The Founding Myths of Modern Israel (R.Garaudy)

When Roger Garaudy's THE FOUNDING MYTHS OF MODERN ISRAEL was first published in France in1995, it unleashed a nationwide sound and fury unmatched by any other revisionist book on the Holocaust, before or since. No work by Arthur Butz, by Robert Faurisson, or by David Irving has precipitated anything approaching the tempest among intellectuals and the uproar in the media that accompanied the appearance of this book. Nor did the impact of Founding Myths end with the literary controversy that swept France in the first half of 1996. Garaudy's trial and conviction in Paris in 1998, for Holocaust heresy, ignited further conflagration across the Islamic Middle East and beyond. As Zionist organizations soon had cause to lament, influential persons and groups in Arab countries, and in non-Arab Muslim nations such as Iran, made, for the first time in the Islamic world, a show of concerted support for the Holocaust revisionist position. How to account for the extraordinary affair aroused by Garaudy's book? None of the Holocaust revisionism expounded in Founding Myths can be said to be original. For that matter, neither Garaudy's summoning of recent Old Testament scholarship against the "chosen people" and "promised land" myths that justify modern Zionism, nor his citation of Zionist leaders and anti-Zionist Jews in evidence against Israeli policies break new ground. Rather, the cause of the uproar lies in the extraordinary syzygy of a man and a movement. The man is of course Roger Garaudy, who has made a twentieth-century odyssey through literature, philosophy, and politics, from Christianity to Communism, through Stalinism back to Christianity, and then to Islam, and at last, with this book, to the radical revising of World War II history that French attorney Pierre Pecastaing called "the great intellectual adventure of the end of this century."