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Returning to the Critique of Europe: On Arabs, Jews, and Arab-Jews
Abstract
It is widely understood that the “Jewish Question” was concerned with the centuries old anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Europe. It culminated in the genocide and the systematic policies to annihilate European Jews perpetrated by the German state under the Nazi regime during what came to be known as the Holocaust. Meanwhile, establishing an exclusively ethno-sectarian Jewish state in Palestine, dispossessing some 750,000 Palestinians, turning them into refugees, and depopulating and destroying over 400 of their villages in the aftermath of the Holocaust in what came to be known as the Nakba; constituent of the “Arab Question”. This paper probes the principal parameters of each question, the Jewish and the Arab, by bringing to the foreground the displacement of Arab-Jews that is silenced and subverted within both narratives, that of the Holocaust and the Nakba. The paper advocates for the inclusion, of what Ella Shohat calls, “the question of the Arab-Jew”, which constitutes the predicament of the Arab-Jewish populations in both their home Arab locales and in Israel. In the shadow of Walter Benjamin’s critique of history, when considering the displacement of Arab-Jews as a question in its own right, coupled with Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba will put us at the confluence of three, and not only two, questions that have been read separately, independently, and mostly, competitively. The paper argues that the exclusion of Arab-Jews from the Arab/Jewish engagement propagates a European reading of history that silences the histories and historical specificities of Arab-Jews. Such an approach limits the possibilities of an integral engagement that is fully realized within the simultaneous critique of violence in Europe (fascism) and violence outside of Europe (colonialism). Segregated approaches to histories of violence as is the case with the three questions continue to create a hierarchy of victimhood, the trivialization of the suffering of “other/s”, and the denial of the complexity of human histories confining us into intellectual “ghettos” in the historical narration that his paper critiques. If we were to entertain the three questions as part of a single catastrophe, it is imperative that we resume our critique, beyond the Arab and Jewish dichotomy, by returning to question Europe and the critique of the “European”.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Arab States
Israel
Palestine
Sub Area
None