HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE ARABS
By Robert Satloff
Newsweek (International Edition)
Nov 12 2006
Even for the most empathetic Arabs, the Holocaust is still a faraway
event-Europeans killing their own-for which they paid a price.
Nov. 20, 2006 issue – A moroccan cartoonist recently took top honors,
worth $12,000, in a contest lampooning the Holocaust, sponsored by
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead of echoing the crass
anti-Semitism that nowadays issues from Tehran, Moroccans and other
Arabs might better have cited their rich history with Jews and the
Holocaust to put Ahmadinejad in his place.
In North Africa and the Middle East, discussion of the Holocaust has
tended to take one of three forms. One is outright denial, favored
by demagogues ranging from secular nationalists like Egypt’s Gamal
Abdul Nasser, who 40 years ago said that "no person takes seriously
the lie of the six million Jews that were murdered," to religious
radicals like Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah, who once proclaimed that
"Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." At the opposite end
of the spectrum are what I call Holocaust glorifiers. These Hitler
cheerleaders are best exemplified by the editorial writers at Egypt’s
state-owned al-Akhbar newspaper, who have praised the Final Solution
and only lamented the fact that the Nazis didn’t finish the job.
Most Arabs settle between these extremes in a sort of "Holocaust
relativism." They admit that Jews suffered during World War II but
dispute both the numbers and the unique depravity of the Final
Solution. "In war, bad things happen," they tend to say, citing
mass killings of Armenians, Kurds or Cambodians to suggest that the
Jewish experience was nothing special. Thus Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad told U.S. TV host Charlie Rose earlier this year that
he doesn’t have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were
killed," while moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas authored
a Soviet-era doctoral dissertation that questioned the number of Jews
killed. Even for the most empathetic Arabs, the Holocaust is still
a faraway event-Europeans killing their own-for which, they say,
the Palestinians have paid a price in the creation of Israel.
Five years ago, shortly after September 11, my family and I moved to
Rabat to begin a research project that I hoped would change the way
Arabs think about the Holocaust. My man-bites-dog idea was simple.
Not a single Arab is among the more than 20,000 non-Jews recognized by
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, for rescuing
Jews from the threat of death. This didn’t make sense to me, given
that North Africa, with more than a half-million Jews, was such a
critical front of the war. If I could find even a single story of
an Arab who saved a Jew, I thought, perhaps it could serve as a tool
for transforming the Holocaust into a source of pride for the region,
rather than a target of denial.
I soon learned that the Holocaust, while overwhelmingly a European
story, was an Arab story, too. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis
and their allies controlled North Africa and exported across the
Mediterranean many elements of the Final Solution, from slave labor
camps to the Yellow Star. Arabs responded remarkably like Europeans:
most were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a sizable percentage
willingly collaborated in the persecution of Jews, and a small but
symbolically important group of Arabs helped and even saved Jews.
Perpetrators ranged from Arab guards who tortured Jews in Vichy
"punishment camps" in Algeria and Morocco to Arab interpreters in
Tunisia who went house to house with SS officers pointing out Jews.
These ordinary Arabs are best represented by a Tunisian named Hassen
Ferjani, convicted by a Free French tribunal in 1943 for a conspiracy
that led to the deportation to Germany-and subsequent execution-of
three Jewish men, a father and his two sons.
The heroes have names, too. They include men such as Si Ali Sakkat,
a former mayor of Tunis who opened his mountainside farm to 60 Jews
escaping from a labor camp, and the dashing Khaled Abdelwahhab, son
of a celebrated Tunisian author, who spirited several Jewish families
from their hostel in the middle of the night to protect one of them-a
beautiful blond, blue-eyed Jewish woman-from being raped by a German
officer. I also found tales of many Arabs whose names we don’t know:
the Arab wet nurse who took in Jewish children when milk was scarce;
the Arab baker who squirreled away extra bread for Jewish families when
Vichy rations penalized Jews most of all; the Arab shepherds who opened
their modest homes to Jewish families fleeing bombed-out villages.
These stories of villains and heroes constitute the real-life Arab
experience of the Holocaust. Arabs don’t have to take a lesson from
the president of Iran. In fact, they could teach him a few things.
Satloff, director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is
the author of ‘Among the Righteous: Lost Stories From the Holocaust’s
Long Reach Into Arab Lands’
week/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
