sourceThey may have been thousands of miles away, but the death camps of Europe had a profound impact on Arab history.
By bringing together a macabre assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other right-wing cranks — many of whom would be just as keen to rid Europe of Muslims as the Nazis were to empty the continent of its Jewish population — in Tehran this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seeks to deny or diminish the reality of the Holocaust. And while that may seem like just another slap in the face of the West, to the extent that anyone in the Arab world takes him seriously, the Iranian president is also doing them a profound disservice.
As a Jew, of course Holocaust-denial sickens me. But it causes the same revulsion for me as a person who believes in justice for the Palestinians, for whom Israel's emergence meant displacement and dispossession. Those who deny or diminish the Holocaust aren't only callously negating the lived experience of the Jews of Europe; they are also negating what has been — despite the distance at which it occurred — a defining episode of 20th century Arab history. Trying to negate the Holocaust stokes blind hatred on both sides of the divide, and reinforces the most hard-line positions. That may suit Ahmadinejad's own domestic power game, but it does nothing to help the Palestinians and Israelis find a way out of their endless conflict.
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