The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives
Political scientist and Middle East scholar Achcar (Clash of Barbarisms, 2002) offers a careful parsing of a most incendiary topic: the use of references to the Holocaust in the rhetoric of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Essentially, this is a conflict of historical narratives deployed as argument: on one side are a bundle of sometimes-conflicting narratives that invoke the Nazi genocide as an argument for the necessity of Israel’s existence and certain Israeli policies; on the other side are another set of sometimes-conflicting narratives that invoke the Nazi genocide in articulating grievances against the Israeli state. Even more extreme, though unfortunately on the rise, as Achcar shows, is the use of the rhetoric of Holocaust denial as a political weapon. Yet, tracing the history of Holocaust discourse in Arab-Israeli politics, the author suggests that, recent escalations aside, the evolving narratives ultimately intertwine in a way that invites the possibility of common ground. Calm and judicious in tenor yet unyielding in its intellectual rigor, this selection may show the path out of a seemingly intractable dispute. --Brendan Driscoll--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.