The Arabs as Nazis? Some Reflections on “Islamofascism” and Arab Anti-Semitism (original) (raw)

The Arabs as Nazis? Some Reflections on “Islamofascism” and Arab Anti-Semitism

Alexander Flores
Bremen University of Applied Sciences

Abstract

One of the main constituents of the so-called Islamofascism is, in the eyes of those who subscribe to this conception, the close affinity of Arabs (and sometimes, Muslims) to Nazi ideology and possibly practice. To bolster this notion, its proponents do basically three things: first, they try to prove that a massive majority of Arabs took a pro-Nazi stand during the Third Reich and especially during World War II and that important Arab figures collaborated with Nazi Germany during the War. Secondly, they point to widespread-real and alleged-anti-Jewish beliefs among present-day Arabs. And thirdly, they claim that there is a personal, political and ideological continuity between both phenomena and that, thus, present-day Arab Judeophobia has the same character, scope and possible effect as the antiSemitism of the Nazis. During the War, so the argument goes, Arab attitudes were part and parcel of Nazi ideology, and they largely retained this quality although, after the War, Nazism was overcome in Europe. In this article, three more recent publications which subscribe to the above mentioned argument will be critically discussed.

Keywords

anti-Jewish attitudes, Arab anti-Semitism, Judeophobic discourse, Zionism, Israel, Palestine, National Socialism, response

One of the main constituents of the so-called Islamofascism is, in the eyes of those who subscribe to this conception, the close affinity of Arabs (and sometimes, Muslims) to Nazi ideology and possibly practice. To bolster this notion, its proponents do basically three things: first, they try to prove that a massive majority of Arabs took a pro-Nazi stand during the Third Reich and especially during World War II and that

important Arab figures collaborated with Nazi Germany during the War. Secondly, they point to widespread-real and alleged-anti-Jewish beliefs among present-day Arabs. And thirdly, they claim that there is a personal, political and ideological continuity between both phenomena and that, thus, present-day Arab Judeophobia has the same character, scope and possible effect as the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. During the War, so the argument goes, Arab attitudes were part and parcel of Nazi ideology, and they largely retained this quality although, after the War, Nazism was overcome in Europe.

The German edited book “A New Anti-Semitism? A Global Debate” 1{ }^{1} contains several contributions with the said thrust. Thus, Jeffrey Herf discovers a new wave of totalitarianism in the present world. He sees it in the Arab and Islamic worlds and traces back its roots to French fascism, German National Socialism and Russian Stalinism. In his view, it is incorporated in an Arab nationalism in Saddām Husayn’s manner (the article was written before the latter’s demise) and Islamic fundamentalism. Both are described as viciously anti-Semitic and terrorist.

This wave that has taken root in the Arab and Islamic worlds consists of a mixture of secular Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Added to that is an influence of French fascism, German national socialism and Soviet communism that is tied up to secular pan-Arab radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism. 2{ }^{2}

Herf’s article is an appeal to fight totalitarianism as German National Socialism had been overcome in the War and Stalinism had been destroyed by the demise of the Soviet Union. He deplores what he calls the unwillingness of many in the West to enter this fight and to support the “war on terror” and Israel’s “defensive struggle” against an enemy that is, in his view, driven by an eliminatory anti-Semitism 3{ }^{3} like that of the Nazis.

[1]

  1. 1){ }^{1)} Neuer Antisemitismus? Eine globale Debatte, ed. by Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck and Natan Sznaider, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. It should be noted that by no means all contributions to this volume fall in the alarmist category.
    2{ }^{2} Jeffrey Herf, “Die neue totalitäre Herausforderung”, in: op. cit., 191-210, here 195.
    3{ }^{3} The use of the term “anti-Semitism” is problematic. This term was coined around the year 1880 to denote an enmity against Jews understood not as a religious but as a racial ↩︎

Some of the proponents of this view, like Herf himself, are historians of Nazi Germany but quite ignorant of matters Middle Eastern and thus hardly able to appropriately grasp any phenomenon in the Arab world in its context. Rather, they seem to imply that the said phenomena share the basic characteristics of Nazi ideology and will, unless stopped, have the same deadly consequences. 4{ }^{4}

