NAZARETH, Israel — At a recent family wedding, Khaled Mahameed says, no one talked to him. Neighbors curse him at the supermarket. A relative accuses him of unwittingly playing into Israel's hands.
The reason: This Israeli Muslim has embarked on a lonely mission to teach his fellow Arabs about the Nazi Holocaust.
Mahameed's newly opened Holocaust institute in the biblical town of Nazareth is a modest operation, with occasional lectures and about 60 photos documenting the genocide mounted on the walls.
But it's unique in the Arab world, where the Holocaust is often played down or even denied.
One photo shows a Nazi officer pointing a gun at the head of a Jew squatting at the edge of a mass grave. "Men like this man settled our land," Mahameed told five Arab visitors recently. "We have to understand the very deep trauma of this man."
Mahameed, 43, believes understanding the Holocaust could help Arabs understand Israel better and ultimately resolve the Mideast conflict.
A few of his neighbors have expressed their support for his museum, but it has provoked strong opposition among Palestinians who say Israel has used Hitler's genocide as an excuse to take Arab land.
Underlying this dispute is competition over victimhood, said Tom Segev, an Israeli author on the Holocaust. "Arabs often feel that if they acknowledge the Holocaust they give up their claim of being the real victim of this conflict," Segev said.
Arab attitudes about the Holocaust are to some extent mirrored by an abiding Israeli indifference to the catastrophes that have befallen the Palestinians because of Israel's creation. That indifference also has begun to fracture, as is evident these days in a five-part documentary airing on Israeli television that delivers a blunt indictment of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Mahameed said his interest in the Holocaust was first sparked by photographs of Nazi atrocities that he saw as a young man. He learned more about it at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied sociology and international relations. Along the way, he also adopted Mahatma Gandhi's doctrines of nonviolence. The final trigger came during the Israeli-Palestinian fighting that erupted in 2000 and led many on both sides to despair that peace could ever be achieved.
