Muslim collaboration with Jews against Fascism

academic.oup.com /edited-volume/41330/chapter/352330022

Similarly to how there were both good Christians and extremely sinful Christians in relation to the Shoah, there were both good Muslims and deeply sinful Muslims with regard to it as well. It was common (maybe less so now) for Islamophobes to emphasize the anti‐Jewish Muslims, for example the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (which actually had very little to do with the Shoah), but given the rise of the alt‐right it would be unsurprising if some Islamophobes would now prefer to emphasize the Jew‐friendly Muslims such as the Albanians.

In any case, while some ultranationalist Muslims did mistake the European Fascists for allies against colonialism, most Muslims did not want the snake oil that the Axis was offering. Many of them had the circumspection to tell that the Fascist colonialists were no better than their liberal counterparts, and Libya was a case in point.

What too many of us overlook is that the Western Allies weren’t the only ones holding colonies in North Africa. So was the Axis, giving many Muslims and Jews alike a common enemy:

A history of co‐tolerance of Jews and Muslims was suppressed by the language of the politicians who used the religious and geopolitical techniques of pitting them against one another. Jews and Muslims who had lived together for centuries were now under the threat of colonialism and extinction.
The narrative of history undermines the positions of these groups where books like Jerey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009) and Robert Satlo’s Among the Righteous (2006) particularize the discussion of Arabs/Muslims in terms of the Holocaust and the pressures of colonialism and threat from the forces at hand.
However, the story of colonization reemerges when the discussion of Arab camps surface in Muslim and Jewish narratives, and the two minor narratives emerge within their own minority status in witnessing both the colonial forces and the [Fascist] campaign. In other words, Jewish and Muslim identity struggled immensely through the time of the Holocaust from the fall of the Ottomans 1922, colonialism, and the oppression and Holocaust of native Arab/Muslim/Jewish narratives.
The historical accounts of Jews from Europe or Arab lands who tried to escape ended up in many death camps, and the Arabs who fought against the colonists and attempted to overthrow the colonial forces landed in camps in the Sahara and in some cases with Jews. For example, many Jews who had fled Germany in 1938–1939 were later captured in France and interned in Arab camps.
The camp at Hadjerat‐M’Guil was opened on November 1, 1941, as a punishment and isolation camp. It contained 170 prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews, one of whom had earlier been in a concentration camp in Germany but had been released in 1939 and had fled to France. This young man’s parents had become refugees in London. On learning of their son’s murder in the Sahara, they committed suicide (Glibert, 1988: 56).
[…]
Berkani’s testimony says that he and the Jews in the camp understood that Deriko was trying to get the Arabs to fight with Jews:
He gathered the Jews of the camp, who were previously mixed with the Europeans, and separated them from the French, or rather from the Europeans. This cursed Dériko prepared further provocations once again. Europeans were separate, the Arabs were separate, and the Jews too were separate. Now the Jews were also gathered in the first section. (Berkani, 1965: 44)
Berkani, a Muslim, sees Deriko’s tactic and writes the following; he observes astutely that the [Fascists] (Vichy) were attempting to create tension but that the Jews and Muslims (he changes from Arabs) had caught onto his divisive tactic.
There is no doubt that Dériko did this with the intention of seeing the Jews cut down and killed by the Muslims, since the Jews were not numerous. But the Jews realized his goal; the Arabs too realized the same thing. Commander Dériko expected that there would be fights between Arabs and Jews, but the opposite occurred: a friendly understanding spread between the two communities. Never could one have believed that the Arabs and the Jews in the first section of the camp would become real friends, even brothers. Whether you wish to believe it or not, they were moreover brothers in hunger, in suffering, in misery, in punishment/pain etc. […] in Dériko’s camp. (Berkani, 1965: 45)