August 1999

I had some misgivings starting this essay. The intellectual climate, here and elsewhere, militates against taking Arab world antisemitism seriously. To the extent that anyone other than Jews take notice, it is seen as a politicised form of attack on Arabs, a deliberate confusion of a political and nationalist antagonism with a racial and religious one. The argument runs thus: Arabs, surely, in the climate of fifty years war (whatever one’s views as to its cause) are unlikely to be well disposed towards Israel. And yet, such a rationalisation of Arab attitudes towards Jews, on closer inspection, turns out to be so much insubstantial apologetics.

The fact is that antisemitic theories about Jews, of a kind that would be instantly recognisable to classical European antisemites, are awash in the Arab world today. Oslo six years ago or Camp David twenty years ago have done little if anything to stem them. There is hatred, fear and loathing quite distinct from the passions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, though doubtless stimulated and energised by it. More significantly, the anti-Jewish attitude is intricately bound to conspiracy theories, with their closed system of analysis, which makes it difficult to counteract. Even a genuine change of policy in the Arab press from the top would most likely produce a widespread reaction that sinister forces are at work to suppress the truth being told about the Jews.

There are at least two reasons for making a point of saying so. First, antisemitism, wherever it occurs, is a serious matter, and, as has always been the case, is more easily stimulated than extinguished. Second, it is a serious threat to Arab-Israeli peacemaking to the extent it minimises the prospects of mutual respect and adjustment.

Recent surveys conducted within Palestinian Authority areas show both a majority in favour of the peace process and a majority in favour of continued violence against Israelis. The inevitable conclusion is that many Palestinians support both peace and violence. There are at least two possible explanations, neither very comforting, but one distinctly worse than the other. One interpretation is that support for violence is purely tactical because Palestinians perceive dividends to be made from pressure of this sort on the Israeli government, a view bolstered by the fact that more Palestinians support negotiations than violence. The other interpretation is that Palestinians are not truly reconciled to the Israelis, believing what they have been saying for years about them, and that negotiations are simply the best way for them to achieve their goals. Neither view can as yet be authoritative, but what gives both their plausibility is that the Jews are disliked to an extent that makes few Palestinians admit that stopping violence is part of peacemaking.

Indeed, peace making has been more the result of the willingness of particular Arab elites rather than any popular groundswell of opinion in the Arab world. When reading what the Arab press says about Jews, it is easy to understand why, especially if one notes that it has been saying the same things for decades, long before an Israeli set foot in Gaza.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has produced antisemitism almost from the beginning. Haj Amin el-Husseini, the disastrous leader, for both Arabs and Jews, of Palestinian nationalism, turned to it early in his career to neutralise opponents and eliminate moderate contenders for the de facto leadership of the Arabs of Palestine. Qualified by neither age nor experience for high office – he was 28 at the time – he succeeded in 1921 to the post of the newly styled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, after a remarkable campaign of intimidation against opponents. In the poll for the previously unimportant post of Mufti, Haj Amin polled last. But he succeeded in intimidating the moderate cleric who won the post into standing aside, while his henchmen branded as traitors and Jewish agents all other candidates. Thereafter, any Palestinian nationalist who sought some form of accommodation with the Jews in Palestine was smeared, intimidated and often killed, including members of the influential Nashashibi family.

This was to be the origin of fratricidal Palestinian politics, still visible today in the bloody chronicle of ‘collaborator killings’. Haj Amin always said his enemies were the Jews and he proved his murderous intent not only in inspiring anti-Jewish pogroms all over Palestine in 1921 and again in 1929, but in moving into the Nazi orbit in the 1930s and assisting the deportation to their deaths of Yugoslav Jews during the Holocaust. Unsurprisingly, he was a wanted war criminal after the war.

By the time of the first Arab-Israeli war, the pattern was well-established that any Arab leader calling for accommodation, or merely prudence, in policy towards the Jewish state, was viewed as a traitor in the pay of a Jewish conspiracy too pernicious and comprehensive to be perceptible to any but the most alert. King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated on such grounds by the Mufti’s agents.

