Book Review: Among the Righteous
We still live in the legacy of the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, which action took its inspiration from the guilt of the Jewish Holocaust under the Third Reich, Vichy France, and Fascist Italy. American news headlines are replete with references to Israel, especially as a state that experiences such friction and horrors in its dealings with Middle Eastern neighbours. The understanding I take from the American media environment is that Israel is a state like any other—like Russia, like France, like China, like the United States.
Yet there are some who do not believe it is so. There is a widespread Arab culture that does not believe that the State of Israel ought to exist. And perhaps part of this refusal to recognize the State of Israel comes with a refusal to engage the widespread understanding in the West of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust.
Some call it “Holocaust denial”; some have less clinical names for it. But whatever it is, the author Robert Satloff has chosen it for a nemesis in his book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (2006, Public Affairs, a division of Perseus Books).
Satloff goes on the hunt for stories of Arabs who, during World War II, saved Jews from the labour and death camps that Axis powers had established in North Africa.
What? There were concentration camps in North Africa? This is exactly the question Satloff wants you asking from the beginning: what nefarious work for the holocaust was done in countries they don’t teach us about in high school? He lays out a full spread of evidence for the extension—by German, French, and Italian forces—of Jewish internment and torture in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. However, aside from using it as a barb to keep us reading, Satloff does not wish to focus on this part of the holocaust.
What Satloff searches for—and, to some degree, finds—is evidence of Arabs who defied the stereotype of Jew-hating co-conspirators in “the final solution.” In the interest of providing a seed for discussion between present-day Jews and Arabs, Satloff digs deep to uncover narratives from World War II of Arab individuals and families who resisted Axis powers and their plan of destruction. His thesis question is: Were there Arabs who saved Jews from the holocaust? If he can do so, then he hopes these stories will give the Arab community the impetus to breach the cultural barrier of holocaust denial. Instead of being a categorically guilty party, perhaps the Arabs can be seen—and see themselves—as human, thereby transcending the Jewish-Arab antipathy that dominates Middle Eastern affairs.
Well, as for this reader, I can’t speak to how much of an effect Satloff’s book will have on Mid-East politics. But I did find it an eye-opening history lesson: I did not know that the Holocaust effort had crossed the Mediterranean. The stories he finds are intriguing, putting cracks in my stereotypes borne from news footage of Palestinian Arabs throwing rocks and grenades at Israelis. He does succeed in highlighting a human dimension to North African Arabs of World War II.
And, as if to provide the keystone for years of reading and thought, Satloff’s words dawned on me for the first time: “If the Holocaust were something unique, in which the world’s most advanced society [Western Europe/Germany] nearly succeeded in wiping out one of the world’s oldest peoples, then it stands to reason that the victims deserve special remedy. . . . Providing special protection for these victims by helping them realize their goal of creating a state of their own, where the eternally homeless would never again live at the whim of the local despot, is a reasonable solution” (p164). Somehow it had never sunk through my thick skull that the formation of the State of Israel was victims’ compensation for the crimes against Jews by the Axis powers.
Now I have the tough work of deciding if I agree with this solution to the guilt of the holocaust. But that may take some more reading.
~ emrys
1 comment:
While Israel was created after the holocaust, the World Zionist Org was formed in the 1880s after the Dreyfus Affair in France.
Pick up some books about Theodore Herzl to get a longer look at how the state was formed.
There was a time when Uganda was offered as the Jewish state and Herzl almost accepted it, believing that any Jewish state was better than none. That was not accepted by the WZO and work continued to get the land we now call Israel.
Post a Comment