramilitary activities and ultimately embraced anti-Semitism in words and deeds (attacking Egyptian Jewish establishments). Some pan-Arab nationalist members of the Iraqi Muthanna Club, founded in 1935, were anti-Semitic and admiring of Nazism to varying degrees. Nazi Germany also invariably attracted support at a popular level as the foe of the English, and Palestinian anti-Semitism, also at a popular level, and according to the ‘most primitive of views’, often transformed Germany into an ally against Zionism. Nevertheless, fascism proper, as ideology and practice, remained marginal in the Arab world, and most nationalists rejected its anti-Semitic associations.

An overwhelming majority of liberal pro- independence activists, a majority of progressive nationalists, and all Marxists – in a word, all those Arabs who shared an allegiance to the values of political liberalism that issued from the Western Enlightenment … rejected Nazism and alliances with Hitler’s Germany in the name of those values.

Such values did not vanish with the advent of revolutionary, progressive pan-Arab nationalism, as represented by Nasserism and Baathism in its earliest decades, or as represented by the progressive nationalists of today. According to Nasser and Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Baath, the main enemy was not the Jewish population of Palestine or a worldwide Jewish conspiracy; rather, it was imperialism, and the Zionism and reactionary regimes with which this imperialism was closely tied.

The second major category, that of reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists, presents a significant shift, for it is here that Achcar identifies individuals and groups that exhibited ‘the greatest affinity’ with the fascist states. Achcar traces Islamist anti-Semitic ideological discourses, from the Syrian Rashid Rida, who published a prototypical version in his Egyptian journal al-Manar in 1929, up to the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the theorist and activist of the 1950s and 1960s, who is one of the most important sources of contemporary Islamist thought. Given Islam’s belief that all humans are inherently equal as God’s children, it was difficult for Islamists to embrace Nazi racism as such. They were, however, capable of demonising and essentialising Jews and Judaism. Rida argues that Jews refuse to exist with others and that this penchant is based on the Torah. They received the first revelation, but they rebelled against Moses, killed a number of subsequent prophets, lapsed into idolatry and plundered others’ property through usury. They spread free-thinking in Europe and invented the western banking system, which has led to their domination of capitalist countries. They have, at the same time, defeated the Orthodox Church and established Bolshevism in Russia.

The thought of Rida and his successors represents a reaction to the innovative liberal Islamic modernism associated with the great Egyptian religious thinker Muhammad Abduh (d.1905). Islamists such as Rida ‘are living in their imagination in the first century of the hijra, in which religion is the prime mover in the world’. Relations between Islam and other religions are understood as reproducing the alternation between war and peace, conflict and alliance, that characterised the period of Islam’s earliest expansion. Rida cannot endorse the Nazi concept of the subhuman, but he does see Nazism as an instrument of God’s will in its hostility to Jews. Rida’s anti-Semitism would be shared with the Saudi monarchy, a bastion of reactionary pan-Islamism in Rida’s day (he became a champion of Wahabism) and our own. Whatever ‘elective affinity’ might have existed between the Saudis and the Nazis in respect to the Jews (an attempt to forge an alliance before the second world war was stillborn), the Saudis nevertheless ultimately placed themselves under the protection of the US, ‘in a relationship … from which the American overlord has reaped … immense profits’. The Saudis have yet to become friends with Israel (‘officially at any rate’), but this has little significance in the longer term. After all, the Arab leader who became one of Israel’s best friends, after embracing the US and abandoning Nasserism, was Anwar Sadat, ‘who also happens to be a notorious Jew hater’. On 25 April 1972, soon after expelling Soviet military advisers, the Egyptian delivered a vigorous speech on the Prophet’s birthday in which he declared that, ‘in the end, they [the Jews] proved that they are petty-minded people, deceitful and treacherous, when they allied themselves with his [the Prophet’s] enemies in order to strike him a blow in Medina, a blow from within’. The Prophet then did ‘the most marvelous thing’ by expelling them from every part of the Arabian Peninsula (King Saud’s emissary commended Hitler, during a personal interview in 1939, for his determination to rid Germany of its Jews by referring to this same incident).

Achcar does not flinch from treating such utterances at length, although he is painfully aware of the academic and propaganda industry focused upon discovering and publishing them, with few references to opposing Arab views, as a means of demonising the Arabs and Islam. He is highly sensitive to the need for contextualisation: he points out that the development of Arab anti-Semitism has been largely a product of the Arab-Israeli conflict; that some Arabs were bound to turn away from the Allies in the spring of 1941 in order to come to terms with the winners of the moment; and that some were driven to the Axis by the arrogance of their British overlords. He nevertheless firmly insists on drawing certain moral lines: ‘While it may be necessary to strike an alliance with the devil under certain circumstances, it is never legitimate to become the devil’s advocate [he is thinking of such infamous collaborators as the Palestinian Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini], and even less so to present the devil as an angel. Therein lies the difference between an alliance of convenience and full complicity.’

