The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews has always
been a phenomenon that scorched people's minds and memories,
permeating the very fabric of their lives, but it has never
achieved such a heightened degree of presence as it has today in
most countries of the West. Instead of fading and then vanishing,
it is as if the passage of half a century since the end of the
Second World War has but deepened and intensified the memory of the
Holocaust, both for the heirs of the victims and the descendants of
the executioners. It is as if the end of the Cold War, which did
away with legacies, concepts, feelings and, indeed, countries and
entities, did not touch an iota of this memory. This is what
attracts the attention and makes one pause to think and re-examine
matters.
The memory of the Holocaust then is one of the few values untouched
by the Cold War. It did not end with it; it has, on the contrary,
gathered momentum as if the Second World War had taken place a few
days ago, or as if the concentration camps had just been
discovered.
We thus see France admitting through its president its
responsibility for what befell the Jews on its soil during the war
while, throughout five decades, it had placed the blame for the sin
- all the sin - on the shoulders of the German occupier. Moreover,
it translated words into action when it took Maurice Papon (who was
an official in the Vichy government) to trial for crimes committed
against humanity. This trend of self-accountability has not spared
even the spiritual authorities in the country. The French Catholic
Church issued a document and occasioned a forum for a public
admission of guilt and a demand for forgiveness for the silence it
kept while atrocities were being committed against the Jews,
notwithstanding that this silence was often broken by the many
cardinals who, at the time, wrote the Vichy government, denouncing
its discriminatory and criminal behavior towards the Jews.
In Germany, talk of the Holocaust is more topical than ever and was
given a boost by the publication of Daniel Goldhagen' book entitled
Hitler's Willing Executioners. In his book, the American Goldhagen
argues that German responsibility for what happened is collective
and comprehensive and cannot be confined to Hitler, his
administration or his National-Socialist party. This provoked
discussions in Germany itself, as well as in the United States and
other Western countries.
Accountability - by self or by others - has spread to countries
that kept neutral during the war. Formerly the object of praise for
the way they used their neutrality to save Jews or grant them
asylum, they now have their image tarnished. Switzerland, it turns
out, agreed to store Nazi gold, including that which was stolen
from Jewish victims. And Sweden, it transpires, often colluded with
the Nazis behind the screen of its official neutrality. Its
security apparatus, it would seem, used to collaborate with its
German counterpart, supplying it with information on escapees or
dissenters or, in some cases, handing them over to the enemy. Even
Portugal was among those countries that profited from deposits of
Nazi gold.
The West does not seem willing to turn over a new leaf, nor to
absolve from responsibility those who were involved in the
Holocaust, irrespective of the degree of their involvement. It is,
on the contrary, intent on affirming this responsibility, on
unearthing that which has escaped it so far, and on disclosing that
which has been hidden. Why is this so?
No Simple Answer
To many, a ready answer exists: it is Zionism and its tentacular
extensions, controlling the West, its decision-makers and its
media. It is Zionism that imposes the remembrance of the Holocaust
on everybody, in order to cover up the crimes Israel has
perpetrated in the Middle East against the Palestinians and the
Arabs.
Matters, however, are not that simplistic. The French president who
has taken a dramatic and unprecedented initiative in admitting the
responsibility of the French state for what befell the Jews during
the war, by so doing, demolished a consensus long established by
General De Gaulle. The president is himself a Gaullist, with no
love lost between him and the Jews. He is what we generally
pigeon-hole here as a loyal friend of the Arabs. Furthermore, when
he took this step, he was not under any election pressure that
might have led him to court one side or the other. It is noteworthy
that Jacques Chirac's decision had been strongly resisted by his
predecessor François Mitterrand, in spite of the fact that the
latter was known for his great sympathy for the Jews and Israel. In
short, it is difficult to conceive that France or any other nation
in the West would revise its history so radically and dramatically
because some Jewish circles, enjoying real or imaginary influence,
had wished it, or that they had maneuvered and woven conspiracies
towards that end. As for the issue of Holocaust victims' gold in
Swiss banks, it is part of an awakening that is taking root now,
stretching into the past, to collective memories, deeds and values,
lumping together the "treason" of European conscience in Bosnia
with a revision of the history of wars with the Red Indians.
It would be a mistake to believe that this insistent, obstinate
desire to keep the memory of the Holocaust alight is a partial
expression of a wounded cultural narcissism. It is as if the West,
which sees itself as the creator of the highest civilizations,
cannot forgive itself or each other for having programmed a crime
of the magnitude of the Holocaust, or for having condoned it, or
for having connived with it through a gloating or cowardly silence,
or for the fact that this crime could have been committed within
its own deep recesses and not in some remote colony.
This concern of the West to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust
is also probably a manifestation of the deepening of the values of
its democracies, for these are still facing the challenges of
racism, bigotry and xenophobia. Papon's trial disclosed, inter
alia, the fact that the butcher of the Jews is also the butcher of
Algerians. The General-Secretary of the Gironde Department during
the Second World War used his position to hand the Jews of his
district over to the Nazi occupation authorities. As Chief of
Police in Paris in the early sixties, Papon machinated the ugliest
butchery the French capital saw against peaceful Algerian
demonstrators during the Liberation War. In one night, he had
around 300 Algerians shot or drowned in the River Seine. Papon's
trial has disinterred this heinous deed as an incidental means to
confirming his racism and the acts he had committed against the
Jews.
