Les Arabes et le Holocauste: la vérité, réponse à Gilbert Achcar

"The myth that Arabs were innocent bystanders while foreigners committed atrocities against other foreigners in far away Europe has gained so much traction, that it is virtually politically-incorrect to see Arabs as other than victims of Israeli oppression or western colonialism. Yet the Holocaust was, in the words of author Robert Satloff, as much an Arab story as a European. Scholars like Matthias Kuntzel and Jeffrey Herf continue to uncover evidence of Arab sympathy and collaboration with Nazism. The key role played by the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in fomenting anti-Jewish incitement and violence, not just in Palestine but across the Arab world, is a constant source of embarrassment to apologists like Gilbert Achkar. In an article for Le Monde diplomatique he calls the Mufti an ‘Israeli propaganda puppet’, long ‘discredited’ among the Arabs. [...] Had the Allies not liberated Tunisia and Libya from the Italian fascists – and Algeria and Morocco from the Vichy regime in 1943 – the Jews of the Arab world would have undoubtedly joined their European brethren in the death camps."

Source: Arabs and the Holocaust: the truth, par Bataween @ CIF watch

In his CiF post Lebanese SOAS professor Gilbert Achcar argued last week that Holocaust-denial in the Arab world is much less common than it is believed to be in the West. Where it does exist, Achcar writes, Holocaust denial is the ‘anti-Zionism of fools’: Arabs deny the Holocaust in order to lash out at Israel’s ‘oppression’ of the Palestinians.

Achcar’s thesis is at once contradicted by a poll taken among Arab-Israelis. It finds that 40 percent believe that the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis never happened, almost twice the percentage in 2006. If 40 percent of Arabs living in the Jewish state – where the Holocaust is daily discussed and deeply embedded in the national psyche – manage to deny it, how much more rampant must denial be in the Arab and Muslim world, where information is censored, controlled and distorted. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad has institutionalised Holocaust denial.

Gilbert Achcar’s shoddy analysis takes no account of those Arabs and Muslims who, on the contrary, wish that Hitler had been able to finish the job, the ‘minimisers’, such as Mahmoud Abbas (who claimed in his doctoral thesis that numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were much lower); and those who so universalise the Holocaust that it ceases to be a Jewish tragedy.


Achcar then argues that the media should praise rather than ignore Arab acknowledgements of the Holocaust. What are these acknowledgements? Yasser Arafat visiting Anne Frank’s house in 1998. Palestinians in the West bank village of Bil’in dressing up in striped pyjamas, reminiscent of concentration camp inmates, during the Gaza war. Palestinian villagers in Ni’lin holding exhibitions of Yad Vashem photos.

Rather than attempts ‘to empathise and further understand their occupier’, as Achcar puts it, these examples are PR gimmicks – cynical, dishonest and crude attempts to score propaganda points by exploiting one of the most painful catastrophes in Jewish history. The comparison is calculated to offend where it hurts most. The message is ‘the Palestinians are the new Jews'; by implication, ‘the Israelis are the new Nazis’.

The comments thread to Achcar’s piece corroborates two myths: Zionism not only exploits, and exaggerates, the Holocaust in order to attract sympathy for Israel – but that Arabs paid the price of Israel’s establishment as a direct consequence of the Nazi Holocaust. The second myth appears to be believed by President Obama, no less, who in his Cairo speech in June 2009 ‘balanced’ Arab acknowledgement of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with Jewish recognition of Palestinian suffering. In fact, 14 centuries of Arab and Muslim subjugation and antisemitism validate the creation of Israel as a haven of last resort as much as any European persecution. If any equivalence should be drawn, it should be between the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, and Jewish refugees driven from Arab countries.

The myth that Arabs were innocent bystanders while foreigners committed atrocities against other foreigners in far away Europe has gained so much traction, that it is virtually politically-incorrect to see Arabs as other than victims of Israeli oppression or western colonialism. Yet the Holocaust was, in the words of author Robert Satloff, as much an Arab story as a European. Scholars like Matthias Kuntzel and Jeffrey Herf continue to uncover evidence of Arab sympathy and collaboration with Nazism. The key role played by the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in fomenting anti-Jewish incitement and violence, not just in Palestine but across the Arab world, is a constant source of embarrassment to apologists like Gilbert Achkar. In an article for Le Monde diplomatique he calls the Mufti an ‘Israeli propaganda puppet’, long ‘discredited’ among the Arabs.

The Nazis incorporated the Jews of the French Maghreb in their extermination plans at the Wannsee conference. Tunisia was occupied by the Nazis for six months in 1942. Scores of Jews were murdered, hundreds rounded up and sent to labour camps. Some 600 died from starvation and typhus in the notorious Giado camp in Libya. Thousands of European Jews who had enlisted in the defeated French army or foreign legion died from torture and neglect in forced labour camps in Morocco.
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Gilbert Achcar et l'inversion de la Shoah contre les Juifs et les Israéliens, par Petra Marquardt-Bigman