The ideological mapping at the heart of Achcar’s work is achieved with such intelligence, sensitivity and learning, and with such admirable concern for the theoretical and methodological, that it deserves to be regarded as one of the finest achievements in contemporary Middle Eastern studies. His capacity to integrate a story of Arab intellectual and political diversity with the story of how this diversity has often been reduced to a monolithic caricature is magisterial. The case of Michel Aflaq’s alleged fascism and anti-Semitism provides a delicious example. In an influential 1985 study of Nazism’s impact on the region during the 1930s, Stefan Wild devotes a single page to the Baath. ‘This page, however, contains so many errors, distortions, and deliberate omissions that it has become an obligatory source for polemics hostile to Arab nationalism.’ One of the most egregious distortions relates to Aflaq, one of the two founders and chief theorist of the Baath, who, according to Wild, was fascinated by Nazism as a student in France in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. This allegation is based on the fact that Aflaq owned a copy of the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century and on malicious misrepresentations on the part of fellow activists who had become alienated from him.

Nothing indicates that Aflaq had the least affinity for Nazism as a student, unless one takes his possession of the Nazi bestseller as proof. Aflaq was, in fact, much more interested in Marxism. He was on the four-member editorial committee of the communist-controlled weekly al-Talia, for which (in 1935) he wrote an article singing the praises of the ‘communist revolutionary’ in contrast to that of the ‘fascist warrior’. In a 1941 essay, he also warned against the ‘nationalism that comes to us from Europe’, and, in an essay published in 1950, which was probably written in the 1940s, he rejected

Germany’s and Italy’s national socialism because it is based on the idea of racial supremacy and discrimination between nations, that is, the supremacy of one race over another and its right to dominate the world, and also on discrimination between individuals of the same nation, which inevitably leads to individual or class dictatorship.

Achcar does not cite such passages in order to offer excuses for the Baath’s ‘later degeneration’; he simply wishes to expose gross distortions. ‘Those who have knowingly spread them … have done so in the context of a campaign to retrospectively denigrate Arab nationalism and its anti-Zionism. The political motivation is patent.’

Comparable distortions in respect to Arab attitudes towards Jews apart from fascism and Nazism are also widespread. The Israeli scholar Nassim Rejwan criticised the Israeli scholar Yehoshafat Harkabi ¹ for writing about a collective Arab stance that ‘has never existed in reality’. Achcar laments that ‘forty years after Harkabi, Israeli monitoring of Arab positions appears to have made little progress, except, perhaps, in the aggravation of tendencies denounced by Rejwan’.

Achcar’s work deserves high praise and, hence, the closest of readings, and it is in the spirit of this remark that I conclude with several questions:

1) To what degree will mutual recognition of the historical validity found in the narratives of each side contribute to the lessening of conflict or a truly just and peaceful solution in the real world of clashing material interests? Achcar maintains that the Nakba, the ‘grievous catastrophe’ of the Palestinians (the defeat of Arab armies in the first Arab-Israeli war, the massive exodus of Palestinians from what became Israel, and Israel’s refusal to allow them back), is inextricably linked to the Holocaust, understood as the Nazi accession to power and its aftermath, and not simply the 1942–1945 Final Solution. Arabs and Palestinians must recognise the fact and significance of the Holocaust, and Zionists and Israelis must recognise the fact and significance of the Nakba. So far, so good. The political significance of such mutual recognition, whether it is primary or secondary, nevertheless remains problematic. On the one hand, Achcar approvingly cites Hazim Sagieh’s remarks that reciprocity (in the mutual recognition of narratives) ‘can, at least initially, prove useful, or even indispensable’; on the other hand, Achcar tells us that ‘the violence must come to an end’ if mutual comprehension is to bear fruit, that pro-Israeli authors concerned with negative images of Jews in Palestinian textbooks should change the reality that produces these images, and that initiatives such as Arafat’s visit to the Anne Frank House can have ‘very little’ results in the ‘face of Israeli offenses’. Shlomo Sand ² has recently pointed to a sobering reality relevant to the issue at hand. During the period following the Oslo Accords, the heyday of post-Zionist thought among a number of Israeli intellectuals (including recognition of the truths of the Nakba narrative and the promotion of Israeli political and cultural pluralism), there was little change in Israeli political behaviour. The newly arrived colonists in the occupied territories during the Oslo years equalled the number of Israelis who had settled there over the previous twenty-five years.

2) Has Achcar exaggerated the degree to which reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamism has influenced Arab and Islamic thought? The counter-reformation championed by Rida, and its enhancement by what Achcar speaks of as the ‘intellectual regression’ of recent decades, have certainly taken their toll, and this has included Holocaust denial and the growth of anti-Semitism. There are, however, counter strains. The great historian Albert Hourani ³ has written that the liberal, innovative Islamic modernism against which Rida reacted ‘was to become part of the furnishing of the mind of many educated Arab Muslims and of Muslims far beyond the Arab world’. In spite of the depredations to which Achcar refers, this modernism has remained an important, living tradition among ‘lay people’ and intellectuals, as is readily apparent in the works of such famous contemporary Arab Islamic thinkers as Mohammad Arkoun, Muhammad Shahrur and Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid. Why hasn’t Achcar, so concerned to emphasise Arab heterogeneities, introduced us to what such thinkers might have to say about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Jews and Israel? My observations on the religious also extend to the secular/political. When Achcar writes that the ‘banners of preceding struggles, on which the adjectives “national”, “popular”, and “socialist” were inscribed, have vanished almost without a trace’, that ‘their place has been taken by the standards of Islamic fundamentalist movements’, he goes too far, as the diversity of secular political forces participating in the revolts of the ‘Arab spring’ amply shows.

