The Challenge of Assessing Arab/Islamic Antisemitism

The object of this article is to introduce a careful reading of Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism in view of the conflicting approaches to its assessment. Three aspects are covered: the origins of this anti-Semitism and its relation to the Arab–Israeli conflict; the impact of Nazism on Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism; and the place of anti-Semitism in the ideology of Islamist movements, highlighting a much neglected feature – the Arab discourse on Arab/Islamic anti-Semitism. It contends that the image of the Jew as an irredeemably destructive, conspiratorial agent, hostile not only to Arabs and Muslims but to humanity at large, is a relatively new phenomenon, gradually striking roots especially among Islamists. Notes 1. The term Arab/Islamic antisemitism is used in this article because of the strong affinity between the two but focuses mainly on antisemitism in the Arab world. 2. G. Krämer, 'Antisemitism in the Muslim World. A Critical Review', Die Welt des Islams, Vol.46, No.3 (Nov. 2006), p.243. 3. To the best of my knowledge, the only academic institute involved in monitoring and analyzing contemporary Arab/Islamic antisemitism since the early 1990s has been the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), and other Jewish and Israeli organizations that monitor the Arab media are not academic institutions although they occasionally publish scholarly studies. The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem also publishes occasional papers on the topic. 4. Shmuel Almog, 'Theorizing about Antisemitism, the Holocaust and Modernism', SICSA Annual Report 2001 (Jerusalem: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2002), p.12. 5. Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes toward Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1972). Daniel Pipes and Gary Rosenblatt also argued that Israelis 'have clearly chosen to de-emphasize or even ignore' the phenomenon of Arab rejectionism and rhetoric. D. Pipes, 'Israel's Moment of Truth', Commentary (Feb. 2000), p.23; The Jewish Week, 20 Dec. 2000. 6. B. Lewis, Semites and Antisemites (London: Phoenix Giant, 1997). 7. See, for example, R.S. Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism. A Clear and Present Danger (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 2001); A.G. Bostom (ed.), The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008). An earlier book in the same vein is B. Ye'Or, The Dhimmi. Jews and Christians under Islam (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985). 8. M. Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press Pub., 2007). 9. A.G. Bostom, 'The First and Last Enemy', FrontPageMagazinecom, 19 Oct. 2007, p.2. 10. Ibid., p.3. 11. N. Rejwan, Arab Aims and Israeli Attitudes: A Critique of Yehoshafat Harkabi's Prognosis of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Jerusalem: The Leonard Davis Institute, 2000). 12. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes, pp.225–6. 13. D. Bar-Tal, 'Societal Beliefs in Times of Intractable Conflict: The Israeli Case', International Journal of Conflict Management, Vol.9 (1998), pp.22–50; idem, 'From Intractable Conflict Through Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation: Psychological Analysis', Political Psychology, Vol.21, No.2 (June 2000), pp.351–65; Mark Cohen has written in this vein, both in the Introduction and Afterword of the new edition of his book Under Crescent and Cross. The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), and in an Op-Ed entitled 'The New Muslim Antisemitism', Jerusalem Post, 2 Jan. 2008, as well as in an article, 'Modern Myths of Muslim Antisemitism', in M. Maoz (ed.), Muslim Attitudes to Jews and Israel (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010, pp.31–17). Professor Cohen gave me his essay to read in draft form and I found that many of our views coincide. 14. E. Karsh, 'Intifada II: The Long Trail of Arab Antisemitism', Commentary (Dec. 2000), p.49. 