Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion

Preface

Preface The subject of Arab responses to Fascism and Nazism, particularly Egyptian responses, has guided my scholarship over the past two decades. I have attempted to understand how Egyptians perceived totalitarian regimes and positioned themselves vis-à-vis these forces.The further I delved into the subject, the more I discovered that the literature suffers from gaping lacunas and outdated methods and approaches. Upon realizing that many other scholars share my feelings toward the state of the research, I initiated and convened a workshop entitled “Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism, 1933–1945: Reappraisals and New Directions” at Tel Aviv University and the Open University. The event took place at the end of May 2010. Renowned scholars worldwide submitted papers that suggested a profound rethinking and reappraisal of the Arab responses to Fascism and Nazism and charted a path for future research. They revised established narratives and commonly held paradigms. I open the collection with a review essay in which I critically survey the historiographical literature produced by Middle Eastern scholars on the subject of Arab responses to Fascism and Nazism. I suggest that alongside a persisting established narrative, a new revised narrative is emerging.The historiographical review introduces and situates the volume’s articles that contribute to this nascent narrative. The articles collected in this book focus on Syria, Lebanon, Palestine , Iraq, and Egypt as well as the broader Arab Middle East. The rationale for this selection rests upon the assumption that these countries were major arenas for Fascist and Nazi activities and Arab responses, although it is true that North African countries were also an important arena. However , because the countries of the Mashrek received considerably more attention in Middle Eastern studies and because the conference papers that viii Preface focused on the North African arena are published elsewhere,1 this volume gives priority to the former. Götz Nordbruch demonstrates how the Syrian and Lebanese encounters with Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s gave rise to internal debates and arguments in the public sphere regarding fundamental issues such as nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, social order, the political system, and political culture. He shows how fascination with Fascist models coexisted alongside ardent rejection of Fascism and the reassertion of humanist and enlightened values concerning individual rights and political liberties. Meir Zamir focuses on the Syrian and Lebanese political elites’ assessment of wartime developments, highlighting how influential political leaders anticipated an Allied success despite both resounding German victories in the battlefields and their control of Syria and Lebanon via the Vichy regime. They secretly contacted senior British officials in the region in order to secure their countries’ independence in the event of a Nazi-Fascist defeat. Their efforts to collaborate with Great Britain suggest that local leaders perceived it as the hegemonic power in the Middle East that would ultimately emerge victorious. Eyal Zisser examines individual and collective memories of prominent Syrian intellectuals and political leaders. He counters the commonly held claim that they tend to remember their admiration for Nazism and Hitler from their youth and their will to collaborate with them against French colonial rule. Examining a substantial corpus of memoirs, he clearly demonstrates that many agents of memory vehemently rejected the Nazi option, its totalitarian and racist worldview, and its expansionist ambitions. Some demonstrated empathy for the persecuted Jews of Nazi Germany. René Wildangel revisits the question of collaboration between Palestinian leaders and the Nazi regime. He shows that al-Hajj Amin alHusayni , the foremost leader of the Palestinian national movement who participated in the Nazi war efforts and Jewish genocide, was not necessarily the exclusive representative of the broader Palestinian public and national movement. Although Husayni’s positions undoubtedly reflected those of important segments of Palestinian society, Wildangel sheds light on other Palestinian voices that rejected Fascism and Nazism’s racist antiSemitic ideology and policies. Many Palestinians viewed support for these totalitarian regimes as counterproductive and inconsonant with Palestinian interests. Despite the struggle against Zionism and the British Mandate, in the complicated reality of the worldwide struggle between Fascism and democracy, they backed the latter. Mustafa Kabha examines Palestinian attitudes to the Spanish Civil War, which stood at the center Preface ix of Europe’s crisis in the 1930s. He concludes that alongside support for Franco and the monarchists, there were many voices in the Palestinian press identified with the Republicans and supported their cause. A prevailing assumption in the historiographical literature locates...