I noticed in Ynet Tuesday morning that the Simon Wisenthal Center posthumously honored Khaled Abdelwahhab, a Tunisian who rescued twenty-four Jews during the Nazi occupation of his country in 1942-43.
Abdelwahhab is also the first Arab to be nominated as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel. The museum has yet to decide whether he will receive the award.
Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal tells the story of how Abdelwahhab saved twenty-four Jews by hiding them on his farm during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia.
The Nazi takeover immediately affected Jacob Boukris, an affluent household appliances manufacturer, as well as his wife, Odette, and their 11-year-old daughter, Anny. German troops gave the family one hour to evacuate their spacious house in the coastal town of Mahdia, then the soldiers turned it into a barrack and took all the valuables. The family and two dozen Jews found shelter in a nearby olive oil factory, but a few days later, another visitor appeared at midnight.
He was Khaled Abdelwahab… a notably handsome man of 32, whose father was Tunisia’s most eminent historian. The visitor told the startled Jews that they must leave immediately and explained why. Young Abdelwahab served as liaison between the local population and the Nazi occupiers. He used the position to ingratiate himself with the Germans and, like Oskar Schindler in Poland, frequently treated the officers to meals and endless rounds of wine.
The Germans had set up a brothel and impressed a number of local women, among them Jewish girls. One evening, a drunken officer confided that he had his eye on a particularly beautiful Jewish woman and planned to take her to the brothel and rape her the next night. The intended victim, Abdelwahab quickly realized, was Odette Boukris.
Between midnight and morning, Abdelwahab drove the Boukris family and the other Jews in the olive oil factory to his secluded farm. He hid and fed the large group until the Germans were chased out by the British four months later.
Abdelwahab’s daughter, Faiza , had a place of honor and spoke at the Wisenthal Center Yom HaShoah ceremony Monday. She had told the Jewish Journal in an earlier interview:
Growing up in Tunisia, “at a certain social level there was no difference between Arabs and Jews, and our home was actually in the Jewish section,” Abdul-Wahab said. In retrospect, she felt that her father was quietly frustrated that his wartime deeds were never recognized. “He seemed a little sad,” she said, “but whenever he visited me in Paris, he wanted to go to the Jewish neighborhood.” As for herself, Abdul-Wahab mused that “I’ve always tried to bring Jews and Arabs together. I felt like a link, but I never knew why. Now I understand.”
The story was uncovered by historian Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who spent four years researching the Arab role in the Holocaust - in particular, Arabs who tried to help or save Jews. His book is Among the Righteous.
Sourcewatch pegs Satloff as a neocon, and the Washington Institute as a right wing think-tank with close ties to AIPAC. Personally, I find the WI reports pretty well reasoned though definitely conservative in perspective; but, in any case, I think it’s fair to say Satloff is part of the Pro-Israel establishment. Maybe that’s why this story was picked up by a number of right wing blogs and not as much by the left.
Since the Jewish right has seemed so intent on documenting Arab anti-Semitism, I was surprised to find someone like Satloff pursuing the exact opposite. What is he up to here?
Satloff told U.S. News that his aim was to offer Arabs a way to identify with the experiences of Jews:
The political rationale was to try to find a single Arab who saved a single Jew, which I thought would be a twist that might help lance the boil of Holocaust denial.
He also said in a recent State Department webchat:
In general, the experience of Holocaust-era persecution of Jews in Arab lands is something that most Arabs I spoke with do not like talking about — I expected this. But in the course of my research, I was surprised by the number of heirs of Arab ‘rescuers’ who were not eager to discuss the exploits of their fathers or grandfathers and were not particularly helpful in assisting me to bring those stories to light…
To a large extent, this has to do with the sense that any Arab discussion of the Holocaust inevitably leads to a political validation of Israel. But whatever dispute Arabs have with Israel politically, it does not seem necessary, in my view, for Arabs to deny the heroism and generosity of their fathers and grandfathers who courageously extended a helping hand to Jews in time of need.
There’s a long and very interesting interview with Satloff by Terri Gross here , with more information on his findings and on the political context.
My feeling is that Satloff has done a good thing. Many Arabs supported the Nazis, as did many Europeans and even some Americans. The Jews were victims of a historical catastrophe, in which Arab communities played at least a minor role, and it’s hard to understand Israel’s history without understanding this. Holocaust denial is prevalent, though certainly not universal, in the Arab world, for exactly the reasons Satloff outlines above.
In talking about Arabs who save Jews, he has found a compassionate way to broach the topic. While speaking to the Arab world, he is also reminding Jews of the closeness of the two communities in Palestine before World War II, and of a debt we owe to the many Arabs who had the courage to defend us.
But, to discuss only Arab actions – whether complicit with or in defiance of the Nazis – is only to tell half the story.
I cannot help but note that Yad Vashem, the Israeli museum of the Holocuast, where Abdelwahhab may one day be honored, stands almost on top of Dier Yassin, the site of one of the more atrocious massacres of Arabs by Jewish militias in the days immediately before the founding of the Jewish state.
Early in the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. It was several weeks before the end of the British Mandate. The village lay outside of the area that the United Nations recommended be included in a future Jewish State. Deir Yassin had a peaceful reputation and was even said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out some Arab militants. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and one plan, kept secret until years afterwards, called for it to be destroyed and the residents evacuated to make way for a small airfield that would supply the beleaguered Jewish residents of Jerusalem.
By noon over 100 people, half of them women and children, had been systematically murdered. Four commandos died at the hands of resisting Palestinians using old Mausers and muskets. Twenty-five male villagers were loaded into trucks, paraded through the Zakhron Yosef quarter in Jerusalem, and then taken to a stone quarry along the road between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin and shot to death. The remaining residents were driven to Arab East Jerusalem.
The above comes from the site Dier Yassin Remembered. The events are accurately described, and have been well documented by historians.
That massacre – which remains unacknowledged by Israel and by the museum - was only one component of a deliberate strategy of the nascent Jewish state to drive Arabs from homes and villages in territory within and outside the U.N. Partition that Israel’s leaders intended to be resettled by Jews.
Much more about the destruction of Palestinian villages can be found at Zochorot, an Israeli site dedicated to remembering the Nakba – the catastrophe of the Palestinian people.
If we are going to ask the Arab people to acknowledge our history, and their role in the Nazi persecution of Jews, perhaps we also need to find ways to look at history from an Arab perspective, and to recognize the suffering we have caused the Palestinian people.
Were there Jews who tried to protect the Palestinians during the Nakba? If so, maybe they will be honored some day at a Nakba memorial.
Anyone who wants to show gratitude for the acts of Khaled Abdelwahhab and others (Satloff documents many such acts of courage) might consider donating to the Palestinian Welfare Association (a well established NGO, and a recipient of large scale donor funds from the World Bank, the United Nations and the development agencies of many European countries) to support the construction of a Palestine Remembrance Museum on the West Bank.
