This, First Arab Nominated for Holocaust Honor, is the headline put out by the Associated Press on the first Arab to be nominated for the Righteous Gentile award, which has already been bestowed on about 22,000 non-Jews, including 60 Muslims from the Balkans. The award is given for unusual actions and bravery by nonJews who saved Jewish lives during the Second World War when many were subjected to the indignations of racial and religious bigotry, eventually all of the horrors we have come to associate with the Holocaust.
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Given the large number of Righteous Gentiles whose actions resulted in saving Jewish lives, that this particular award could draw so much attention is unusual; but that is not so. To some degree, it must be guessed that current events in the Middle East, the so-called Israeli-Arab conflict, or more particularly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is playing role in generating the notoriety. And it should.
How natural it is for people to want to say, they can live together, Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis. Most people are basically good (Confusius said so) and want the same things out of life irrespective of their religious or ethnic distinctions.
Researchers at Yad Vashem are now undertaking an examination of the life of the potential recipient, Khaled Abdulwahab, who died in his native Tunisia in 1997, to see if he is eligible for the award. He is said to have sheltered Jews on during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. That no other Arabs have been nominated for the award is likely due to the fact that Tunisia was the only North African Arab country ever occupied by the Nazis.
More than 1.5 million Arabic-speaking Sephardic Jews otherwise lived in North Africa before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Tunisia was home to 100,000 Jews during World War II. Even though they were not sent to death camps like in Europe, Tunisian Jews were nonetheless subjected to persecution during the Nazi occupation.
The story about Khaled Abdulwahab’s deed was reported by Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a U.S. think tank. Satloff stated that after the Sept. 11 attacks, he went to Morocco to research what happened during the Nazi genocide in hopes of countering Holocaust denial in the Arab world and tempering some of the sentiments he thought helped pave the way for the attacks. Satloff eventually nominated Abdulwahab after confirming his actions.
At the time of the Nazi occupation, Abdulwahab had a role coordinating with the German army in his hometown of Mahdia. At some point, he got wind of a plan to rape a Jewish woman and to put other Jewish women into a brothel. He reacted by taking about two-dozen Jews, including the intended victims, to his farm nearby and looked after them there until the end of the occupation.
"Khaled is the finest example, though not the only one, of an Arab who saved Jews from persecution during the German occupation," Satloff said. Satloff indicated that he first heard about Abdelwahhab's story several years ago from Anny Boukris, a resident of a Los Angeles suburb. Boukris was an 11-year-old in 1943, who was also hidden by Abdelwahhab.
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, a North Africa expert at Tel Aviv University, reported that Morocco's King Muhammad V also intervened on behalf of Jews, although the situation there was not as difficult as in Tunisia.
The Abdelwahhab story shows that in the end, human being-ness transcends race, religion, and ethnicity, or any other difference we may use to distinguish among ourselves. Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, can live together, and they can do so in a caring way. In the face of evil, such differences become meaningless, as Abdulwahab’s story attests.
Another report of the story was carried by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/...