Gilbert Achcar’s Arabs and the Holocaust

What was the attitude and record of Arabs and Muslims to the Holocaust?

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a review essay on Gilbert Achchar’s The Arabs & the Holocaust. It was published in Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal Vol.10, No.1 (May 2011): 109-119. It is one of the conditions of having an article published in a journal such as JHLS that you cannot reprint the article for at least 6 months after publication. Hence the long delay. It is the only critical review of the book that I have located, though I’m sure there are some others, but they have been given little prominence.

JHLS is edited by Professor Nur Masalha, a distinguished Palestinian historian of St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill whose books include The Bible & Zionism. Today St. Mary’s is part of the University of Surrey but back then it was an affiliated college of London University.

In 1980/81 I was a teacher education student at St. Mary’s, having been blacklisted by Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Sussex, as befits someone who was a student agitator and troublemaker. I was interviewed by the late Father Michael Prior, a bluff Irishman with a heart of gold. I was the only Jewish student in what was quite a conservative and sleepy college although my PGCE course was a nest of reds! Michael Prior went on to form Living Stones, a Christian solidarity group with Palestinian Christians, although I knew nothing of this at the time. But Michael clearly liked dissidents, probably because of his own Irish background. At that time the hunger strikes in Ireland were taking off (yes the Palestinian resistance closely mirrors that of Ireland).

Duncan McPherson was another unusual character who I quickly met. He was both a priest and President of the local Trades Council and a strong supporter of the Palestinians. A liberation theologist he ran the debating society. I can remember returning to the college to take part in a debate on 1 or 2 states with none other than George Galloway, who at that time supported a 2 states solution and was very much part of the Scottish Labour establishment.

Although I say it myself, the review is almost prophetic when analysing the political weaknesses of Achcar. Those weaknesses were, first and foremost, illusions in imperialism and Achcar's lack of any rigorous understanding still less critical analysis of Zionism. This was borne out by Achcar’s support for Western imperialism’s bombing campaign in Libya. Although motivated by humanitarian concerns re the Ghadaffi threat to the city of Benghazi, it betrayed his illusions that imperialism was capable of intervening to prevent a humanitarian disaster rather than securing control of Libya’s oil. The same forces are playing themselves out today in Syria. Yes we support the Syrian people but it is precisely because of that that we reject imperialist attempts to use the Syrian peoples’ struggles for their own, completely different, ends.

Tony Greenstein

Journal of Holy Land Studies 10.1 (2011): 109–119
DOI: 10.3366/hls.2011.0007 © Edinburgh University Press
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2011.0007

THE ARABS AND THE HOLOCAUST

Tony Greenstein

Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (London: Saqi Books, 2010). 237 pp. Hardback. ISBN: 9780863566394

Both the history of the Holocaust and its interpretation have been colonised by Israel and the Zionist movement. Its conclusions: that non- Jews who helped Jews were the exception, the ‘righteous among the nations’, and that Israel is a guarantee against its recurrence, have become commonplace. It is taken for granted that the Arabs, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, overwhelmingly supported Hitler. Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust is long overdue. It is based on a considerable body of research into the impact of the Holocaust on the Arabs during the Nazi era. Achcar is a Middle East and Arabic specialist, however his expertise does not extend to either Zionism or imperial history more generally. It is unfortunate that the book does not include the Arabs of the Maghreb.

The research of Robert Satloff, of the Israeli lobby’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is only mentioned in passing (pp. 101–102; and Satloff 2006: 99). At the premiere of the documentary ‘Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands’, Satloff remarked that he found it ‘inexplicable’ and that it smacked of ‘double standards’ that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, had rejected one particular man, Khaled Abdul Wahab, as one of the ‘righteous amongst the nations’.1 The research uncovered a number of Arabs such as Si Ali Sakat, who had sheltered 60 escapees who, in the Spring of 1943, had fled from a concentration camp near Tunisia’s Djebel Zaghouan mountains after the camp had come under attack.2

The Holocaust has become a propaganda instrument, a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ (Segev 1994: 11). This dates back to the Eichmann Trial in 1961, which was intended to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial. . . ’ of 1953–1958 (Segev 1994: 328), when survivors of the Hungarian holocaust accused the leadership of Hungarian Zionism and the Jewish Agency of collaboration in the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz. Achcar does not even mention the Kasztner Trial as he treads warily around Zionism’s record during the Holocaust. However Zionism’s record during the Holocaust and its behaviour towards the Palestinians are part of a seamless tapestry.

