Preface This book had its inception early in 2006, when my friend Enzo Traverso
asked me to contribute a chapter on the reception of the Holocaust
in the Middle East to the monumental work on the history of the
Shoah that he and three other scholars were coediting for the Italian
publishing house UTET in Turin. I accepted the invitation, but only
after much hesitation: the short six months I was given to complete my
essay— an author who had been approached before me had bowed out
late in the day— made the task, given its scope and complexity, a perilous
one.
I took it on nonetheless, motivated by what might be called a sense of
duty. The work being put together would, I knew, be a good one, and I did
not want to see the issue I had been asked to discuss— a delicate question
if ever there was one— treated incompetently or left aside. Out of a concern
for intellectual rigor, I limited the field of my research to countries
that lay directly in my area of competence, countries whose language I
knew— those of the Arab world from which I come. After my editors had
approved this restriction, I began intensively researching and writing, and
I eventually turned out the long chapter that closes the second and final
volume of that work. Enzo was the first to suggest, insistently, that I work
this chapter up into a book. At the time, I was not particularly inclined to
plunge back into intensive research on the same topic.
But I continued to give it thought, since the questions raised were
being posed ever more sharply in the Middle East. For example, late in
2006 a Tehran conference called “Review of the Holocaust: Global
Vision” promoted Holocaust denial, with the Ira ni an president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad contributing his own deliberately provocative statements.
Urged on both by readers of the original chapter— including the
publishers of the French, British, and American editions of the present
book— and by my own desire to discuss the problem in a form more
widely accessible than the voluminous compendium published solely in
Italian, I undertook the project of transforming the chapter into a book.
It was obvious that it was going to take enormous effort to depict the
reception of the Holocaust in the Arab world, where the diversity of
countries and conditions is multiplied many times over by the diversity
of po liti cal tendencies and sensibilities, even as the inhabitants views of
the Jewish tragedy are rendered infinitely more complex by their relationship
to the Palestinian drama, the Nakba. The introduction to the
book is accordingly devoted to this very complex relationship between
the Holocaust and the Nakba.
To make my task somewhat more manageable, I have focused on the
countries most directly affected by the creation of the State of Israel,
those of the Arab East. Maghreb countries— those of the Arab West, in
North Africa— are treated only incidentally. This restriction notwithstanding,
the slim volume that I initially envisioned has mushroomed
into a thick book. The discussion of the Holocaust period— the 1930s and
1940s— takes up more than half of it. I have construed the Shoah (the “catastrophe”)
broadly in the following pages, not restricting it to the post-
January 1942 phase of systematic liquidation that the Nazis called the
“Final Solution” but including the entire period of Jewish persecution—
both in Germany and, later, in the lands conquered by the Nazis— that
began with Hitlers assumption of power in 1933.
I have privileged these years over the following decades for several
reasons. First, they are the main object of the historical controversy fought
out in the battle of the narratives. (Wherever good secondary sources
were not available, I have explored primary sources.) Second, it was
between the end of the First World War and that of the Second that the
main ideological currents of the Arab countries took shape; their diverse
relations to the Holocaust provide an excellent index of their own nature.
As a result, this book provides an ideological mapping of the Arab
world— and, as I see it, as much of its interest lies therein as in the title
subject. Finally, a detailed discussion of the attitudes toward the Holocaust
that have taken shape in the six decades since the State of Israel
came into being is impossible here, for the simple reason that it would fill
several volumes.
I certainly have not titled my book The Arabs and the Holocaust
because I share the grotesque view that the Nazis had no closer collaborators
in their persecution of the Jews than the Arabs. I do not even suggest
that “the Arabs” participated in the crime, actively or passively, as many
population groups across Europe did. Yet as a result of the Zionist enterprise
and Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Arabs were deeply affected
by the Holocaust, and my main ambition has been to render the complexity
of their relation to it. To be sure, one finds many odious attitudes toward
the Holocaust in the Arab world; but one also finds absurdly distorted
interpretations of the Arab reception of the Holocaust in Israel and the
West. My aim is to open up avenues of reflection that make it possible to
go beyond the legion of caricatures, founded on mutual incomprehension
and sustained by blind hatred, that plague discussion of the subject.
Finally, though it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive
account of Arab reactions to the Holocaust, I do believe that a more narrowly
focused investigation of Palestinian perceptions of the Shoah is
both possible and necessary. I would hope that a Palestinian scholar will
soon produce, on this subject, the equivalent of what Tom Segev and
Peter Novick have produced, respectively, on the Israelis and the Americans
relationship to the Holocaust, with the same admirable concern for
objectivity and the same critical distance from nationality and ethnicity
that they demonstrate. And, in the interests of mutual comprehension, I
would also hope that an Israeli scholar will soon produce an in- depth
study of the history of the Israeli reception of the Nakba, the drama of
the Palestinian people.
LONDON, AUGUST 2009
A Note on the Transliteration of Arabic
I have transliterated Arabic names and terms using a simplified version
of the rules for romanization applied in the specialized literature, with
the aim of making them more accessible to lay readers yet still recognizable
to those who know the language. To the same end, names of wellknown
individuals are transliterated in accordance with common
practice. Finally, in the case of Arab authors who have published in a
Eu ro pe an language, their own transliterations of their names have generally
been respected. However, the romanization of Arabic names by
the various authors is respected in the citations, as is the rule.