Did Arabs Help the Nazis Kill Jews?
At every stage of the Nazi, Vichy and Fascist persecution of Jews in Arab lands, and in every place that it occurred, Arabs played a supporting role. At times, Arabs were essential to the process. At other times, the Arab role was passive yet still critical. And there were those occasions when certain Arabs did more than just collaborate -- they made an already trying situation intolerable.
If there is one word to characterize the attitude of most Arabs toward Jews during the war years, it is “indifference.” That word appears time and again in Jewish accounts of the period. A veteran of the Bizerte labor camp, for example, described in his memoirs how Arabs reacted when they saw Jewish workers filing through the streets, pail and shovel over their shoulders: “The Arabs regarded them indifferently,” he wrote. An historian of the period, writing in the early post-war years, observed that the “attitude of the great majority of the non-Jewish population of Tunis conformed to that of the [French] authorities: there were gestures of sympathy, but in large there was glacial indifference.”
Indifference has many shades. At one end of the spectrum, indifference could refer to a certain steely stoicism, a my-hands-are-tied inaction. As harrowing as life was for Jews in Arab lands during the war, the mass of Arabs suffered considerable hardships, too. Goods were scarce, food was rationed, and hunger and disease took a heavy toll. Politically, Arabs were not on sure ground either. To many Germans and their European partners, Arabs were only marginally less inferior than Jews. As one German officer said ominously to an Arab enjoying the comeuppance of Jews near Tunis, “Your time will come. We will finish with the Jews and then we will take care of you.” If indifference meant that Arabs were primarily concerned with securing the means for their own survival – finding food, shelter, work, and so on – and could not spare the effort to act on their natural human sympathy toward their Jewish compatriots, then theirs was an understandable, even legitimate “indifference,” born of necessity.
At the other end of the spectrum, indifference could also reflect a callous disregard for Jews that had lived – simultaneously protected, tolerated and subordinate – within Arab societies for hundreds of years. If that is what contemporary observers meant when they used the term, then the indifferent were, in a sense, tacitly complicit in the crimes of the foreigners. It is clear that, whatever their attitude toward the fate of the Jews, many Arabs were not indifferent to the coming of the Jews’ tormentors. “Go, go, I would wish to be with you, Hitler,” were the lyrics of one popular Berber song of this period. The head of the Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain, had a position of particular respect in the eyes of many Arabs, because of his age, his military exploits, his emphasis on family, his carefully crafted persona of personal modesty. As Algerian Professor Ahmed Ibnou Zekri, a member of Vichy’s National Council, said “For us Muslims, Marshal Pétain is ‘a sid’ [an honored lord].”
Clarity on this issue is important: By virtually all accounts, the mass of Arabs neither participated in nor actively supported the anti-Jewish campaign that European fascists brought to North Africa. The preoccupation of most Arabs was survival; for those of the political class, the emerging challenge to colonial rule was a much greater concern than contributing to the persecution of Jews. But if one can excuse those Arabs who took satisfaction at the collapse of the French republic before the forces of Nazi Germany, the general sense of welcome accorded to European persecutors of Jews bespoke an indifference to the fate of the Jews that was hardly benign. In the view of many Arabs, if the humbling of French colonialists brought with it the humbling of the Jews, too, then so be it.
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