Achcar’s work is particularly good on Arab reactions to the Holocaust. It effectively demonstrates that the claim that the Arabs masses welcomed the Nazis was totally false. He cites Israel Gershoni, of the University of Tel Aviv, that ‘the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices . . . rejected fascism and Nazism’ (pp. 42–43). Examples include the Syrian independence movement which defended Syria’s Jews against attack and the Palestinian daily Alif Ba which condemned the August 1934 anti- Jewish riots in Algiers, as well as the Nazi government, for driving out its Jews (p. 45). The main Palestinian daily, Filastin, consistently depicted Nazism as reactionary and dictatorial from 1933 onwards displaying ‘an acute awareness, which can only be termed premonitory, that Hitler’s accession to power would reinforce the Zionist enterprise’ in Palestine (p. 48).

Arab political reaction to Zionism saw it as the catspaw of the British. The Istiqlal (Independence) Party of secular Palestinian Arab nationalism, unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism. It was ‘forthright in proclaiming that the British not the Jews, should be the primary targets of action . . . ’ (p. 95). Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zionism’s ‘new Hitler’, argued, in December 1953, that ‘Arab leaders forget the primary cause of our defeat, England, and say Israel and the Jews. They are afraid to say England’ (p.189). Zionist leaders however ‘admitted they preferred dealing with the underlings of the much maligned Amin al- Husseini’ (p. 50) just as in the 1980s they encouraged the formation of Hamas to undermine secular Palestinian nationalism (Shlaim 2001: 459). Zionist historians portray Arabs and Muslims as uniformly anti-semitic and pro-Nazi. Stefan Wild’s (Wild 1985: 130) ‘lamentably influential’ study of Nazism’s impact on the region during the 1930s (p. 68) devotes just one page to Ba‘athism, yet this page ‘contains so many errors, distortions and deliberate omissions that it has become an obligatory source for polemics hostile to Arab nationalism’ (p. 68). For example, Wild asserts that the founder of Ba‘athism, Michel Aflaq, was pro-Nazi on the basis that he purchased a copy of Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century! (p. 69). Orientalist Bernard Lewis, another Zionist historian, asserts, without any evidence, that the Egyptian Free Officers Group of Nasser was pro-Nazi (p. 85), whereas Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who wrote a doctoral thesis supporting Holocaust denial and a foreword to a pamphlet by French holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, is Zionism’s favourite Palestinian (pp. 269–270).

Both Bernard Lewis and the late General Yehoshafat Harkabi (Harkabi 1972: 298–299), Israel’s leading academic orientalist, accepted that Arab anti-Semitism was a symptom of the conflict, ‘functional and political not social’ (p. 242). Achcar makes the important distinction between European neo-Nazis, whose use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism describes a Jewish conspiracy, and Arabs who use it to prove a Zionist conspiracy. Even Meir Litvak and Esther Webman accept that the Protocols ‘provided a reasonable explanation for the Zionist phenomenon’ (pp. 204–5; also Litvak and Webman 2009: 7).

The main example of Arab support for Nazism was the Farhud, the pogrom in Baghdad, when up to 190 Jews were murdered. In fact it only occurred after a coup against the British in April-May 1941 was put down (pp. 99–102). The coup was anti-British not pro-Nazi (pp. 90–91). The Iraqi communists, who never hesitated to condemn all manifestations of anti-Semitism, gave it their full support. The number of victims would have been far larger if the Jews’ Muslim neighbours had not sheltered and protected them. Their behaviour ‘contrasts favourably with that of European populations confronted with similar events’ (p. 100). Marion Woolfson raises questions about the role of the British during the Farhud (Woolfson 1980: 155–163). Another example of Arab ‘anti-Semitism’ was the hanging of two Zionist agents in Baghdad in January 1952. They had been caught in possession of explosives and had detonated bombs outside the Masuda Shemtov synagogue and Jewish cafes, to stimulate Jewish emigration to Israel (Woolfson 1980: 182–201; Hirst 2003: 281–290).