Matthias Küntzel

A book that is often cited as scholarly underpinning of the said school of thought is the German author Matthias Küntzel’s “Jihad and JewHatred: About the New Anti-Jewish War”. 5{ }^{5} It tries to explain the antiSemitic attitudes widespread in the Arab world by the fact that they are a necessary ingredient of Islamism which he calls jihadism without making any distinctions within Islamism. This anti-Semitism, until
group. Although anti-Semites targeted Jews specifically, the term could be taken as encompassing all “Semites”, that is, speakers of a Semitic language. An uncritical use of the term implies an acceptance of the racist notions it carries and can also lead to confusion as to the object of the hostility it denotes. Thus, when Arabs claim their generic innocence of anti-Semitism in their capacity as “Semites”, they are certainly wrong. Most of their critics in turn are inconsistent when they note this but fail to see that the very notion is largely to blame. Another drawback of the term anti-Semitism lies in the fact that it is frequently used to amalgamate all kinds and degrees of enmity against Jews whatever the circumstances. Bearing in mind the Holocaust, such an approach suggests a comparable danger in all expressions of hostility towards Jews, even those of the pre-Holocaust period and those from the Middle East where the Holocaust is much less present than in the West. This is unhelpful for an adequate understanding of anti-Semitism. For these reasons, it might be preferable to discard the term “anti-Semitism” and to replace it with a more appropriate one, such as “essentialist Judeophobia”. The only reason not to do so is the currency the term has gained and the ensuing confusion were one to replace it. In this paper, I retain the term but restrict its use to the modern European “racialist” conception and those instances that closely resemble it while using the term “Judeophobia” for the broader phenomenon.
4){ }^{4)} Another author belonging to that same category is Omer Bartov, see his article “Der alte und der neue Antisemitismus”, in: op. cit., 19-43, here 33-43. A shorter version of this piece was published under the title “He Meant What He Said” in The New Republic, 2 February 2004.
5){ }^{5)} Matthias Küntzel, Djibad und Judenhaß. Über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg, Freiburg: ça ira, 2003; English translation: Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, New York: Telos Press, 2007.

then virtually unknown in the Arab world, was imported from Nazi Germany by two agents working in close collusion: the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the then mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hājj Amīn al-Husaynī. In Küntzel’s view, around the mid-1930s, the Muslim Brothers took over Nazi anti-Semitism and sharpened their Judeophobia in a militant direction. They also discovered the Palestine issue as a field of action and allied themselves with the mufti, another rabid anti-Semite who was to become a close collaborator of the Nazis. Thus developed the core of all subsequent Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism that is with us still today. Despite all changes in circumstances and detail, the ideology thus developed, a jihadism that is of necessity coupled with anti-Semitism, has remained the same and still has the same pernicious effect. Today’s Arab anti-Semitism is, in effect, as eliminatory as was that of the Nazis. For Küntzel, this eliminatory antiSemitism is also responsible for the enmity of Palestinians and other Arabs towards the Zionist project and Israel.

This picture is an enormous distortion of the origins and history of Arab anti-Semitism. By assuming one background-Nazi Germanyand one carrier of anti-Semitism-the afore-mentioned duo-, Küntzel precludes a proper understanding of its real dimension, origin and history. This becomes clear in many passages of his book where he has to redraw certain complexes in order to make them compatible with his conception. Thus, for instance, he draws a grotesquely distorted picture of the general strike and subsequent rebellion of the Palestinians from 1936 to 1939. According to this picture, the rebellion was brought about by the machinations of the mufti who just followed his lust for power and his anti-Semitic leanings and who already at that time colluded with the Nazis. The real background of the revolt, the Palestinians’ apprehension at enhanced Jewish immigration, accelerated Zionist upbuilding and the possible loss of their homeland, is absent from this picture.

The Egyptian president Nasser was an ardent opponent of the Muslim Brothers and brutally suppressed them. In Küntzel’s view, antiSemitism is necessarily connected to Islamism, and consequently it is hard to understand that the anti-Islamist Nasserist regime disseminated anti-Jewish propaganda (which it did). Küntzel solves this problem by claiming that Nasser, once close to the Muslim Brothers, in this respect

remained faithful to their ideology. 6{ }^{6} The much simpler explanation that anti-Semitism can coexist with different political stands does not fit into his scheme, and for this reason probably did not occur to him. Yāsir 'Arafāt is treated in a similar manner: by and large, he was a secular politician, but since he was a sharp opponent of Zionism and Israel (and thus, for Küntzel, an anti-Semite), he has to be made an Islamist by hook or by crook, which Küntzel manages to do through his former connection to the Muslim Brothers, his being related to the mufti and the latter’s alleged support for him.

This picture does not help to grasp the phenomenon. It is true that explicit anti-Semitism European style is relatively new in the Middle East. It was imported from Europe, but the import began long before Küntzel claims it did. It was not restricted to Nazi Germany as its sole source. It was by no means exclusively done by the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the mufti; anti-Semitic attitudes were not only held by Islamists; anti-Semitism was not always such an important and central ideology as Küntzel claims; and the whole process was far longer and more variegated than he wants us to believe. And perhaps most importantly; this approach implies an almost complete disregard of the context in which the development was taking place. Such an approach not only precludes a sound understanding of anti-Semitism in Arab societies but by its alarmist tone and lack of distinction is also grist to the mill of a generalized anti-Arab propaganda.