15. Ibid., p.50. See also Raphael Israeli, Arab and Islamic Antisemitism, ACPR Policy Paper, 104 (Ariel: Ariel Center for Policy Research, March 2000), p.15. 16. G. Shmalberg, 'Goldhagen, the Holocaust and the Arab Hatred', Nativ (Jan. 2001), pp.49–59 (in Hebrew). 17. G. Nordbruch, The Socio-Historical Background of Holocaust Denial in Arab Countries. Reactions to Roger Garaudy's The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics (Jerusalem: SICSA, 2001), pp.15–16. Discussing the prejudices and negative images of the West and defining it as 'Occidentalism', I. Buruma and A. Margalit, Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), provide a similar explanation for the phenomenon, presenting it as a deep-rooted tension that flows within and across civilizations, religions and cultures in different times and circumstances. 18. R.S. Wistrich, The Myth of Zionist Racism (London: WUJS Pub., 1976), p.9. 19. Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, p.100. 20. A. Flores, 'Judeophobia in Context: Antisemitism among Modern Palestinians', Die Welt des Islams, Vol.46, No.3 (Nov. 2006), p.307. 21. E. Sivan, 'A Resurgence of Arab Antisemitism', in W. Frankel (ed.), Survey of Jewish Affairs, 1989 (London/Cranbury, NJ/Mississauga, ON: Associated University Presses, 1989), p.78. 22. Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism, p.46. 23. See, for example, Lewis, Semites and Antisemites, pp.117–39. 24. M.R. Cohen, 'Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History', The Jerusalem Quarterly, No.38 (1986), p.127. See also his book, Under Crescent and Cross, which has been translated into Turkish (1997), Hebrew (2001), German (2005), Arabic (2007), and French (2008). 25. Ibid., p.133. 26. H. Lazarus-Yafeh, 'Jews and Christians in Medieval Muslim Thought', in R.S. Wistrich (ed.), Demonizing the Other. Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), p.108. 27. Ibid., p.111. 28. M. Hatina, 'Fatwas as a Prism of Social History in the Middle East: The Status of Non-Muslims in the Nineteenth Century', in M. Tamcke (ed.), Studien zur Orientalischen Kirchengeschichte. Koexitenz und Konfrontation (Hamburg, 2003), p.69. 29. Ibid., p.71. 30. Lazarus-Yafeh, 'Jews and Christians', p.115; Lewis, Semites and Antisemites, pp.198–9. 31. S.G. Haim, 'Arabic Antisemitic Literature. Some Preliminary Notes', Jewish Social Studies, Vol.17, No.4 (1955), pp.307–8. See also B. Lewis, 'Muslim Anti-Semitism', Middle East Quarterly, Vol.5, No.2 (June 1998), p.43. 32. B. Lewis, 'The Arab World Discovers Antisemitism', Commentary (May 1986), p.33. 33. Sivan, 'A Resurgence of Arab Antisemitism?', p.79. 34. D. Pipes, 'The Politics of Antisemitism', Commentary (Aug. 1981), p.41; idem, The Hidden Hand. Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp.1–2. 35. J.T. Kenney, 'Enemies Near and Far: The Image of the Jews in Islamist Discourse in Egypt', Religion, No.24 (1994), p.253. 36. R.L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations. A Muslim Fundamentalist's View of the Jews (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), p.v. 37. Y. Porath, 'Anti-Zionist and Anti-Jewish Ideology in the Arab Nationalist Movement', in S. Almog (ed.), Antisemitism through the Ages (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), p.219. 38. Ibid., p.224. 39. I. Gershoni, Egypt and Fascism, 1922–1937 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1999), pp.340–41 (in Hebrew). 40. N. al-Tantawi, al-Risala, 25 March 1946, p.341. 41. Al-Ahram, 26 November 1955. 42. See R. Yadlin, An Arrogant Oppressive Spirit Anti-Zionism as Anti-Judaism in Egypt (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989). 43. See Gershoni's Introduction, Egypt and Fascism, pp.15–20. 44. For a discussion of this issue, see M. Litvak and E. Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London and New York: Hurst and Columbia University Press, 2009). 45. G. Nordbruch, Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933–1945 (London: Routledge, 2008). 