When the Zionists mounted a campaign among Iraqi Jews in Israel against the executions, they found that the attitude among most exiles was ‘This is God’s revenge against the movement that brought us to such depths’ (p. 197).

Yad Vashem and the Re-writing of Holocaust History

Zionist historians exploit the fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, helped set up the Waffen SS Muslim divisions, Handschar, Kama and the Albanian Skanderberg. But these divisions were so reluctant to participate in anti-Jewish actions that they were sent to France for retraining, whereupon they promptly mutinied and attempted to join the French resistance, the only known rebellion of an SS unit. The Bosnian SS units played no part in the anti-Jewish deportations, which were left to the Croatian SS and the Nazis. The religious leaders of the Bosnian Muslims issued no less than 3 declarations condemning Croat-Nazi collaboration against the Jews and Serbs (p. 143). Contrast this with the silence of the German Churches who, even when they did condemn the killing of innocents of another race, ‘neither the word “Jew” nor “non-Aryan” ever crossed their lips’ (Lewy 1968: 292).

Although the Skanderberg division turned over 210 Jews to the Nazis in Kosovo, not one Jew was handed over in Albania to the Nazi death mills (p. 144; also Schwartz 2005). The largest Jewish community in North Africa, in Morocco, under Vichy control, also successfully protected its Jewish citizens from deportation. They fared better than Jews in any European country under Nazi occupation (Marqusee 2008: 221). Yet of the 23,000 non-Jews honoured by Yad Vashem there are only 60 Muslims and not one single Arab.3 Only the Zionists fondly remember the Mufti, who was appointed in 1921 by Britain’s Zionist High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, despite coming fourth in elections (p. 129; also Weinstock 1979: 117). Yet the article on the Mufti in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is longer than that of Himmler and Heydrich combined and only slightly shorter than Hitler’s entry (p. 159). Ironically the Zionists remain silent about Lehi, the Zionist group led by a triumvirate including Yitzhak Shamir, which offered a military pact to the Nazis on 11 January 1941 (Brenner 1983: 265–269). Forty-two years later Shamir became Israeli Prime Minister – from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992. The Haganah, the Labour Zionist militia, sent an agent, Feivel Polkes, to Germany with an offer to spy for them against the Communists (Brenner 1983: pp. 93–5, 99).

A cardinal principle for Zionism is that the Holocaust is unique, beyond history. To compare it with the sufferings of others is, according to Elie Wiesel, a ‘total betrayal of Jewish history’. But then the real purpose of Holocaust awareness ‘is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the future’ (Finkelstein 2001: 45, 41, citing Evron 1983: 15). At the centre of this manipulation stands Yad Vashem. When one of its guides, Itamar Shapira, pointed out that Yad Vashem is located a few hundred metres from the ruins of Deir Yassin,4 he was dismissed. Shapira explained that ‘Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews . . . If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dir Yassin, or the Nakba . . . it means that it’s afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed’.

The response of Yad Vashem was that ‘the institution objects to any political use of the Holocaust . . . The institution’s position is that the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other event. . . ’ (Stern, 23.4.09).

This did not, however, prevent Yad Vashem building a special wall devoted to the Mufti’s relations with the Nazis, its purpose to suggest that ‘there is much in common between the Nazis plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs enmity to Israel’ (Segev 1994: 425). In April 1976 Yad Vashem hosted a visit by John Vorster, Apartheid South Africa’s Prime Minister, interned during the Second World War for his support for the Nazis (pp. 226–7). As the late Professor Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen, said of Yad Vashem: ‘its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt’.5

Achcar’s book has been received uncritically by the Left. It is an impressive, indeed ambitious work but it is not without its faults. Despite its author’s Marxist politics, it is primarily descriptive rather than analytical. The explanation of ideological phenomenon such as ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ is circular: ‘Islamic fundamentalism, because of its attachment to the letter of the holy scriptures . . . perceives religion as the prime mover of the world . . . ’ (p. 109); this is true of all religions. The question is why, in the 21st century, movements that look backwards hold such sway? Why has a Reformation never taken hold in Islam or Judaism? Achcar holds that whereas ‘anti-Semites perceive Jews as members of a “race”, fundamentalists regard them as members of a faith’ (p. 109). This is an oversimplification. Racial anti-Semitism could also take, as in the Slovakian and Croatian Nazi puppet states, a clerical form.

