Language:
German
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts
Angaben zur Quelle:
8 (2009) 483-518
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Public opinion
;
Arabs Attitudes
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
Abstract:
Traces Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust since 1945, as reflected, inter alia, in the liberal Egyptian weekly "ar-Risala". During the Holocaust, most Arab intellectuals held liberal views and condemned Nazism, but after 1945 they unanimously embraced anti-Jewish views. Disappointed with European values and with the colonial experience, after the war intellectuals turned to Islam, also seeking explanations for the humiliating Arab defeat by the Jews in Palestine in 1948. Arab texts of the 1950s deal only with the Jews and do not mention the State of Israel; they make no effort to explain Jewish history in general or the fate of the Jews during World War II. The Holocaust only became a subject for Arab intellectuals with the event of the Eichmann trial in 1961. Mentions Egyptian journalist and essayist Ahmad Baha al-Din as the person who introduced the ideological mix of the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which came to mark the Arab approach to the genocide of the Jews. Al-Din's main goal was to put the Zionists on trial just like the Nazis, to whom he compared them. The 1960s also brought silence, relativization, and denial as further Arab reactions to the Holocaust. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 forced Arab views to change. Faced with Western demands for the universalization of Holocaust memory, Arab intellectuals began to rectify the prevailing Holocaust denial. Mentions the Israeli-Palestinian politician Azmi Bishara and Edward Said as examples. Since the 1990s, Arab reception of the Holocaust has become a theme of research outside the Arab world.
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