Actually, the link between the two racisms, or between their
victims, Papon was not its founder, nor was he the last to give it
expression. From that other Frenchman, Jean-Marie le Pen, whose
venomous utterances against North African immigrants mitigate the
importance of the Holocaust, to the Russian Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
the animosity toward the Arabs and Muslims and to the Jews goes
hand in hand. The conduct in our age that has acquired the label
anti-Semitic, in all likelihood has its roots in European history,
dating back to the Crusades or to the expulsion from Andalusia,
which touched Muslims and Jews equally. But presently, the
predicament of the two sides is that, even though they face the
same racism in Europe, in the Middle East they are confronting each
other with mutual annihilation. Talk about a united racism and the
call for a united front in facing it are not sufficient to surmount
the many complex and tenacious issues that separate talk from
reality.
A Destructive Impact
The Holocaust is the most complex and intractable knot in the
Middle East, which can be described in short as follows: If the
Arab side has failed, with a few exceptions, to comprehend the
reality of the Holocaust, and to appreciate its impact on modern
human conscience, the Jewish side, specifically the Israeli one,
has also failed because of its extreme involvement in its own
painful experience to conceive of any other injustice besides it,
and specifically that to which it has subjected, and is still
subjecting, the Palestinians.
The Arabs and Palestinians have adopted the widespread belief that
the admission of the Holocaust constitutes a recognition of
Israel's right to exist. So they chose to doubt or question it, or
even to meet with a measure of glee the denial of its existence in
some Western circles. At best, they saw it as an issue that did not
concern them. Why should the Palestinians pay for a crime they did
not commit? The problem with this logic, irrespective of any
ethical consideration, is that it unconsciously embraces Israel's
ratiocination which prompts it to draw a link between the Holocaust
and the existence of the state.
The inability of the Arabs to assimilate the Holocaust is
understandable, without excusing them. The Arabs and notably the
Palestinians have been victimized by history - a history that is
not theirs - and it was their lot to bear the consequences of this
exceptional and horrific crime. The burden is onerous, and as in
Greek tragedies, it threatens the person swaying under it with
annihilation. How can the paradigmatic victim produce, in its turn,
another victim?
It is, however, not impossible for the victim to transcend its own
tragedy and to comprehend one that is not its own. This can be the
measure of a great enlightenment and a sign of moral stature,
without being a relinquishment of one's rights. In the Middle
Eastern context, this is necessary so that Palestinian rights and
their demand to realize them do not conflict with values that have
become universal. The evocation and commemoration of the Holocaust
will not yield unending benefits for Israel and will not help
justify all its actions. If this period is witnessing a revival of
the memory of the Nazi crime, it is also seeing criticism and
protests of unprecedented severity being levelled against Israel as
a result of its government's policy and what it is doing to the
Palestinians and peace.
The Exclusivist Approach
The dissociation between the acknowledgment of the Holocaust and
what Israel is doing should be the starting point for the
development of a discourse which says that the Holocaust does not
free the Jewish state or the Jews of accountability. On the
contrary, the Nazi crime compounds their moral responsibility and
exposes them to greater answerability. They are the ones who have
escaped the ugliest crime in history, and now they are perpetrating
reprehensible deeds against another people.
Modern Jewish consciousness can no longer look at the world from
the exclusive perspective of the Holocaust, in spite of the
magnitude of the event and its enormity. Within these parameters,
it becomes pressing to (re)present the event as a trial for human
suffering more than a purely and exclusively Jewish one, especially
since the Jews in recent decades have started losing their
long-standing "monopoly"over the tragic. The Turk in Germany, the
Algerian in France, and always the black in every place, head the
columns of victims of racism in the world and in them, albeit in
different proportions and degrees, is the continuation of the
suffering of the Jews of which the Holocaust was the
culmination.
One must then move from vindictiveness to the crystallization of a
lesson which ensures that such monstrous acts against any nation or
ethnic group do not recur. It is not important, at the end of the
day, that Maurice Papon spends his last years in prison; what
matters is to exhaust all means, cultural and educational as well
as political, to ensure that the Vichy experience is not
repeated.
To be rid of the burden of this dark heritage, is above all to the
advantage of the Jews themselves. In the political sense, it means
that fundamentalism and extremism cannot take advantage of the
collective symbols of the suffering of nations. This is true of
Jews as well as of any other people. In another sense, Jews will be
able to get on with their lives, relieved to a great extent from
the past and its sufferings.
And if the memory of the Holocaust comes between the Jews and their
ability to live in and to cope with this world, in particular,
their capacity to coexist with that other people at whose expense
the "Jewish question" was solved, it will be a victory for
Hitlerism after its defeat. In other words, Hitlerism will triumph
in the perpetuation of vengefulness and exclusivism, fired by a
response to Wagner's music or to the works of Carl Schmidt,
Céline, Pirandello and others.
