For my second colloquium I planned on gathering empirical findings and investigating memorials as assumed ‘resonant-spaces’ but since life had other plans, and social gatherings, workshops and field work had to be freezed/postponed… will present this paper, which is part of a bigger chapter on the historical background from which the interviewees come. I had to restrict it to particular cases, for I’m not yet sure which ‘national-backgrounds’ will be included.
I argue in short, that the reception of the Holocaust in the Levant went through four stages, each very complicated and intertwined to be simply dismissed as echoes, or argued as ‘resonant’
Pre-conflict (Israel/Palestine): Sympathy
Post-war (nation-building): Denial
Nationalism and legitimization of totalitarian regimes: copying Nazism?
Post-2011 (Revolution/War/Exile): Empathy?
The first three simplified stages are reviewed here, in order to show that if there was a resonant encounter, it was far from being based on racial ideology. However, its effects had been used by totalitarian regimes, to gain legitimacy and ‘manipulate’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for their own aims. The outcome can be traced in how refugees and migrants approach the German Erinnerungkultur and their understanding of the Holocaust.