"War of Narratives"

One of the most awkward and painful topics of debate among Israelis and Palestinians and their respective supporters is whether the Palestinians, displaced and stateless since the creation of Israel in 1948, are correct in claiming that they have been made to pay the price of Hitler's persecution of European Jews. To many Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, there is a self-evident connection here, part of the long history of European colonial interference in the Middle East. To most Israelis and Jews who view the return to Zion and the creation of the Jewish state as an answer to Jewish dispersion and vulnerability, the suggested connection is at best misleading or inaccurate, at worst offensive and unacceptable.

A War of Narratives

As this reviewer has suggested elsewhere, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, above and beyond the negotiable issues in dispute, given birth to a tangle of core arguments of this sort which are partly psycho-social, partly existential — and largely unwinnable.¹ Israelis and Palestinians have become locked in a vicious cycle, viewing themselves as the victims of the other — not just victims, but righteous victims.² And nowhere is their sordid competition for exclusive or superior victimhood more acute, self-righteous, and self-defeating than in the "war of narratives" (in Gilbert Achcar's subtitle) involving the Jewish Shoah and the Palestinian Nakba.

From Empathy to Denial and The Arabs and the Holocaust are very different books that complement one another in addressing — yet not resolving — these difficult issues. Together, these volumes unfold a complicated and unhappy history of the interplay of Shoah and Nakba, their enduring impact on the identities of Israelis and Palestinians, and how they contribute significantly to each side's inability to empathize with the other.

A number of historical episodes are treated in both books: the persecution and genocide of European Jews; the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, with Hitler's war against the Jews; West Germany's restitution to the Jews via reparation payments to the State of Israel; the trial (1954-1955) in Israel of Rudolph Kasztner, a Zionist official falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis; the kidnapping, public trial, and execution by Israel of high-level Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann (1960-1962); the Catholic Church's pronouncements of contrition regarding centuries of Jew-hatred and its passivity during the Shoah (1965, 1998); Roger Garaudy's 1996 book and subsequent trial in France for Holocaust denial; Yasir 'Arafat's aborted visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1998; and the United Nations' inauguration of an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2005. Each of these Holocaust-related episodes has provoked critical, often hostile, commentary in the Arab world, as has distribution of a number of star-studded popular depictions of the Shoah in film (e.g., "Schindler's List" [Steven Spielberg, 1993], "Life is Beautiful" [Roberto Benigni, 1997]) and on television ("Holocaust" [NBC, 1978]). The authors of these two works summarize and evaluate those Arab responses, but they do not always draw the same conclusions.

Unpleasant Primary Materials, Overheated Rhetoric

Both books deal forthrightly with unpleasant primary materials reeking of stereotyping, racism, anti-semitism, and Holocaust denial. Neither attempts to hide or gloss over disturbing evidence of prejudice and hatred emanating from a number of Arab thinkers and leaders. Both books are admirable for the richness of their source material, the rigor of their scholarly citations, and for providing readers with excellent bibliographies and indexes — rare jewels indeed on today's publishing scene.³

Each of these books can serve as a guide — and antidote — to the overheated rhetoric that has unfortunately taken over much of the discussion on these topics. As these studies attest, the abuse of Nazi and Holocaust imagery on both sides distorts our ability to understand Middle Eastern events...