This is a trap to be avoided by all. If the memory of the Holocaust
remains exclusivist and indifferent to the injustices heaped upon
others because of it, a moral impasse is reached where the
shrewdest and most skilled arguments and publicity will be futile.
Bridging the gap here is the only assurance that the Holocaust will
be moved from its place in European history and exclusive European
centrality, to the universalistic dimension it deserves. This
bridging, however, will not be complete without a reconciliation
with the non-European region that has reaped the consequence of the
Nazi act.
A Shared History
Once again, the importance of a radical re-examination becomes
pressing. This re-examination presents to the Jews a mental and
moral challenge which they will not be able to defer indefinitely.
This is because the pretext which Israel and the Jews use in
linking what they have been exposed to in Europe and the state they
have established in Palestine, suffers from a basic defect. If the
recollection of the Holocaust constitutes a strong justification
for the establishment of the State of Israel, it falters in the
case of the injustices inflicted as a result on the local
indigenous people, the Palestinians.
The reality is that the establishment of the Jewish state and what
has ensued as conflict and struggle created a strong historical
connection between Jews and Palestinians, making them conversant in
a shared history. It did not only concentrate both of them on the
same land over which they are fighting and where they will,
eventually, end up coexisting one way or the other. It made of the
two peoples, irrespective of their discrepant degrees of inherited
suffering, partners in the recollection of the Holocaust. The
latter has turned into a common heritage between those who have
been exposed to extermination, though innocent of any crime save
their belonging to a specific religion or ethnicity, and those who
were fated to pay the price for the act, without their being guilty
of anything other than being, during an unfavorable moment in
history, in a land where their forefathers had lived for hundreds
of years. On the one hand, there is a people faced with unequaled
persecution which cost it six million victims, and on the other, a
people threatened with the loss of its very historical
existence.
Coexistence on the land of Palestine between the two peoples is
unlikely as long as each side is living its own history, alongside
the other or in isolation from the other. To have coexistence, each
side will have to assimilate the history of the other, even to make
it its own, based on what the Holocaust has entailed for both of
them separately or together.
Security, political or purely territorial matters are relatively
easy to solve and can be dealt with by authorities and committees
of experts. The basic challenge that should be addressed is the
manner Arabs and Palestinians relate to the Holocaust and how the
Jews relate to the Palestinian victim.
It is possible to go further and say that one of the most important
conditions governing the worthiness of the Jews to maintain the
heritage of the Holocaust is in their dealing with the
Palestinians. Any injustice perpetrated by Israel against them or
any denial of their rights will be tantamount to an infringement of
the sanctity of the Holocaust, which has become a yardstick for
universalistic values.
Transcending the Past
Clearly, and this is what many Arabs fail to consider, asking the
Jews to put the big event behind them or to re-exmine it as we have
suggested, is to a great extent contingent on the conduct of others
and their readiness to take hold of the Holocaust and to add it to
the heritage of collective human suffering. This surpasses by far
the self-evident call to transcend anti-Semitic obscenities, or to
make sure anti-Semitism does not occur, or to minimize the number
of Holocaust victims.
Lack of trust in the other by the Jews, for which the Arabs are
paying the price and which Binyamin Netanyahu has exploited to
blackmail the whole region, has a lot to justify it. In European
history one saw a retreat from the promises of the French
Revolution, as shown by the Dreyfus Affair, and a retreat from the
promises of the Russian Revolution, as seen in Stalinism. Even the
Allies in the Second World War did not come to the rescue of
Holocaust survivors until it was too late, and Western democracies
turned a blind eye to Nazi criminals when their exploitation in the
Cold War was thought possible. Add the disclosure of what the Swiss
banks did with the knowledge of the Allies (as it turned out), to
the disclosure of the Gaullist cover-up of French history ("We are
all, with the exception of collaborators, resistance fighters"),
and fatuous statements and declarations, such as those made by
Mahatir Mohammad, it is not difficult to find reasons for anxiety
and suspicion of others.
Such lack of faith in the other is what makes Israel into a
"reserve homeland" for the majority of Jews in the world, whose
many trials taught them that anti-Semitism can fall upon them
unawares wherever they are. All these factors are what keep the
memory of the Holocaust alight and underscore its uniqueness as a
Jewish occurrence and not a human one. Within the context of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, it magnifies and perpetuates
security-related anxieties. Actually, the transcendence by Jews of
this enormous event remains a condition for the melting away of the
huge security fears and for the achievement of peace. By the same
token, this will not happen without the comprehension by Arabs of
this memory and its inclusion in their narrative.
If the event of the early forties in Europe becomes a Palestinian
preoccupation, and the Jews allow that, and if the event of the end
of the forties in the Middle East becomes a Jewish preoccupation,
and the Arabs allow that, then the renewed universal awareness of
the Holocaust will herald the disengagement between the occurrence
and its Jewishness. Do we join our voices with the rest of the
world? And will Israel permit us to do that, given that this
entails internalizating the Palestinian moment into Israel's
consciousness?
This is a translation from the Arabic of an article that
appeared in Al-Hayat newspaper, London, December 18, 1997. Printed
by permission.