Where Achcar goes astray is with his argument that the Palestinian national movement made a ‘major historical error’ in not supporting the 1939 White Paper. Made with the benefit of hindsight, Achcar effectively says the Palestinians should have accepted their defeat in advance and agreed to a slimmed down Zionist state. This argument fails to understand the expansionist nature of Zionism. Achcar is also wrong when he suggests that the British proposed net Jewish immigration of 75,000 a year for five years from 1939 (p. 138). It was 75,000 in total. (Hurewitz 1976: 102–104; also Lacquer 1972: 528). The British counter-insurgency war of 1936–39, having armed and trained the Zionist militias, savagely put down the Palestinian Arab Revolt. A strategy based on British imperialism keeping its promises is a strange one coming from a Trotskyist! Achcar argues that Nasser’s ‘fundamental error’ was in failing to recognise ‘Zionism’s success in forging an Israeli Jewish nation’ (190–1, 215). But how would this have been of any benefit to the Palestinians? Would it have enabled all 200 bi-nationalists in Brit Shalom, to triumph? They included Ruppin, a supporter of ‘transfer’, Kalvarisky and Arlosoroff, were all leading Jewish Agency members, whose main interest was in the peaceful acceptance by the Palestinians of Zionist demands. As NathanWeinstock observes, ‘Even the maverick Brit Shalom . . . was every bit as insistent as the Revisionists on opening up Palestine to mass Jewish immigration’ (Weinstock 1979: 152). Racial exclusivity has always been integral to Israeli Jewish ‘nationality’.

Achcar’s problem lies in his very specialisation. The Arabs and the Holocaust does not have an overview of either Zionism or the Holocaust or settler colonialism. How else to explain the assertion that the ‘indigenous population of “Rhodesia” obtained the same political rights as the population of colonial origin in 1960’? It was only in 1980 that white minority rule ended. Likewise Achcar’s assertion that the Final Solution was initiated in 1942 (p. 25). On 31 July 1941 Göring sent Heydrich orders to begin implementing the Final Solution (Dawidowicz 1987: 170, 175–6). Belzec began construction in November 1941,6 Chelmno began operations on 8 December 1941 (Browning 2005: 418). On 3 September 1941 Auschwitz had already carried out an experimental extermination of 600 Russian POWs and 250 Polish prisoners. The Holocaust began with Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 and the slaughter of up to two million Jews by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads.7

Zionism –Racist?

Achcar suggests that Zionism was as ‘morally excusable as the reactive racism of blacks to white racism’. However he fails to understand the Zionist dialectic. In Europe Zionism sought an alliance with anti-semitic regimes and rulers such as the Czar of Russia. Zionist policy was based on the belief that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’ (Patai 1960: 83–4). To the Kaiser he explained that ‘we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties’ (Patai 1960: 729).

From its inception Zionism was integrally linked to the colonisation of Palestine and the achievement of state power in Palestine. Achcar describes ‘statist Zionism’ as a Janus type movement, ‘one face turned towards the Holocaust, the other towards the Nakba’ and the ‘obstinate insistence with which both sides fix their gaze on only one face is the source of their inability to communicate’ (p. 275). This implies that the Palestinians have an equal responsibility in respect of the Holocaust that Zionism has towards the Nakba.