3) Why has Achcar neglected to provide a fuller discussion of the Jewish fundamentalist ideas that provide a religious basis for hatred? Achcar refers to a Jewish/Israeli ‘regression’, comparable to that experienced by the Arabs in the 1980s and 1990s. Such a regression was marked ‘by the accession of Orthodox and fundamentalist Judaism’, which greatly contributed to the colonisation of the occupied territories by many religious settlers who believed that all Arabs are bad and every Gentile is hostile to Jews. We are, nevertheless, not provided with any extended treatment of the Jewish fundamentalist specificities that are comparable to the Islamic. Achcar speaks of ‘the startling harmony between the Mufti’s [Hajj Amin al-Husseini] vision and the Islamophobic representation of Islam as an intrinsically racist religion’. The Jews ‘live as parasites’, the Mufti claimed in a radio speech from Germany in 1943, and it is the duty of Muslims and Arabs to drive all of them from their lands.

Germany is also struggling against the common foe, who oppressed Arabs and Muhammadans in their different countries. It has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and resolved to find a definitive solution [endgültige Lösung] for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.

Yet, we find nothing in Achcar’s work of those Orthodox rabbis (of significant numbers, even if opposed by many of their fellows) who teach (in Israel, the occupied territories and elsewhere) that the Palestinians are descendants of Amalek, a tribe and symbol of evil that the Torah commands Jews to destroy; or that Arabs are the savage descendants of Ishmael, the ‘wild man’, as described by the Torah, who has bequeathed his terrorist ways to his heirs; or that, as a strain of Chabad Hassidism would have it, Jewish souls are divine and Gentile souls animalistic. I would have expected that a scholar so determined to do justice to parallel sins of omission and commission would have been especially keen to illustrate how, precisely, Judaism is as susceptible to racism as Christianity and Islam, a topic that largely remains untouched in mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) western discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Gentile-Jewish relations. I must also note here that the rabbis of whom I speak (and their many followers) do not see Zionism and the creation of Israel as essentially a response to persecution and the Holocaust, which lies at the heart of the Zionist/Israeli narrative of the Holocaust that Achcar takes as modular. They see the establishment of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, as the fulfilment of God’s will.

4) What is the relationship between imperialism, and particularly American imperialism, and Zionism and Israel? Achcar certainly speaks of imperial connections: that the Arabs looked upon early Zionism as an avatar of European colonialism, especially as it unfolded under the British mandate; that the Arab Left emphasised that the enemy was Israel as an agent of western imperialism and not the Jews as such (a theme more recently echoed by the leader of Hizballah, illustrating that Islamists are open to changing their views, and that the idea of an international Jewish plot is not inherent to their thinking); that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made a ‘famous’ attempt to show that the US’s interests are no longer served by supporting Israel; and that Israel and America can be seen as sharing ‘elective affinities’ on the basis of their being European states created in countries inhabited by non-Europeans and in which Europeans hold ‘the upper hand’ (here, Achcar quotes Nathan Glazer).

The imperial links are nevertheless handled piecemeal and intermittently, and their relationships to the narratives of Holocaust and Nakba are never really explored. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Zionist Revisionism, was not so reticent. He claimed that British imperial interests depended on the ‘paramount’ condition that Palestine should cease to be Arab. If it remained so, the inhabitants would eventually seek independence, distance themselves from Britain and federate with other Arab countries. Palestine as a Jewish state, however, surrounded by Arabs, would always seek to lean upon some powerful non-Arab and non-Muslim empire. Isolationism was virtually ‘providential’ (see Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri). ⁴

Jabotinsky’s words ‘should give us pause’, as Achcar says of his two ‘symmetrical’, but ‘not perfectly symmetrical’ narratives. Is there an intrinsic, structural link between Zionism/Israel and imperialism apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict? If this conflict should be resolved through an arrangement that preserves Israel as a separate Jewish state, why should we suppose that such a state would cease to be the US’s major Middle Eastern imperial satrapy, with many of its customary attendant rewards? Would such a state not continue to contribute its hard and soft power (in conjunction with non-Arab Turkey and, perhaps, non-Arab Iran restored to its former functions) to the long-lived imperial project of preventing the emergence of truly autonomous Arab states or forms of pan-Arab unity?

Achcar does not pursue such considerations. Zionism and Israel as imperial agents, for the short or long haul, are not central to his thought, or at least not for the purposes of this work. It would, indeed, be especially difficult to incorporate the idea of an intrinsic Zionist/Israeli imperialist link into the reconciling narrative of Holocaust/Nakba that he seeks to construct through a combination of what he takes to be the truths of the traditionally dominant warring narratives.