Jeffrey Herf

Another book that tries to lend credibility to the purported close link between Nazism, Arab nationalism and Islamism-the common denominator being anti-Semitism-is Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. 7{ }^{7} In it, the author draws a picture of Nazi Germany’s propaganda in Arabic during World War II. His sources are mainly German and American archival materials; he draws especially on transcripts of radio emissions recorded and translated by the American

[1]

  1. 6{ }^{6} See Küntzel, Djibad, 68-73.
    7{ }^{7} Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2010. ↩︎

embassy in Cairo. As has been noted, Herf is a serious historian of Nazi Germany. Insofar as he restricts his treatment to the German propaganda effort as such, he succeeds in giving a plausible description of his subject. Nazi propagandist tried to “export the regime’s ideology in ways that they hoped would strike a nerve among Arabs and Muslims”. 8{ }^{8} They largely avoided materials like Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and instead concentrated on a selective (i.e. unilaterally anti-Jewish) reading of the Koran and an emphasis on the “common enemies” of Germans and Arabs-the Jews and the British. There was a peculiar mixture of religious and secular arguments: "The boundary between secular appeals to Arab nationalism and religious appeals to Muslims as Muslims was often blurred to the point of insignificance."9 Whereas in Germany, the Nazis envisaged to annihilate the Jews themselves, in the Middle East, they instigated the Arabs to do so.

Herf also stresses the fact that this propaganda gained in efficiency when in autumn 1941 a group of Arab exiles-with the mufti Amin al-Husaynī as its most prominent figure-came to Germany, joined the effort and contributed local idiom and a better knowledge of regional politics.

As a serious historian, Herf exposes and analyses the main features of Nazi propaganda for the Arab world. He sees its content as "a synthesis of Nazism, Arab nationalism and fundamentalist Islam"10 grounded in the war situation that gave rise to a highlighting of a purported common enmity towards “British influence and […] the Zionist project in the Middle East”. 11{ }^{11}

So far regarding Nazi propaganda for the Arabs. What about the receiving end? Did the Arabs heed the call? This is a problem Herf is ill equipped to tackle. At times, he is quite honest about it and expresses scepticism as to the possibility of gauging the Arab response to Nazi propaganda: "Fortunately, the question of how Arabs and Muslims would have responded to an Axis military victory in the Middle East

[1]

  1. 8{ }^{8} Herf, Propaganda, 263.
    9{ }^{9} Herf, Propaganda, 262.
    10{ }^{10} Herf, Propaganda, 261.
    11){ }^{11)} Herf, Propaganda, 262. ↩︎

remained in the realm of speculation." 12He{ }^{12} \mathrm{He} points to “evidence” to the effect that there might have been “strong support” in such an event, but in his book, he remains cautious and just speaks about the necessity to further explore “impact and reception” of the propaganda. 13{ }^{13} Even in his book, he is less cautious while describing the nature and the alleged afterlife of the “Nazi cum Islamist” ideology that was developed, in his view, through interaction of the Nazi specialists and the Arab exiles between 1941 and 1945. According to him, the creation of this ideology was an important stage in the evolution of Islamism, and it displayed marked continuity and influence ever after. In a chapter about “Postwar Aftereffects”, Herf tries to trace theses “lineages”. In contrast to the rest of the book where he treads familiar ground, in this chapter his lack of familiarity with Middle Eastern subjects is noticeable. Here, he claims that the mufti regained his Middle Eastern stature after the War-a dubious assertion-, he ascribes to him enormous influence at that time, he deals at length with Sayyid Qutb’s booklet Our Struggle with the Jews, establishing the link with the Nazis by a purely speculative thought (“It is plausible that during World War II, Sayyid Qutb listened to Nazi broadcasts and traveled in the pro-Axis milieu of the radical Islamists in and around Al Azhar University”), 14{ }^{14} and finally he reports that Nasser made positive statements about the “Protocols” and had them published. 15{ }^{15} In his view, this is sufficient evidence for the survival of a Nazi-like ideology in the Middle East. Strangely enough, several of the laudatory statements of readers on the back cover of the book praise it mainly for being an essential contribution to an understanding of the modern Middle East.

In a more recent article, Herf goes further, tries to establish even closer links and similarities between Nazism and all kinds of presentday Islamist phenomena (Hamas, al-Qaida, Ahmadinejad’s Iran), deplores an alleged neglect of this fact by the left as well as the right in the US-and calls to arms. As Nazi Germany was overcome by the force of arms, in the present struggle against radical Islamism, military force

[1]

  1. 12){ }^{12)} Herf, Propaganda, 263.
    13){ }^{13)} Herf, Propaganda, ix (Preface to the paperback edition).
    14){ }^{14)} Herf, Propaganda, 259.
    15){ }^{15)} Herf, Propaganda, 233-260. ↩︎

should not be discarded. Iran is a favourite target: "Conventional military strikes by the United States and our allies against Iran’s nuclear program should remain a serious option. 116{ }^{116} Here, as in his contribution to the volume cited at the beginning of this article, we leave Herf the historian and meet Herf the alarmist.

Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers

The book Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers 17{ }^{17} comes with great ambitions: the authors claim it is the first comprehensive study of the relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world, and they furthermore claim to have made a revolutionary discovery: the existence of an “Einsatzkommando” (special operations unit) meant to plan and execute the annihilation of all Jews in the Middle Eastern countries to be occupied by the advancing Axis armies.

What the book actually deals with is mainly:

[1]

  1. 16{ }^{16} Jeffrey Herf, “Killing in the Name. A progressive foreign policy will require more focus on Islamic radicalism”, in: The New Republic, 10 April 2010.
    17{ }^{17} Klaus-Michael Mallmann/Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006; English translation: Nazi Palestine: The Plan for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, transl. by Krista Smith, New York: Enigma Books, 2010. ↩︎

All this is largely true. But it is hardly new. The story of the mufti’s collaboration with the Nazis has been told several times. The evolution of Nazi policies towards the Middle East and the course of the War in that region are known. What is new are the findings about the “Einsatzkommando” of the SS to be deployed behind the lines of the German army advancing from Libya to the east. It was to undertake “executive measures against the civilian population” in the conquered territories. In view of the fact that its leader was Walther Rauff who had played an important role in the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union, it is plausible that the commando was meant to perform the same task in the Middle East. Because Rommel’s army had to retreat after its defeat at El Alamein, the commando never went into action on the Egyptian front. Later, it was resuscitated and acted against the Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Tunisia, treating them quite brutally but not murdering them on a large scale.

In any event, this commando was and remained a completely German affair and thus cannot serve as evidence for the main thesis of the book, i.e., that large numbers of Arabs, driven by anti-Semitism, were ready to closely collaborate with the Nazis in their mass-murder of the Jews. Since nothing of the sort ever happened in concrete terms, in order to corroborate their thesis, the authors had to rely on imputation and speculation. They close several chapters of their book with remarks of the following kind: Fortunately, it did not come to a Middle Eastern Holocaust because the Germans never occupied large tracts of the Middle East or North Africa, but had they done so, there is not the slightest doubt that Arabs would have wholeheartedly participated in the genocide. To quote a few examples:

It is to be assumed that the collaboration in the annihilation of the Jews would not only have worked in Europe under German occupation. Since a long time, numerous reports about the mood of the population suggested that there was likewise, in the Middle East, an immense and partly already well organized number of Arabs from the local population who offered

themselves as willing henchmen of the Germans. The central field of action of Rauff’s special operations unit, the realization of the Shoah in Palestine, would have been quickly enacted immediately after the appearance of the “Armoured Troop Africa” with the help of those collaborators. 18{ }^{18}

Thus there is no reason why the anti-Semitic potential of Lithuanian, Latvian, or Ukrainian nationalists should have been greater than that of Arabs in anticipation of the German army. The knowledge of the pogroms and massacres of summer 1941 in the western Soviet Union makes us suspect what kind of will at annihilation on the Arab side especially in Palestine would have been set free at the latest with the crossing of the Suez Canal by the Axis troops. 19{ }^{19}

On a bigger level to be sure, but materially comparable to the armed Jewish resistance in Europe, in Palestine there would have been a desperate struggle against the Axis and its Arab allies. Undoubtedly, the complete annihilation of the Yishuv would have been its result; the Jews of Palestine were only spared that fate through the military developments on the North African front. 20{ }^{20}

And as if to sum up all these bold statements, at the end of the book the authors claim:

The present study has shown that Germans, during National Socialism, attempted much more concretely than was hitherto assumed to physically annihilate the Jews of Palestine and render impossible for all times the establishment of a state by the Yishuv. It could also be amply documented that this enterprise would have found, on the Arab side, far-reaching and active support. 21{ }^{21}

And all this without a shred of evidence. There is evidence for a certain sympathy, among Arabs, for the German army, especially when it was still advancing and thus held the prospect of deliverance from the colonial power; there certainly was much opposition to the Zionist project which sometimes was expressed in anti-Jewish terms. How all this would have been translated to action in the event of a German occupation of the whole Middle East remains entirely in the realm of

[1]

  1. 18){ }^{18)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 147.
    19{ }^{19} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 164.
    20{ }^{20} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 182.
    21){ }^{21)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 257. ↩︎

speculation. Reliance on such innuendo in order to prove the main thesis of a book renders it worthless.