Yet what is noticeable is how many in Israel have begun identifying with the Nazis – from neo-Nazi Russian gangs,8 to a retired judge who believes that Israel must learn from Nazi tactics,9 to Israeli soldiers identifying themselves as the Mengele Squad,10 to right-wing Israelis shouting at Jewish supporters of the Palestinians that ‘Hitler was Right’11 to settlers daubing ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ on walls.12 How in practice would a Palestinian focus on the Holocaust bring a solution any nearer? When a group of Arab women from the West Bank recently visited Yad Vashem they were told ‘Get out of here, you sluts’, by high-school students: ‘This place is ours, and there is no room for Arabs’.13 Clearly the lesson that they had learnt from their visit to Yad Vashem was not an anti-racist one. Achcar compares the use by Palestinian communists of the label ‘fascist’ to describe the ‘socialist leaders’ of ‘socialist Zionism’ to the third period of Stalinism when social democrats were termed ‘social fascists’ (p. 56). This is a false analogy. Social democracy and fascism were mutually antagonistic. Labour and Revisionist Zionism both agreed on the need for a Jewish State. Their disagreements were primarily tactical. This is best epitomised by Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatza‘ir, of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation. They supported binationalism, whilst also forming the backbone of the elite Palmah shock troops of the Haganah, who spearheaded the expulsions and massacres of the Nakba.14 Zeev Sternhall termed Labour Zionism ‘nationalist Zionism’ (1998: 18–19, 25, 32).

To Achcar the problem with equating Zionism and racism lies in its ‘totalizing nature . . . we can hardly treat all Zionists . . . as birds of the same racist feather’ (p. 274). Achcar confuses the movement with its adherents. Yet a majority of Nazi Party members opposed Kristallnacht in November 1938 (Kershaw 1983: 260–71).15 Even among party members a third of Peter Merkl’s sample gave no evidence of anti-Semitism, half were uninterested and just 13 percent were ‘paranoid anti-Semites’ (Marrus 1988: 12 citing Merkl 1975). Yet who could deny that the Nazi Party was anti-semitic?

Achcar’s formulation that the comparison between Zionism and Nazism is understandable when coming from Palestinian or Jewish anti-Zionists, but potentially anti-Semitic when coming from non-Jewish Europeans, because Europeans are ‘citizens of countries that were actively or passively responsible for the Holocaust’ is collective guilt and chauvinistic (pp. 224–225). When Anwar Kamil, an Egyptian Trotskyite, compared the Zionist use of the term ‘chosen people’ to the Nazi concept of a master race, Achcar ascribes this to an Islamic critique of Zionism (p. 60). When Professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University says of the children of the Hebron settlers that ‘they are exactly like the Hitler Youth’ (p. 234) Achcar finds this a ‘terrible comparison’. Despite formally repudiating it, Achcar still clings to the Zionist nostrum of the Holocaust’s uniqueness (p. 228).

Zionism, the Holocaust and the Creation of the Israeli State

Achcar’s conclusion that Israel ‘owes its creation to the Holocaust. . . ’ (p. 19) lies at the root of his reticence about Zionism’s role during the Holocaust and his ambivalence about the nature of Zionism. Achcar effectively adopts Isaac Deutscher’s famous analogy, that the conflict in Palestine is the equivalent of a man escaping from a fire by jumping from a window, injuring someone in the process and inviting retribution (Deutscher 1968:136–7). It is a conflict built on equal tragedies and therefore simplistic to see Israel as merely a settler colonial state. In actual fact the Zionist movement averted its eyes and kept silent during the Holocaust. Clearly Hitlerism gave the proto-Jewish State its critical mass and British imperialism would not have been so weakened by 1948 but for the war. However, like the other White Dominions, the Jewish settlers would have achieved independence, probably around the mid-1950s. Achcar has difficulty reconciling the Zionist record during the Holocaust with its role in Palestine. Yet the writing off of the Jews of Europe was consistent with the refusal to acknowledge that the indigenous people of Palestine also had rights. The Zionist movement was a singleminded one and ‘In spite of the certainty that genocide was being carried out, the JAE did not deviate appreciably from its routine . . . ’ (Teveth 1987: 844). Ben-Gurion made it clear that ‘In these terrible days . . . I am still more worried about the elections of the (Mapai) branch in Tel Aviv’ (Segev 1994: 105). 'Throughout 1939 and 1940, the situation of Europe’s Jews was not discussed once by Mapai’s Central Committee’ (Porter 66: 2008). ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism’ (Teveth 1987: 850). Achcar cites Ben-Gurion’s statement that ‘nothing takes precedence over saving the Hebrew nation in its land’ (p. 21) but draws no conclusions. Even more grotesque were the proposals in September 1942 to establish a memorial, Yad Vashem, to the Holocaust victims, whilst they were still alive. (Segev 1994: 104)

