Anguished Hope: Holocaust Scholars Confront the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, and: From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (review)

The Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine (Eretz Israel) is not the only interminable struggle in which two peoples contend over a small piece of land—one thinks of Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, and Nagorno-Karabakh. But it may be unique in focusing the world's attention because of the use and misuse of Holocaust memory and imagery. The memory of the Holocaust has been deployed for various purposes. In the Arab-Israeli conflict it has been employed in part to buttress the legitimacy of the existence of the state of Israel and to support policies including settlement in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). At the same time, Palestinians and others often have denied the Holocaust, while cruelly, if somewhat illogically, demonizing Jews and Israel by identifying Israelis (Zionists) with Nazis.

The two works reviewed here address the question of how the history, historiography, and reportage of the Holocaust have interacted with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Anguished Hope asks, How does the Holocaust inform that conflict, and how should Jewish, Christian, and other scholars understand that conflict given the Shoah's centrality to their own world views? From Empathy to Denial asks, How have the Holocaust, Jews, and Israel been understood and portrayed in the Arab world? To some extent, the studies complement each other in that the first volume focuses on the Israeli, Jewish, and Christian responses to the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the second examines the Arab reaction. Both works are critical of misuses of the Holocaust narrative, although they view the Holocaust instrumentally as providing legitimacy for the state of Israel.

Anguished Hope is a product of the biennial Stephen S. Weinstein symposium in Wroxton, England, which has met since 1996 under the leadership of Leonard Grob and Henry F. Knight. Thirteen writers, most of them philosophers and/or theologians, including Peter J. Haas, John K. Roth, David Blumenthal, Leonard Grob, Britta Frede-Wenger, Margaret Brearley, David Patterson, Didier Pollefeyt, Myrna Goldenberg, Henry F. Knight, Hubert Locke, Amy H. Shapiro, and Rachel N. Baum have contributed essays. The collection comprises thirteen chapters and is organized into three main sections titled "Challenges," "Risks," and "Possibilities." Each essay is followed by a summary paragraph of pointed questions raised by the other members of the symposium and by a concluding response from the author. The dialogic nature of the collection is one of its effective and attractive features since it conveys the liveliness of the symposium while affording the reader a deeper understanding of the issues.

From Empathy to Denial shows how the Holocaust has been represented and misrepresented in the Arab world from the end of the Second World War to the present and demonstrates that the Arab portrayal of the Holocaust has been affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict. The first part of the book centers on four historical events that highlighted the Holocaust: the struggle over Palestine between 1945 and 1948, which led to the creation of Israel and the dispossession of some Arab Palestinians; the 1952 reparations agreement between Germany and Israel; the Eichmann trial of 1960 to 1962; and the improvement of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish world following the papacy of John XXIII, the Vatican II conference, and the papacy of John Paul II.

The second part discusses seven themes that have appeared in various combinations in the Arab world in discussions of the Holocaust, Jews, and Israel: "Denial of the Holocaust"; "Justification of the Holocaust" (meaning that the Jews deserved to be destroyed by the Nazis); "Equation of Zionism with Nazism"; "Alleged Zionist-Nazi cooperation"; "Arab Retrospective Perceptions of Nazi Germany"; "The Palestinian Catastrophe (Nakba) versus the Holocaust"; and [End Page...