In this sobering and valuable work, Omar Kamil examines “the conflict and juxtaposition of memories” (Gegenlaufigkeit der Gedächtnissen) evident in writings by Arab intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. Kamil examines various authors as they responded to the views on the Israeli-Arab conflict offered by Arnold Toynbee, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maxime Rodinson. In the texts he examines, the narrative of British and French colonialism and of Israeli victory and Arab defeat in 1948 and 1967 displaced an Arab memory of the Holocaust. Kamil's work offers a valuable insight into why some western observers found favor among Arab intellectuals and also how they fell out of favor.

Kamil reminds us of Toynbee's opinions about Zionism and Israel, views that became familiar themes of post-1945 anti-Zionism. Toynbee wrote that the “Zionist Jews” made the Palestinian Arabs pay the price for the persecution of the Jews in Europe. He acknowledged that though the “Israeli Jews did not follow in the footsteps of the Nazis by putting the Arabs in concentration camps and gas chambers, they dispossessed” the majority of a people, the Palestinians, of the country they had lived in “for generations” (p. 55). Kamil offers an illuminating discussion of a debate that took place in Montreal in 1961 between Toynbee and the Israeli ambassador to Canada, Yacov Herzog. In the course of the debate, Toynbee said, “I firmly believe that, insofar as their moral quality is concerned, many of the massacres which the Israeli armed forces have inflicted on the Palestinians are thoroughly comparable to what the Germans did to the Jews” (p. 61). In short, Toynbee not only drew a “moral analogy” between Zionism and National Socialism, but also rejected the legitimacy of historical and religious arguments for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Such views endeared Toynbee to Arab scholars such as the Egyptian diplomat Fuad Muhammed Shibl, the Lebanese historian Menh Khoury, and the Egyptian historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal. They were aware of Toynbee's career in the British colonial service and of his criticisms of Islam. Hence they kept their distance. Kamil concludes that Toynbee's statements in Montreal “fundamentally changed the Arab perception of Toynbee” (p. 68). A Lebanese publisher, Verlag Dar al-ilm lilmalayin, brought out a collection of his essays with the title “Palestine—Crime and Defense.” The introduction welcomed Toynbee's views because he “prophesied . . . the end of the state of Israel” and because he saw that “the Zionist's crimes against the Palestinian are more morally reprehensible than are those of the National Socialists against the Jews” (p. 68). Kamil reports that the book was a “great success” and is still sold in bookstores in the Arab states. The Egyptian Ministry of Cultural Affairs commissioned the historian Lam I al-Mutai'i to write a book about Toynbee. The resulting text, “Toynbee and the Jews,” presented his views expressed in the Montreal debate. In 1966, an abridged edition of A Study of History as well as favorable secondary works appeared in Arabic. Toynbee received praise on programs of Radio Cairo. Toynbee met Egyptian President Gamal Nasser in Cairo in 1961 and visited Egypt again in 1964 and 1968 (pp. 68–69). For his Arab enthusiasts, Toynbee's fame lent legitimacy to the equation of Zionism and the actions of the state of Israel with those of Nazi Germany and to their view that the state of Israel was illegitimate.

Kamil effectively summarizes Sartre's postwar writings, including Anti-Semite and Jew, his essays on anticolonialism and opposition to the French war in Algeria and on Franz Fanon's justification of political violence. As a result, in the years before the Six Day War of 1967, Sartre gained an enthusiastic audience among Arab intellectuals. Sartre's star began to fade in the Arab intellectual world, however, when he decided to visit Israel in 1965. Kamil traces the trajectory of the Lebanese essayist Suhail Idris from enthusiast to critic. Upon learning of Sartre's decision, Idris criticized the French philosopher who had defended the Jews against oppression, but was now, Idris wrote, supporting “a criminal state” [i.e., Israel]. For Idris, Sartre was not distinguishing between “the Jews as such and the Israelis and Zionists, between the persecuted and the criminal” (p. 110). During the Six Day War, Sartre supported the Israelis. When the Arabs asserted that they were not antisemitic but anti-Israeli, Sartre replied that while that was “certainly” the case, “for us [French leftist intellectuals] these Israelis are Jews” (p. 123). As such they were inseparable from the French and European memory of the Holocaust and the obligations that followed from it. As a result of his support for Israel in 1967, Sartre's Arab admirers turned against him. Unlike Sartre, they were not torn between opposition to colonial violence and the memory of the extermination of the Jews in Europe. They had “no feelings of guilt about the Holocaust.” They viewed the Jews as colonialists and occupiers of Palestine and so that in their view “the Jew as victim of National Socialism was erased” (p. 126).

Kamil then examines the views of the French, Jewish, and Marxist Orientalist Maxime Rodinson and the response of Arab intellectuals to him in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, Rodinson found a sympathetic Arab audience when he denounced Israel as a colonial project and declared his pro-Palestinian stance in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. He described the conflict between Israel and the Arabs as “the struggle of an indigenous people against the occupation of a part of their national territory by a foreign power” (p. 134). He urged his Arab interlocutors to pay attention to Jewish history, however, and to make common cause with leftists in Israel. Yet Kamil notes that Arab nationalists, such as Clovis Maksoud, once an ambassador of the Arab League to the United Nations, asserted that “what is usually called ‘the Jewish question’ has importance only in connection with the Zionist colonization of Palestine” (p. 138). Kamil concludes that the Arab intellectuals' enthusiasm for Rodinson emerged not only because “he was a non-Muslim who was enthusiastic about Islamic civilization, and a Frenchman who was against French colonialism.” Rather it was also due “above all” because “he was a Jew who opposed the ‘Jewish project’ in Palestine.” In Arab eyes he was the “ideal trusted witness,” one who valued Arab history, defended the Arab struggle against colonialism, and criticized Zionism (p. 165). Yet Rodinson's Arab interlocutors did not reciprocate his efforts by bringing the facts and history of the Holocaust into their own writings.

Readers who want to explore the issue of the Arab postwar response to the Holocaust should also consult Meir Litvak and Ester Webman's 2009 deeply researched work, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. Kamil's distinctive contribution lies in his depiction of the Arab intellectuals' response to writers from Europe and Britain and the evidence he offers regarding the impact of local politics on historical memory. The authors he examines either did not distinguish at all between the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the Israeli war of independence in 1948 or the Six Day War of 1967, on the other or if so, such distinctions remained on the margins of Arab intellectual and political life. The Arab intellectuals he examines were enthusiastic about the views of these European and British writers when they reinforced local beliefs, but not when they challenged them. Kamil concludes that “to the present day, the idea of a historic battle of the Arabs against European colonialism and its Zionist form in Palestine forms the Arab's master narrative. Its importance does not allow for other narratives, such as the recognition of the Holocaust, which cannot be integrated with it” (p. 166). Historians of memory in postwar Europe have pointed to the impact of local and international politics on the eventual emergence of the Holocaust in postwar European public memory. Kamil's creative approach to the intersections of memory and politics illuminates how international and local politics led to very different outcomes in the Arab states in the 1960s and 1970s.