Q: Gilbert Achcar, your book's subtitle is: "The Israeli-Arab War of Narratives." What do you mean?
A: It's about the war that opposes two entirely symmetrical visions of the origins of the conflict. Specifically, I refer here to the notion of "narrative" as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism. The Israeli narrative describes an Israel that emerges as a reaction to anti-Semitism, beside the "Biblical rights" invoked by religious Zionists. And its justification by European anti-Semitism is extended to Arabs, who are presented as accomplices to this paroxysm of anti-Semitism that was Nazism - which would legitimate the birth of the State of Israel on lands conquered from the population of Arab descent. That's why the Israeli narrative insists to such a degree on this character, Amin al-Husseini, blown up out of all proportion, who became the ex-grand mufti of Jerusalem.
On the Arab side, the most rational narrative - later we'll mention the denialist escalations that are on the rise at present - may perhaps be summarized in these terms, "We had nothing to do with the Shoah. Anti-Semitism is not an established tradition for us, but a European phenomenon. Zionism is a colonial movement that really took off in Palestine under the British colonial mandate, even though there were earlier instances. In consequence, it's a colonial implantation in the Arab world, on the model of what was seen in South Africa and elsewhere." It's the war between these two narratives that I explore in this book.
(snip)
I show in my book how the man who may be considered the main founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Rachid Rida, switched from a pro-Jewish attitude due to anti-Christianity - especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when he denounced anti-Judaism in Europe - to an attitude that, towards the end of the 1920's, began to repeat an anti-Semitic discourse of Western inspiration, including the big Nazi anti-Semitic narrative attributing all kinds of things to the Jews in continuity with the fake Russian "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," including responsibility for the First World War. Then we see a graft occur between certain Western anti-Semitic discourse and Islamic fundamentalism which veers in that direction on this question because of what was happening in Palestine. Before the conflict turned ugly in Palestine, this same Rachid Rida tried to dialogue with representatives of the Zionist movement to convince them to form an alliance between Jews and Muslims to confront the Christian West as a colonial power. From that anti-colonialism that determines anti-Westernism, they were to move on to anti-Zionism, which, in the case of a fundamentalist religious mentality, combined very easily with anti-Semitism.
With that said, the signs of anti-Judaism that one finds in Islam, one finds a hundredfold in Christianity, and in Catholicism in particular, with the idea of the Jews as deicides, the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, the son of God. This anti-Jewish charge contained in Christianity has, moreover, resulted in a persecution of the Jews in the history of the West incomparably worse than was the case in Islamic countries. We have seen, for example, how Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing the Christian Reconquista and the Inquisition, found refuge in the Muslim world, in North Africa, Turkey and elsewhere.
http://www.truthout.org/1112096
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