The Nazis and their Arab collaborators in German exile made huge efforts to rally the Arabs-and at times, Muslims-behind the Axis. Had there been any willingness of the recipients of these calls to heed them, it would have shown itself by some practical response. Contrary to what Mallmann and Cüppers at times assert, there was none. They cite any number of reports by German (and sometimes, British and American) agents, journalists and travellers to the effect that Arabs sympathized with the advancing German armies and that they prepared unrest to help them. In this context, they speak of an “Arab soundingboard” before the German entry. 22{ }^{22} All this remains anticipation in retrospect. They cannot refer to any meaningful practical action. On the authority of the Donauzeitung, a provincial German newspaper, they report “armed conflicts in numerous villages” in Palestine in August 1942, that is, when Rommel prepared his ill-fated breakthrough to the centre of Egypt-so the Donauzeitung had good reason to concoct its report. 23{ }^{23} The local chronology has nothing of the sort. It rather says, for June 1942, after the previous German advance to El Alamein:

The German advance across the Egyptian frontier caused apprehension, but there was no panic in Palestine. Rumours which had previously been put about that the Arabs were planning serious trouble proved totally unfounded, and local security conditions remained good. The economic condition of the Arab population generally and of the peasantry in particular was now better than they had ever known, and the near approach of the enemy brought full realisation of what Axis domination would mean to them. 24{ }^{24}

The British may have misread the reason for the Arabs’ calm, but the statement is unequivocal.

During World War II, Palestine was an important country for the war effort. It contained numerous British army camps employing mostly

[1]

  1. 22){ }^{22)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 149-164.
    23){ }^{23)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 162.
    24){ }^{24)} A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, vol. I, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office 1946, 64. ↩︎

Arab civilian workers. Had there been any willingness to carry out sabotage actions, this would have been an ideal place to do so. The mufti who claimed a large following in Palestine repeatedly called the Palestinians to carry out such actions. The result: nil. A mixed German-Arab sabotage and espionage commando organized by the German secret service and the mufti and parachuted to Palestine in autumn 1944 met with utter failure. The local Palestinians they contacted (with recommendations from the mufti!) were horrified and sent them packing; most members of the group were quickly arrested. 25{ }^{25}

Mallmann and Cüppers themselves, while dealing with the attempt to recruit Arabs and Muslims for the German war effort, in which the mufti was heavily involved, note the modest success of these attempts: “The practical value of the Muslim SS units proved modest.” 26{ }^{26}

In sum, in the actual behaviour of Arabs during the War, with the exception of certain well-known and well-documented cases, nothing points to their readiness to take part in the Axis war effort-let alone in the extension of the Holocaust to Middle Eastern Jews. The alleged widespread bloodlust only exists in the imagination of Mallmann and Cüppers.

There are two further disturbing aspects of the book: first, the European self-righteousness with which an occidental “civilizational basis” is assumed-as opposed to those communities who lack such a basissupposedly, in this case, the Arabs. 27{ }^{27} And secondly, the extremely defective and one-sided way of presenting the Palestine problem in the first chapter (“Jihad: the Arab struggle against the Jews of Palestine”). Here, the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in and continued further immigration to Palestine is taken for granted, whereas Arab opposition to and fight against it is consistently depicted in the most negative terms (“anti-Jewish encroachment”, “Arab terrorists”, “pogroms”, “massacres”, and the like). There is no mention of the largely non-violent nature the Arab opposition took for a long time, nor of any legitimate grievances of the Palestinian Arabs. This treatment follows the line of the crudest

[1]

  1. 25){ }^{25)} René Wildangel, Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht. Palästina und der Nationalsozialismus, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2007, 350-357.
    26){ }^{26)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 232.
    27){ }^{27)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 9, 257 f . ↩︎

version of Israeli propaganda. All the historians who have tried to grasp the reasons for Arab opposition to the Zionist project are vilified by the authors in the rudest possible manner. 28{ }^{28} Such a depiction of the broad lines of the Palestine conflict under the British mandate precludes any sound understanding of the matter.

Thus, there are three books that, each in its own way, try to demonstrate that present-day Arab anti-Semitism owes much to inspiration by the Nazis and Arab-Nazi collaboration during World War II, that there has been a marked continuity between that origin of Arab antiSemitism and its present form, and that there is a necessary link between Islamism and rabid anti-Semitism. I have so far attempted to show that these claims are shaky. And yet, there undoubtedly are Judeophobic elements in present-day Arab discourse. If the explanations given by the books presented above are insufficient, what accounts for these elements?

