The Holocaust, Rebirth, and the Nakba

Memory and Contemporary IsraeliArab Relations

By (author) Yair Auron

Publication date:

04 October 2017

Length of book:

302 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498559485

Yair Auron's important, innovative and instructive book relates critically to the narratives created by Israeli society regarding the events of 1948: the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. Auron proposes a humanistic approach of dialogue to foster the brotherhood of the victims and an identification with each other’s suffering, replacing the current relations of force driving the two peoples to a disaster of terrifying international implications.

Preface to the English Edition
Preface: The “Presence” of the Holocaust in Israel in 1948
Introduction: Facing the Truth
Chapter 1: 1948: Historical Research from the Israeli Perspective
Chapter 2: The Militant Forces
Chapter 3: The Encounter between Holocaust Survivors and the Yishuv
Chapter 4: The Treatment of Arabs, from the Early Zionist Era to the 1948 War
Chapter 5: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Treatment of Arabs by Jewish Combatants in the 1948 War
Chapter 6: Massacres in the Independence War
Chapter 7: The Debate about the Return of the Palestinian Refugees
Chapter 8: The Battle Pages: From the Gates of Vilna to the Gates of Ashdod
Chapter 9: The War Stories of Yizhar Smilansky
Chapter 10: The Arabs, the Germans, and the Holocaust
Conclusion: Morality and War: A Comparative View

In a series of related essays, Auron (Open Univ. of Israel), an Israeli professor specializing in genocide, warfare, and the moral dilemmas and justifications involved, stresses the mutual sense of victimhood in interpretation and consequent memory of the Holocaust and the Nakba. Both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have developed and internalized these events as pivotal and fundamental causes in their own national identities and personal perceptions. Citing extensive evidence largely from Israeli documentary and secondary sources and including his own analyses of these, the author suggests that the Nakba was not genocide (deliberate killing of a specific people), as some have argued, but was more like ethnic cleansing (forced migration), as some have rejected. He urges the necessity to escape the blind spot of victimhood to recognize the suffering of the other. There is no possibility for compromise and for peace without the understanding of the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy and of the Nakba as a Palestinian one. For libraries concerned with Israeli studies, and more generally with issues of rationalizations and justifications in ethnic and religious conflicts. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above