Achcar suggests that Ben-Gurion’s ‘relative indifference’ to the Holocaust was but one Zionist viewpoint (p. 21). As Saul Friedlander observed: ‘The rescue of the Jews in Europe was not at the top of the Yishuv leaders’ list of priorities. For them, the most important thing was the effort to establish the state’ (Segev 1994: 467; Brenner 1992: 201–214).16 Those Zionists who actively campaigned to make rescue the priority were ironically dissident Revisionists Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Achcar describes Zionist opposition to Jewish immigration to the West as a ‘lack of enthusiasm’, citing Zionist historian Francis Nicosia, that an understanding of National Socialism ‘eluded’ the Zionist leadership well into the war (p. 23). Nicosia does his best to exculpate the Zionist movement.17 Yet as early as January 1934 Ben-Gurion predicted that ‘Hitler’s regime puts the entire Jewish people in danger’. (Teveth 1987: 445) In December 1938 he described Hitler’s goal as the destruction of the Jews world-wide (Teveth 1987: 849). It was not ignorance but indifference and opportunism that paved the road to obstruction and collaboration. At the heart of his ambivalence is Achar’s description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as ‘exceptional’ (p. 31) because the Zionists were ‘fleeing a form of persecution as long-standing and brutal as European anti-Semitism. . . ’ In fact most colonists saw themselves as having been oppressed. Achcar’s argument seems like special pleading.

Arab Perceptions of the Holocaust

It is in the Arab perception of the Holocaust that Achcar’s book is at its strongest. Whereas Europeans see the Holocaust from the viewpoint of the perpetrators, Arabs see it as victims. This explains the role that Holocaust denial plays amongst Arabs. When Ahmedinajad hosted a Holocaust conference in December 2006 in Tehran, he was greeted with headlines such as ‘Enough stupidity’ in left-wing Beirut daily Al-Ahkbar. Dr Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, who was driven out of Israel by Shin Bet (‘General Security Service’) wrote in Al-Ahram that ‘Holocaust Denial does not undermine the moral justifications for the existence of the State of Israel as some imagine. What it does, however, is hand the European right and Israel a convenient enemy upon which to unload their problems’ (p. 254). Achcar asks the most pertinent question of all, namely whether all forms of Holocaust Denial are the same (p. 261). Many Arabs reacted to Zionism’s propagandistic use of the Holocaust by denial. This is entirely different from European neo-Nazis, who hope for a repetition of the Holocaust they deny.

Footnotes
1 Los Angeles Times, 26 March 2010.

2 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/among-the-righteous/ (accessed 12 December 2010). Satloff’s motive was that if Arabs could identify with an Arab Schindler and knew of the history of the Nazi/Fascist occupation of North Africa, then perhaps they wouldn’t espouse holocaust denial views.

3 Ynet 14 November 2010: ‘Righteous among the Arabs’, at: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3978445,00.html

4 http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/257.shtml (accessed 29 December 2010).

5 Kol Ha’ir (Jerusalem), 19 May 1989.

6 http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191 (accessed 29 August 2010).

7 Jurgen Matthias, ‘Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust’, in Browning (2005: 244).

8 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2418221.ece

9 Ynet, 5 July 20.10, ‘Israeli judge: Learn from Nazis’, at: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3915394,00.html

10 Haaretz, 1 October 2010, at: http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/themengele-squad-1.316622

11 At: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2010/02/hitler-was-right-say-zionists.html

12 The Independent, 23 June 2004, ‘Breaking silence over the horrors of Hebron’, at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/breaking-silence-over-the-horrors-of-hebron-733173.html

13 At: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-short-anthology-of-racismin-israel-1.334878 3 January 2011, ‘A short anthology of racism in Israel’.

14 At: http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Palmach_-_The_Palmach_in_Politics_and_Culture/id/5363334 (accessed 1 January 20.11).

15 According to one survey, just 5 percent of Nazi Party members approved, 63 percent were opposed and 32 percent were indifferent (p. 265).

16 See speech of Yitzhak Greenbaum, Chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee, 17 See Tony Greenstein’s review of Francis Nicosia’s The Third Reich and the Palestine question and Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Weekly Worker 792 (5 November 2009), at: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1003781.

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