THE HOLOCAUST IN ARAB PUBLIC DISCOURSE: HISTORICIZED POLITICS AND POLITICIZED HISTORY

The Holocaust has become increasingly important in international historical culture, and the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War is arguably the ultimate symbol of evil in Western politics, culture and academia. This fact has had its consequences in the Arab world as well, even though the effects there have been significantly different than in the West. Traditional Arab public discourse has a history of feelings of superiority vis-a-vis the Jews, largely based on Muslim theology. The creation of the State of Israel and its repeated victories over Arab armies have kindled political resentment partly based in this tradition, which in turn has made it virtually impossible to assimilate the dominant Western understanding of the Holocaust into Arab public discourse. Instead, Arab public discourse on the Holocaust is highly politicized and almost always displays hostility toward Israel or Jews. Even though the Arab-Israeli conflict is a major motif in this hostile discourse, there is no saying whether a settling of the conflict would open Arab public discourse to the international understanding of the Holocaust and its universal messages of tolerance and anti-racism. In the last few decades, interest in the Holocaust has increased worldwide. This tendency was already apparent in the early 1980s, in the wake of the broadcasting of the TV series Holocaust in North America and Western Europe. Roughly a decade later, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, this renewed interest spread eastward into the former communist countries as well. The reawakening of these countries from state-imposed ideological amnesia, where history was only interpreted through the prism of narrow historical materialism, has led to the return of old conflicts and ethnic divisions thought by many to have been dead and buried in the 1940s. One of the issues that resurfaced after the lifting of the heavy hand of historical materialism was the Holocaust. The former communist countries had to bring their narratives of World War II atrocities into line with those in the Western world, where ideology and political censorship had not stifled open historical debate in the years following the end of the war. This process of reassessment of the past was part of the general closing of the gap which had been the result of nearly four decades of a divided Europe. Many Eastern European countries had to rewrite their war-time past, and in some cases this resulted in painful revisions of previously heralded glorious grand narratives of sublime national suffering under fascist occupation. One clear example is Poland, where the population had to start to grapple with the fact that many of the victims of the Nazi occupation had in fact been Polish Jews, and that the lion's share of those who perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps on Polish soil had been Jews. To add insult to injury, they had to face the fact that some Poles had even collaborated with the Germans in their genocidal designs. At times, the radical revision of the previous historical narrative has led to negative reactions such as Holocaust denial and other forms of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, a new and sometimes painful understanding of the past has already made some considerable headway in Eastern European society, but much work still remains to be done. The Holocaust as the Symbol of Absolute Evil The increased interest in the Nazi-orchestrated annihilation of European Jewry during World War II has put a new focus on the Holocaust. The Holocaust has become a touchstone in European history and culture in the early 21st century. Auschwitz has become the very symbol of absolute evil, and the most obvious example of barbarism of inhumanity to be drawn upon in any political, historical, cultural or ethical debate, no matter the context at hand. This omnipresence of the Holocaust in historical consciousness and public debate has been decried by some, who see it merely as cheap rhetoric and cynical abuse of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. …