The Holocaust and the Nakba

A New Grammar of Trauma and History

Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231544481
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine.

This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a "dialogue" between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

PART I

The Holocaust and the Nakba

Enabling Conditions to a New Historical and Political Syntax

1

Harbingers of Jewish and Palestinian Disasters

European Nation-State Building and Its Toxic Legacies, 1912–1948

MARK LEVENE

The Holocaust and the Nakba are chronologically close and would seem at first sight to be causally connected. Yet the intimate relationship between the two events continues to be dogged by conventional wisdoms which make the possibility of fraternization between passengers in two compartments of a single train the subject of censure bordering on obloquy.

This chapter is not about the ways this implicit veto has taken hold and become embedded in modern Western societal consciousness. It does, however, contain within it a hope that fellow historians might contribute something to a healing process between necessarily often-embittered and hostile neighbors by opening up the conversation as to how these two peoples’ tragedies had common roots. The conventional wisdoms do not simply repudiate such a connection but also emphasize historical singularities in the natures of the respective catastrophes which brook no grounds for comparison. This chapter does not challenge the exceptionality of the events themselves. Nor does it propose sameness in terms of scope, scale, or outcomes, which should not need reprising here. But it does question the way master narratives have created a cordon sanitaire around the “sacred” memory of both events, thereby blocking off the legitimacy of alternative interpretations which might make these events less exclusive (and hence less untouchable) and more part of the stream—the violent stream—of modern European and near-European history.

In the case of the Holocaust, while the hegemonic role of Nazism is not in doubt, nor the entirely extraordinary turn in the fulfilment of the (as far as we know) unwritten Hitlerian command for a Europe-wide Jewish “Final Solution” and the subsequent creation of bespoke, industrial-scale, conveyer-belt-implemented death camps, these Germanocentric foci have served to buttress the Holocaust as a sui generis category of genocide, in the process obscuring the anti-Jewish goals and agendas of all manner of other Europeans. Pace Timothy Snyder’s recent attempt to draw parallels between Hitler and Stalin in their giant, murderous contest for control of the lands between Berlin and Moscow, ¹ the role of non-German perpetrators in the Holocaust has traditionally been treated largely in terms of their willing or unwilling collaboration with the Third Reich and much less in terms of their own autonomous drives and urges toward nation-state building. That said, recent revisionist studies have begun to explore how such anti-Jewish agendas were repeatedly at the cutting edge of the political programs of “New Europe” countries in their efforts to be rid of any number of so-called “minority” peoples who did not fit the national prescript.²

It is no accident that these anthropoemic goals were at their most intense in these eastern and southeastern regions of the continent—the “New Europe”—comprising those states which had been violently conceived at the end of World War I (1914–1918) out of the “shatterzones” of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires—in other words, in precisely those European regions where a multilayered, multiethnic coexistence had been the prior norm. Alongside the Ottoman Empire, whose collapse had already been presaged in the earlier Balkan wars of 1912–1913, these historically plural borderlands or, as I would prefer, “rimlands” (that is, countries at the geographical conjuncture between the metropolitan, avant-garde, already heavily homogenized nation-states of the West and the retreating world empires of what in Wallersteinian terms were now a semiperiphery) became not just in the course of Hitler’s conquests but in a period spanning 1912 to 1948 the primary locus of a repeated sequence of genocides, or genocidal ethnic cleansings.³ This process, in what amounted to the state-authorized expurgation of ethnoreligious difference, thus fated not only Jews but many other internally complex and heterogeneous communities to compulsory deportation and/or overt elimination across a geographical range spanning the lands between Danzig to Trieste in the west and the Caucasus to Mosul in the east and southeast. In 1948, as an extension of this sequence, these ethnic cleansings would also embrace Palestine.

Readers should immediately see what is being proposed by way of linkage here. Proponents of the Nakba as ethnic cleansing largely frame the 1948 expulsions within a long-term, ongoing program of Zionist colonial settlement which, on the one hand, can be historically situated within a more general, usually Western sequence of invasion and subjugation—whether in Ireland, the Americas, southern Africa, or the Antipodes—and, on the other, emphasizes the singularity of the Zionist project.⁴ As with the assertion of Holocaust uniqueness, a case can be made for the exceptionality of the Nakba expulsions, not least because they were carried out by largely secular, eastern European Jews who claimed a historic, religiously founded birthright to the land which thereby superseded (if not negated) the ownership rights of a majority indigenous-Arab population. But such tendencies to “imagine” territory as unredeemed birthright suggest less a function of colonial settlement of the classic Western type (even if such tendencies can be found within, for instance, the New World puritans or South African Boers) and more the sacro egoismo characteristics of a rampant yet, in the period 1912–1948, very common ethnonationalism.