The Context: European Domination and the Palestine Issue

Apart from the features already mentioned, the three books have another common denominator: they almost completely disregard the sociopolitical context in which a Judeophobic discourse among modern Arabs arose. The region was submitted to European penetration, colonization and hegemony, and it was furthermore exposed to the Zionist project, the realization of which entailed great harm for the Palestinians and, to a lesser extent, for the people of neighbouring countries. The colonization affected the concerned peoples negatively and created resentment and enmity, but it also engendered a certain import of European achievements and ideologies, among them nationalism. And European nationalisms around the beginning of the 20th 20^{\text {th }} century were, to a certain extent, tainted by anti-Jewish ideas. They began to find their way into Arab thought as well, but only to a minor degree. Much more important for the rise of Judeophobic tendencies among Arabs was the endeavour of the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

[1]

  1. 28){ }^{28)} Mallmann/Cüppers, Halbmond, 14, 18, 37 f . ↩︎

At the place of its origin, in Europe, Zionism had been a defensive reaction by some Jews to anti-Semitism and the deteriorating situation of Jews in (mainly Eastern) Europe. It was a nationalist reaction, heavily influenced by the atmosphere of the time in Europe. At the place foreseen for its realization, in Palestine, this defensive movement became an offensive colonizing one. And this was necessary if it wanted to attain its fundamental goal. Palestine at the time (late 19th 19^{\text {th }} century) was an overwhelmingly Arab country as densely populated as the ground would carry under the given economic circumstances. It was under Ottoman rule. If the Zionists wanted to gain a foothold there, they had to secure the support of an imperial power that had dominant influence in the region; if they wanted to drastically alter the demographic balance in favour of the Jews, they had to strategically settle the country and eventually to displace and suppress the native population. And this is what actually happened. This policy was undertaken quite consistently and consciously; Zionist leaders and experts generally made no secret of it. 29{ }^{29} And it did not depend in any meaningful way upon the Palestinian reaction. Whatever the Palestinians did or said, and whatever the internal differences between Zionists, the latter were never ready to compromise their main goal: a Jewish state in Palestine.

The Jewish state envisaged by the Zionists was established in 1948an establishment that was accompanied by the first Arab-Israeli war and by the forceful eviction and dispossession of the bulk of the Palestinian population-and, after a lull, regained its expansionist and colonizing momentum in 1967. In maintaining and defending the occupation and the settlements it engendered, it has applied systematic and massive policies of oppression and control, brute force and atrocities included. It committed numerous aggressive acts against its neighbouring states, most massively against Lebanon. Oppressive and aggressive policies apart, the basic character of the state is deeply problematic. It is conceived not as the state of all the citizens within its borders but of Jews worldwide, and consequently denies its Arab citizens fundamental rights. All this was the outcome of the original aim of the movement;

[1]

  1. 29){ }^{29)} Ample documentation: Dan Diner, Israel in Palästina. Über Tausch und Gewalt im Vorderen Orient, Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1980. ↩︎

it was facilitated by international and regional political forces, and unless stopped, it will continue. 30{ }^{30}

The Palestinians by and large opposed the Zionist project. They did so not because of any attitude towards Jews, but for what it meant to them in quite concrete terms. The authors of the books under review consistently assume a preconceived anti-Semitism as the reason for this opposition. They repeatedly note that both the Nazis and the Palestinians of the mandate period ranted against Zionism, and they see this as indicating a common ideology-possibly transported from the Nazis to the Palestinians. Not true. In Europe, the Nazis and other antiSemites hallucinated Zionism as a world-wide Jewish conspiracy. In Palestine, Zionism was no hallucination but hard reality that threatened to take away their country from the Palestinians by transforming it into a Jewish state. To resist this project, the Palestinians did not need any inspiration from the Nazis. They already had sufficient inspirationfrom the Zionists.

There were Palestinians (and other Arabs) who consistently distinguished between Zionism and Jewry and did not allow their anti-Zionist stand to spill over into enmity towards Jews in general. Many others did not and expressed their opposition to Zionism in anti-Semitic terms. The Zionists themselves, who loudly proclaimed Zionism as the quintessential Jewish project and were able to rally the vast majority of Palestinian Jews under their banner, were largely responsible for this. Under the impression of these calls and of developments on the ground, many Palestinians abandoned the distinction that had up to then been made. And it was only in that context that catchwords of an antiSemitism Nazi style came to be used. There was no initial identity of ideologies.

The rise and development of anti-Jewish motifs in modern Arab discourse can be understood as a response to the rise and development of the Zionist project in Palestine. It was a wrong response to be sure, and there were other ways to respond, but this one was opted for fre-quently-the more so the more Palestinians felt squeezed by the grow-

[1]

  1. 30{ }^{30} A competent analysis of the process evoked here is Moshé Machover, “Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution”, in: Moshé Machover, Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2012, 262-283. ↩︎

ing Yishouv. These anti-Semitic motifs had no necessary and close link to Nazi ideology. To explain them merely as an import of Nazi ideology is to be wrong. And there is also no necessary link to Islamism. Islamists, too, developed anti-Jewish thoughts (and sometimes actions). It is true that a leading Muslim Brother ideologue (Sayyid Quṭb) tried to combine modern secular and traditional Islamic enmity towards Jews. And it is true that most Islamists seem to harbour bad feelings about Jews and that some utter rude statements in that vein. Yet all this does not establish a necessary link between Islamism and anti-Semitism. AntiSemitism can also accompany different ideologies-and it actually has done so. Its occurrence and form were much more variegated than the authors of the studies under review want us to believe. And they changed over time, largely following the junctures and vicissitudes of political developments.

