From empathy to denial: Arab responses to the Holocaust

)URP(PSDWK\WR'HQLDO$UDE5HVSRQVHVWRWKH+RORFDXVW UHYLHZ 'DQLHO+0DJLORZ Journal of Jewish Identities, Issue 3, Number 1, January 2010, pp. 86-88 (Review) 3XEOLVKHGE\<RXQJVWRZQ6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\&HQWHUIRU-XGDLF DQG+RORFDXVW6WXGLHV DOI: 10.1353/jji.0.0072 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jji/summary/v003/3.1.magilow.html Access provided by University of Nebraska - Lincoln (19 Sep 2015 10:34 GMT) Book Reviews streets from where Gottlieb grew up, in the original text on the 1949 memorial and even as late as 1987 when a new memorial to Wallenberg was erected on the Buda side of the city. It was not until 1999, when the old memorial was reinstated, that the Jewishness of those Wallenberg sought to save was explicitly stated. With this memorial, there was a public reinscribing in the city of 194445 as a year when Hungarian Jewish families were persecuted and rescued. The impact of those years, as Gottlieb’s life writing suggests, continued to be felt long after 1945 and many miles away from Budapest. Tim Cole, University of Bristol Meir Litvak and Esther Webman. From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 416. Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-231-70074-0. In June 2009, when American President Barack Obama delivered a longawaited speech about the United States’ relationship to the Muslim world at Cairo University, The New York Times invited several young Egyptian and Jordanian students to respond in an online forum. One poster, a 20-year old university student named Tarek Hefni, began by praising Obama’s nuanced oratory. “He made his speech relevant to the audience,” Hefni noted, “by always going back to Islam and differentiate [sic] between Islam as a religion and violent extremists as individuals.” Yet two sentences later, he added a dissenting note that surely struck most readers of The Times as both deeply insulting and stunningly ignorant: “I did not feel very comfortable regarding […] treating the Holocaust as a fact. It is still a debatable issue and should not be taken as granted.” With From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, both researchers at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, have confronted head-on how and why an Arab university student could harbor such opinions. The reason is simple and yet, paradoxically, under-researched, presumably because of the linguistic and cultural barriers that Arabic presents to most English speakers. Litvak and Webman argue that “The Arab Holocaust discourse had begun by the end of World War II and was shaped, from its inception, by the political developments related to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine” (377). Even if at times somewhat predictable in its thesis, this important book chronicles with unprecedented thoroughness the origins, evolution, and diversity of Holocaust discourse within the Arab world. It proves quite convincingly the point that, for most Arabs, it is simply not possible to separate the Holocaust from the establishment of the state of Israel and the subsequent history. Litvak’s and Webman’s study is particularly topical after September 11, 2001, when media commentators began carelessly bandying about terms 86 Journal of Jewish Identities Book Reviews such as “Islamofascist” in ill-advised (and wrecklessly ahistorical) attempts to equate Islamists and their terrorist acts with Nazism and the Holocaust. The authors of From Empathy and Denial help English-language audiences go beyond such sound bites to understand the breadth and diversity of Holocaust discourse in the Arab world. Although some Arabs deny the Holocaust because they believe that “the enemy [Nazis] of my enemy [Zionists] is my friend”, others publically reject any siding with Nazism as morally wrong, counterproductive for the Palestinian cause, or both. The book is divided into two parts. In part I, the authors present case studies to map four key turning points in Arab Holocaust discourse: Arabs’ years as reluctantly involved bystanders (1945-1948); the reparations agreement between Germany and Israel (1951-1953); the Eichmann trial (1960-1962); and Arab views on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. Part II catalogues prominent representational strategies. In this second part, Litvak and Webman present a chilling portrait of the many faces of Arab Holocaust denial: outright Holocaust denial, the equation of Zionism with Nazism, and the allegation of Nazi/Zionist cooperation. The most stunning example, however, are the “Holocaust justifiers” who admit that the Holocaust happened and that this was a positive occurrence. Through the Holocaust, some justifiers argue, Allah preemptively punished Jews for Israel’s future crimes against Arabs. These sorts of striking examples are the virtues of Litvak and Webman’s book. By culling the archives of Arab newspapers in Egypt and Palestine, they amassed a wealth of examples. But with From Empathy to Denial, their intention is to catalogue such opinions rather than pass judgment on them, and this virtue of breadth thereby becomes the book’s main vice. Repeated and at times annoying metadiscursive asides along the lines of “see chapter 8” and “as we shall see in chapter 9” point to the difficulties that will likely face any attempt to structure a similarly thorough study of Holocaust discourse in the Arab world. The book’s comprehensiveness, which aside from the myriad examples also manifests itself in superbly documented footnotes and bibliography, sometimes makes it a slow and redundant read. But the authors’ thoroughness and hesitancy to judge generates a more serious concern. One could imagine the following scenario: a non-specialist purchases this book and reads through its wealth of examples. Many if not most aspects of the themes in Arab Holocaust discourse, such as Holocaust justification, will probably come across as absurd. But some arguments are potentially more persuasive. Arab intellectuals frequently claim that the international community (and especially the United States) operates according to a double standard when Israel is concerned. If Americans and Europeans support restitution efforts for Jews, why do they not support similar actions for other victims of discrimination, such as African-Americans or Native Americans? These argumentative moves often transition smoothly (if not entirely logically) into attempts to equate the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba, in spite of the many differences. Litvak and Webman rightly term this equation “soft denial.” “Soft denial” often emerges from the mouths and pens of respected and (ostensibly) credible politicians and intellectuals, which adds rhetorical weight to their arguments. January 2010, 3(1) 87 Book Reviews And yet, Litvak and Webman, both highly reputable experts on Arab antiSemitism, seem hesitant to take a position, presumably because their “stance” (anti-Holocaust denial) seems obvious. Although arguing with Holocaust deniers tends only to legitimize their enterprise, countering the arguments of relativizers is trickier. One cannot reasonably expect protracted arguments for the Holocaust’s uniqueness from a book dedicated to Arab Holocaust discourse. But a periodic sentence or two stating what should be obvious might help less educated readers. For all of the injustices that Israel perpetrates or is perceived to perpetrate, it does not engage in factory-style mass murder on the order of Nazi death camps and Einsatzgruppen. Without presenting short counterarguments, Litvak and Webman risk, as the saying goes, “preaching to the choir.” It is sometimes utterly disheartening to read about Holocaust denial and the currency it enjoys in the Middle East. But in its final pages, From Empathy to Denial does highlight one promising shift in Arab discourse. This movement is a growing tendency among some Arab politicians and intellectuals to decouple the Holocaust from the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As President Obama himself pointed out in his Cairo speech, to acknowledge the Jewish genocide in the past need not mean to deny Arab suffering today. Some Arab commentators are at last implicitly agreeing with Hannah Arendt’s claim that Adolf Eichmann’s crime was not a crime against Jews, but a crime against humanity. If this trend catches on, and a new American presidential administration prioritizes change over Realpolitik, then the path from empathy to denial might yet morph into the move from denial to empathy. Daniel H. Magilow, The University of Tennessee 88 Journal of Jewish Identities