This is not to propose that the settler paradigm has no relevance in the emergence of modern Zionism.⁵ But emphasizing a Jewish colonialism, which actually could have envisaged Africa, South America, or even Australia as its locale—with all the consequent dispossession and displacement of native peoples—takes us too far away from the nationalizing mindset of the Palestinocentric Zionist actors who forged the Yishuv (the pre-Israel Jewish community) prior to 1948. Born and raised almost to a person in the eastern European rimlands—the Russian Empire, more particularly—their thinking about the world, as the late Tony Judt neatly put it, “closely tracked the small, vulnerable, resentful, irredentist, insecure, ethnically exclusivist states to which World War I had given birth.” ⁶ That might suggest a need to more keenly historicize the connecting threads between the origins of the Nakba and the pan-European tragedy out of which the Holocaust emerged. The standard, embedded tropes emphasizing the special status of either case have had the effect of pulling in the direction of disconnect, consequently diminishing dialogue between historians and public on both sides of the divide.

By the same token, recent efforts to reconfigure the Holocaust as a form of late recapitulation of European colonialism, but now within an extended Continental setting pushing out to the east, while arguably supportive of a case for a causal connectedness between Holocaust and Nakba founded on none other than settler colonialism, in my view go too far in that direction. Instead, what I am seeking to do here is reposition the debate through a tighter focus on the nationalist urges which—particularly evident in an emergent, early twentieth century “rimlands” nationalism—might provide not only an underlying framework and context for the relationship between these two events but equally might make them more understandable within a wider process of historical development heralding the genocidal birth pangs of the contemporary international nation-state system.

To develop this argument, I will be looking at two sequences of European and near-European nation-building through ethnic cleansing in the “shatterzone of empires.”⁷ The first is the decline and collapse of Ottomania in the period 1912–1923; the second is the more European sequence, closer to, including, or overlapping with the Holocaust itself between 1939 and 1948. I will then briefly consider the wider ramifications of these developments in relation to the fate of Jews and Palestinians in the decade of the Holocaust and Nakba, before finally returning to an evaluation of their place within a seemingly embedded single-track trajectory of modern state formation.

The Ottoman Twilight and the Emergence of an International Imprimatur for Ethnic Cleansing

In May 1915 the Entente Allies responded to evidence of a mass assault by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) regime on the some two million Ottoman Armenians with a ringing declaration promising to hold it to account for any crimes it had already or might yet commit against “humanity and civilization.”⁸ Eight years later, at the culmination of a sequence of continued war, mass murder, and genocide on Ottoman soil, these same Allies—minus the now Bolshevik-led Russians—signed a treaty at Lausanne with the newly minted, militarily victorious republic of Turkey in which the very names Armenia and Armenians were obliterated from the text. They also put their signatures to a “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations,” giving their imprimatur to a program of comprehensive and compulsory deportation of entire peoples.⁹ How, one might ask, had this seeming volte face come about?

Was the truth actually that nineteenth-century progressive thinking about the rightness of national peoples living within their “natural” borders already informed by a Western distaste for a multiethnic empire repeatedly dubbed “the sick man of Europe”? Certainly, the ethnic mélange of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Ottoman Balkans was considered by many commentators as not only abnormal but an impediment to its modernizing development under its rightful Christian “nations,” regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the region’s peasants or transhumant pastoralists did not understand themselves in national terms at all.¹⁰ Even so, while coercively removing vast numbers of people from hearth and home to somewhere entirely different was almost standard Western colonial practice, when it came to Ottomania, fin-de-siècle blueprints, such as those of Siegfried Lichtenstädter, for a compulsory mass transfer of Christian populations westward across the Bosphorus and Muslim populations eastward to create homogeneous and supposedly stable post-Ottoman nation-states, were largely dismissed as the ramblings of fantasists.¹¹

If this was a case of European states turning a blind eye to some of the more localized population reorderings—for instance, in eastern Anatolia—which their diplomats had already scoped on paper,¹² the whole matter was dramatically put to the test in the First Balkan War of 1912 when Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians joined together to “finally” kick the Ottom...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Syntax of History, Memory, and Political Thought
• Part I: The Holocaust and the Nakba: Enabling Conditions to a New Historical and Political Syntax
• Part II: The Holocaust and the Nakba: History and Counterhistory
• Part III: The Holocaust and the Nakba: The Deployment of Traumatic Signifiers
• Part IV: On Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam: Narrating the Nakba with the Holocaust
• Afterword: The Holocaust and the Nakba
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Series List