46. One of the chapters of my Ph.D. dissertation examined Egyptian attitudes to Nazi Germany from the end of the war until the early 1960s. See E. Webman, The Representation of the Holocaust in the Egyptian Public Discourse, 1945–1962 (Ph.D. dissertation submitted to Tel Aviv University, 2005), pp.292–319 (in Hebrew). 47. Porath, 'Anti-Zionist and Anti-Jewish Ideology', p.225. See also Flores, 'Judeophobia in Context', pp.320–21. 48. See for example Z. Elpeleg, Grand Mufti (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, 1989) (in Hebrew); R. Medoff, 'The Mufti's Nazi Years Re-examined', The Journal of Israeli History, Vol.17, No.3 (1996), pp.317–33; J. Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2009). 49. Flores, 'Judeophobia in Context', p.323. See also Mustafa Kabha, '"My Enemy's Enemy – A Friend": Attitudes of the National Palestinian Movement towards Fascism and Nazism, 1925–1945', Zmanim, No.67 (Summer 1999), pp.79–86 (in Hebrew). 50. Quoted in Lewis, Semites and Antisemites, p.218. 51. Kabha, 'My Enemy's Enemy – A Friend', pp.79–86; Deutsche Welle, 8 Jan. 2008 (Book review of Wildangel's, Between the Axis and the Mandate Power: Palestine and National Socialism (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2007) (in German). 52. Götz Nordbruch, in a lecture at Tel Aviv University on 26 March 2008. B. Nafi, 'The Arabs and the Axis: 1933–1940', Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol.19, No.2 (Spring 1997), p.18. 53. K.-M. Mallman and M. Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (New York: Enigma Books, 2010). 54. R. Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 55. See for example F.R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 56. F.R. Nicosia, review of K.M. Mallmann and M. Cüppers, 'The Crescent and the Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine (Darmstadt 2006)', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol.22, No.1 (Spring 2008), p.128. 57. Götz Nordbruch, lecture at Tel Aviv University, March 2008. See also G. Nordbruch, 'Defending the French Revolution during World War II: Raif Khoury and the Intellectual Challenge of Nazism in the Levant', Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.21, No.2 (Dec. 2006), pp.219–38. 58. Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, p.161. 59. al-Musawwar, 18 Sept. 1953. 60. Webman, The Representation of the Holocaust, p.307. 61. Ibid., p.304. 62. Nordbruch, Socio-Historical Background, p.26. 63. A. Funkenstein, 'History, Counterhistory, and Narrative', in S. Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.76. 64. See also Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism, pp.15–16. 65. 'Trouble in the Holy Land. Hamas in its own words. The Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement', WorldNetDaily.com, posted 7 Feb. 2006. 66. M. Kramer, 'The Jihad against the Jews', Commentary, Vol.98, No.4 (Oct. 1994), pp.39–40. 67. Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial; E. Webman, 'Rethinking the Holocaust. An Open Debate in the Arab World', in D. Porat and R. Stauber (eds.), Antisemitism Worldwide, 1998/9 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp.16–30. 68. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations, p.v. 69. M. Kramer, The Salience of Islamic Fundamentalism, Institute of Jewish Affairs Report, 2 (Oct. 1995). 70. Ha'aretz, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7 May 2002; Wistrich, Muslim Antisemitism, pp.46–7. 71. S. Taji-Farouki, 'Thinking on the Jews', in S. Taji-Farouki and B.M. Nafi, Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp.328–9. 72. Ibid., pp.336–7. 73. For an account on development of the Muslim Brothers' attitude toward the Jews and Palestine, see 'Abd al-Fattah al-'Uwaysi, The Muslim Brothers' Perception of the Palestine Problem (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi' wal-Nashr al-Islamiyya, 1989) (in Arabic). 74. Hatina, 'Fatwas as a Prism of Social History', p.72. 75. E. Sivan, Islamic Fundamentalism and Antisemitism (Jerusalem: Shazar Library, 1985), p.12. 76. E. Webman, Antisemitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizballah and Hamas (Tel Aviv: Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism, 1994). 77. Kenney, 'Enemies Near and Far', p.266. 