Imperfectly symmetrical: a discussion of Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust

Abstract

This review provides a summary and evaluation of Gilbert Achcar’s history of Arab attitudes to the Holocaust (and related matters, such as fascism) from the early 1930s until the present. The author’s ability to integrate a story of Arab intellectual and political diversity with the story of how this diversity has often been reduced to a monolithic caricature is found to be magisterial. The review ends with the kind of critical interrogation that so formidable a work deserves: has Achcar exaggerated the role that ‘narrative’ might have in resolving political conflicts? Has he exaggerated the degree to which reactionary and/or fundamentalist Islamism has influenced modern Arab and Islamic thought? To what extent has he neglected to discuss the Jewish fundamentalist ideas that provide a religious basis for prejudice and aggression towards Palestinians and Arabs? Does he adequately address the relationship between Zionism/Israel and imperialism?