From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (review)

In June 2009, when American President Barack Obama delivered a long-awaited 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 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...