All this is seen and presented in a book that appeared at about the same time as Küntzel’s: Michael Kiefer’s Antisemitismus in den islamischen Gesellschaften (Anti-Semitism in Muslim Societies). 31{ }^{31} This book, too, treats Arab anti-Semitism as a dangerous and objectionable phenomenon and sees it as the result of the transfer of elements of modern European anti-Semitism to the Middle East in a definite context: the transformation of the Arab world towards modernity and the evolution of the Palestine conflict. Regarding Palestine, Kiefer understands the spread of anti-Semitism among Palestinians and other Arabs as a result of the conflict and its intensification. In the beginning was European anti-Semitism that not only gave rise to Zionism but also imbued it with a marked emphasis on ethnic exclusivity and striving after dominance that, in Palestine, led to anti-Jewish reactions of the indigenous population: "Anti-Semitism in the Muslim world has to be seen as an ideological reflex of a real conflict […], that paradoxically takes up and reproduces the way of thinking and the patterns of understanding which originally had led to the genesis of the conflict (anti-Semitism-Zion-ism-anti-Semitism). 332{ }^{332} Only after the foundation of Israel in 1948

[1]

  1. 31){ }^{31)} Michael Kiefer, Antisemitismus in den islamischen Gesellschaften. Der Palästina-Konflikt und der Transfer eines Feindbildes, Düsseldorf: Verein zur Förderung gleichberechtigter Kommunikation, 2002.
    32){ }^{32)} Kiefer, Antisemitismus, 123. ↩︎

and the intensification of the conflict in several Israeli-Arab wars did this Arab anti-Semitism, according to Kiefer, find wide distribution, and only after the demise of Arab nationalism as the dominant ideology in the Arab world was it “Islamized” on a large scale, i.e. amalgamated with certain topics from the Islamic tradition. Thus, far from claiming an unchanging essence of Arab anti-Semitism from the very start, and far from seeing it necessarily imbued with Nazism and Islamism, Kiefer draws the rise and evolution of the phenomenon in its real context. The picture he arrives at is quite valid although he only draws the broad lines of that evolution.

Arabs and Nazis: The Real Picture

We have seen that the books under review here claim or imply solidly pro-Axis attitudes of Arabs during World War II, and we have further seen that their findings in this respect are quite untrustworthy. Fortunately, we now dispose of a number of books that allow us to gauge Arab attitudes towards the Fascist powers much more in detail. Their authors are historians of the region, they rely in their studies on the close scrutiny of source materials from the countries themselves, they do so country by country, and they do so in the spirit of critical scholarship. Needless to say, and contrary to the authors of the three books we dealt with, they know Arabic and make good use of their knowledge. These are the most important publications: Confronting Fascism in Egypt by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, 33{ }^{33} Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht by René Wildangel 34{ }^{34} (on Palestine), Nazism in Syria and Lebanon by Götz Nordbruch, 35{ }^{35} Iraqi Arab Nationalism by Peter Wien, 36{ }^{36} furthermore the edited volume Blind für die Geschichte by Gerhard

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  1. 33){ }^{33)} Israel Gershoni/James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
    34){ }^{34)} Wildangel, Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht.
    35){ }^{35)} Götz Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The ambivalence of the German option, 1933-1945, London/New York: Routledge, 2009.
    36){ }^{36)} Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, totalitarian, and pro-fascist inclinations, 1932-1941, London/New York: Routledge, 2006. ↩︎

Höpp, Peter Wien and René Wildangel 37{ }^{37} as well as a thematic issue of the review Geschichte und Gesellschaft edited by Ulrike Freitag and Israel Gershoni, 38{ }^{38} and finally Les Arabes et la Shoah by Gilbert Achcar. 39{ }^{39}

Without going into these publications in detail, several facts become abundantly clear while reading them: Arab responses to National Socialism were quite variegated, they depended largely on conditions in the respective country, they were in many cases based on a fairly good knowledge of conditions in Europe, and they were much less inclined towards Nazism than is generally assumed. In fact, there is ample documentation in some of these books that shows vigorous opposition by Arabs to German and Italian Fascism.