78. Ibid., p.254. 79. Al-Quds al-'Arabi, 23 Feb. 1998; al-Hayat, 24 Feb. 1998. See also B. Lewis, 'License to Kill', Foreign Affairs, No.6 (Nov.–Dec. 1998), pp.9–14; Yediot Aharonot, 16 Sept. 2001; New York Times, 9 Dec. 2001; al-Sharq al-Awsat, 12 Dec. 2001. See also: E. Webman, 'The Polarization and Radicalization of Political Islam', in B. Maddy-Weitzman (ed.), Middle East Contemporary Survey, XXII: 1998 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), pp.129–31. 80. New York Times, 23 April 2002. 81. Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 7 June 2002. See also MEMRI, Special dispatch, No.388, 12 June 2002. 82. Ma'ariv, 23 May, 15 Oct., 8 Dec. 2002; Washington Times, 8 July 2002; Jerusalem Post, 11 July 2002; USA Today, 9 July 2002; Yediot Aharonot, 14 Nov., 6, 8 Dec. 2002; Ha'aretz, 6 Dec. 2002; al-Jazira, 11 Feb. 2003; al-Quds al-'Arabi, 21 Feb. 2003; MEMRI, Special dispatch, 476, 5 March 2003. 83. E. Sivan, 'The Islamist Challenge', in Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, Tomorrow (Jerusalem: Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, 2008), p.109. 84. Lewis, 'License to Kill', pp.9–14. 85. Sivan, 'The Islamist Challenge', p.110. 86. Middle East Insight, Oct. 1994. See also E. Webman, 'Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Criticism of Israel – The Arab Perspective', in M. Zuckermann (ed.), Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte XXXIII (2005) (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), pp.321–6. 87. D. Porat and R. Stauber (eds.), Antisemitism Worldwide, 1996/7 (Tel Aviv: Ramot Publishing, 1997), pp.181–2; idem, Antisemitism Worldwide, 1998/9 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp.234–6. 88. Al-Ahram Weekly, 8 Aug. 2002. 89. K. Amayreh, 'Jewish Islamophobia, Persecution of Palestinians is Breeding Antisemitism among Muslims', 27 Nov. 2002 (MSANEWS). 90. Published on 27 June 1999 in msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Tamimi/. 91. Al-Ayyam, 7 Nov. 2000. 92. Al-Dustur, 16 March 2003. 93. A. Bishara, 'Ways of Denial', al-Ahram Weekly, 21 Dec. 2006. 94. New York Times, 27 April 2002. 95. S. al-Mawla, 'The Jews and Us', retrieved 26 April 2006 from http://www.metransparent.com/texts/saoud_mawla_the_Jews_and_us.htm. 96. Al-Ahram, 23–25 Dec. 2002; Ha'aretz, 27 Dec. 2002; Yediot Aharonot, 28, 29 Dec. 2002; Washington Post, 30 Dec. 2002. See also MEMRI, Special Dispatch, 454, 3 Jan. 2002. 97. Al-Hayat, 12 Dec. 2001; MEMRI, Special dispatch, 314, 14 Dec. 2001. See also: al-Hayat, 11 Nov. 2003. 98. Rejwan, Arab Aims, pp.1–2. 99. Ibid., p.5. 100. H. Lazarus-Yafeh, 'Outlines for the Study of Arab Textbooks', Hamizrah Hadash, Vol.17, Nos.3–4 (1967), pp.220–221 (in Hebrew); Lazarus-Yafeh, 'Jews and Christians', p.115. 101. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism; Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi. 102. Funkenstein, 'History, Counterhistory, and Narrative', p.78. 103. Krämer, 'Antisemitism in the Muslim World', p.258. 104. Flores, 'Judeophobia in Context', p.307. 105. On the emergence of the Protocols and their exploitation in Nazi propaganda, see N. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Ann Arbor: Scholars Press, 1981). 106. Pipes, The Hidden Hand, pp.1–2. 107. 'A. al-Wahhab al-Masiri, The Hidden Hand: A Study of the Destructive Furtive Jewish Movements (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1998), p.11 (in Arabic). He published another book on the same issue: idem, The Protocols, Judaism and Zionism (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2003) (in Arabic). See also: al-Ahram, retrieved April 2006 from http://www.aljazeera.net. 108. B. Harrison, The Resurgence of Antisemitism. Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp.4–9. 109. Kenney, 'Enemies Near and Far', p.267. 110. Al-Watan, 22 May 2007; http://www.fateh.ps/Print_doc.asp?nid=3564, 18 May 2007. 111. M. Litvak, 'Iran and Israel: The Ideological Animosity and Its Roots', 'Iyunim bi-Tqumat Yisrael, No.14 (2004), pp.367–92 (in Hebrew)

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