To give just one example of such vigorous opposition, I want to close with the case of Najātī Ṣidqī (1905-1979), a Palestinian communist born in Jerusalem who studied at the KUTV in Moscow, was very active politically and became a writer and literary critique after being expelled from the party in the late 1930s. Some facts of his life stand out in our context:

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  1. 37{ }^{37} Gerhard Höpp/Peter Wien/René Wildangel (eds.), Blind für die Geschichte? Arabische Begegnungen mit dem Nationalsozialismus, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag w.d.
    38{ }^{38} Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37, 2011, 311-450.
    39{ }^{39} Gilbert Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah. La guerre israélo-arabe des récits, Arles: Actes Sud, 2009; English translation: The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, transl. by G. M. Goshgarian, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. ↩︎

apologized because of ill health. In any case, Sidqī obviously had no problems with the booklet being used in the service of the Allies. He proudly relates having received congratulatory notes from the French High Commissioner and the British ambassador. 40{ }^{40}

Conclusion

We have seen that the main thesis of the three books under review, namely, that present-day anti-Jewish attitudes of Arabs are consubstantial with the eliminatory anti-Semitism of the Nazis, is untenable. To the extent that the conception of “Islamofascism” rests on this thesis, it can, therefore, be considered void. But beyond this thesis-what do we make of the phenomenon? There are anti-Jewish currents in modern Arab discourse, some of them vicious. They emerged in the framework of European hegemony over the Middle East and the gradual realization of the Zionist undertaking; they developed under the continued impact of these factors. The oppressive and aggressive policies of Israel, its privileged place in the world and the role of non-Israeli Jews in furthering Israel’s standing and power contributed to a deepening and broadening of the phenomenon. These anti-Jewish attitudes are quite heterogeneous; they exist in vastly different forms and degrees; and they coexist with rational criticisms of Israel and its policies.

Even if anti-Jewish attitudes and expressions resemble European antiSemitism, they are essentially different because of the context in which they arose. In Nazi Germany, the “Jewish danger” was imagined, and the anti-Semites were extremely powerful. In the Middle East, the Palestinians face a very real and potent enemy-the State of Israel, which portrays itself as the embodiment of Jewish interests per se. In the conflict, the Palestinians are the dispersed and the occupied, they are the weaker party by far, even if we assume for a moment that they have the support of the Arab world. If they resort to violence, this is in most

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  1. 40{ }^{40} Mudhakkirāt Najāti Sidqi. Taqdīm wa-i dād Hannā Abū Hannā, Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Dirāsāt al-Filastīniyya 2001, 165ff.; the content of Sidqī’s booklet al-Taqälid al-islämiyya wa-l-mabädi’ al-näziyya: hal tatafiqän? is related in Ibrāhīm Muhammad Abū Hashhāsh, Najāti Sidqi. Hayātubu wa-adabubu (1905-1979), Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1990, 64-73. Cf. Israel Gershoni’s article in this issue. ↩︎

instances a desperate attempt to defend themselves. In this extreme imbalance of power, the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Palestinians appears to get the more vicious the more powerless and oppressed they are. AntiJewish expressions in Palestinian and Arab discourse are largely the result of accumulated enmity and frustrations. They are a rhetorical response to an actual damage inflicted by the other side. For all its viciousness, such a response can only be perceived as comparable to Nazi anti-Semitism because public opinion in the West tends to see any kind of enmity towards Jews in the light of the Holocaust.

Given the situation created on the ground by Zionism and Israel, given the fact that the Zionist project presents itself as the quintessential Jewish one, it is hardly surprising that many Palestinians and Arabs harbour generalized anti-Jewish prejudice. This will probably remain as long as the situation endures. It is one of the more ugly and obscurantist aspects of contemporary Arab ideology.

To be sure, anti-Jewish attitudes are far from general, and they are increasingly called into question by Arab authors. And they are right to do so, for several reasons:

Firstly, purely pragmatic political ones. The still prevalent memory of the Holocaust and sensitivity concerning the fate of the Jews are such that the occurrence of anti-Jewish attitudes among Palestinians and Arabs can all too easily be used against them and their grievances. This is already happening on a massive scale; some of the writings reviewed here are precisely in that vein. The more Palestinians and Arabs themselves overcome those attitudes the more difficult it becomes to attack them on that account.

Secondly, on an intellectual level, Judeophobic views among Palestinians are an enormous self-deception, a wrong perception of their own place in the world and of their adversary. They amount to accepting a fundamental Zionist tenet, the claim that Zionism and Jewry are, in the final analysis, one and the same. Because many Jewish organizations and spokespersons unconditionally support Israel, one might be tempted to forgive Arabs for taking that claim for reality. But the claim is demonstrably false: many Jews take a critical-sometimes extremely critical-stand towards Israel. Arabs who accept this claim only strengthen the Zionist position.

Thirdly, this is a matter of human dignity. Palestinians are weak on many counts, but their strongest argument is the fundamental justice of their cause: that of a people wrongfully oppressed, dispossessed and expelled, and a people stubbornly resisting these injustices. They should make every effort to avoid the temptation of anti-Semitism so that the integrity of their case is maintained.

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