It is very much the idea that Jews are a malignant group of schemers, rather than a discrete people with their own interests, which has helped to keep alive the Arab-Israeli war. In the past, these attitudes produced institutionalised discrimination against, but rarely persecution of, Jews in Arab lands. Western influence led to the granting of equality to Muslim subjects, but this state of affairs was largely ended by the coming of national independence to the countries of the Middle East. The Jews have been resented much in the way the West has been, and as they presented an easy target, it was always probable that Arab nationalists would attack them, even had their been no Arab-Israeli conflict at all. Thus the anti-Jewish outbursts which accompanied Egyptian nationalism in the 1880s, before anyone heard of Zionists or the Balfour Declaration. Accordingly, European antisemitic attitudes are a recent phenomenon, stimulated by the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab nationalism and, latterly, Islamic extremism.

That the Jews, traditionally deemed by Muslims to be inept conspirators, routed the Arab armies that came to crush the ‘Zionist gangs’ in 1948 only intensified the sense of illicit conspiracy felt by Arab nationalists. Accommodation is ruled out with such an enemy, its successes invariably attributed to others (the Russians once, the Americans now, the British and French at one time or another), all of which assists the cause of denying the legitimacy of the enemy.

A large vocabulary was dragooned into the service of this campaign of hate. The following is a far from exhaustive list of synonymous phrases, as they are for its users, describing Israel: "a dagger pointed at the heart of the Arab people"; "a cancer to be excised by radical surgery"; "a bone in the throat of the Arab nation", and so on. Egypt’s Nasser became habituated to speaking of Israel as a condemned man, about to be put in a noose. Accommodation, peace treaties, even caution, are not the usual results of such demonology and at least one Arab-Israeli war, that of 1967, broke out because rhetoric shackled Nasser’s policy.

In this intellectual climate, it could not be long before Arabs drew on traditional sources of antisemitism in Europe, coupled with a traditional Arab disdain of Jews as a lowly and devious subject people. Nasser of Egypt took Haj Amin’s antisemitism further by flooding the Arab world with the most successful antisemitic forgery of modern times, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Soviet Union, as Nasser’s paymaster, obliged by becoming for a time the world’s leading disseminator of antisemitic material. In fact, it was a Soviet propagandist who first termed the Israelis ‘Hitlerites’, inciting Arab governments to do the same. Most Arab regimes, in the Soviet orbit, spoke of Israelis and Jews as imperialists. Saudi Arabia, in the American sphere of influence, and especially under its ferociously antisemitic monarch, Faisal, believed Israel and Jews to be communist conspirators. That these formulations are mutually exclusive made no difference.

It was not long before the press of Arab countries commenced using Der Stuermer like antisemitic stereotypes in their depictions of Jews, and Zionism itself became the subject of a campaign of delegitimation which culminated in the Zionism is Racism resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in November 1975. Whatever supposedly fine distinctions were intended to apply between Jews and Zionists, this resolution served as the warrant for attacks on Jews the world over. The resolution was finally rescinded in 1991 by a large majority which included no Arab state; not even Egypt, by then at peace with Israel for twelve years.

In today’s Arab world, the Syrian regime has been the leader in the field of politically inspired antisemitism. The Syrian Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlas, is the author of an antisemitic tract that claims Jews kidnap and slaughter innocent gentile children to use their blood for the manufacture of unleavened bread for the festival of Passover. In 1985, an Egyptian border guard, Suleiman Khater, went on a rampage, massacring a party of Israeli tourists. It was the Syrian regime, however, that built a monument to the man, whose deeds have figured in verse by Mahmoud Adwan. Probably the worst Nazi war criminal to elude justice to this day, Alois Brunner, has lived in Syria under the protection of the Assad regime for many years.

Things like this do not happen in the Arab world if the government does not will it or at least tacitly support it. Jordan’s late King Hussein might also have indulged in Jew-baiting and desecration of Jewish shrines in East Jerusalem when it was under his control, but he shunned the practice long before he finally made peace with Israel. The difference is readily apparent when one recalls that a maverick Jordanian soldier also turned his gun on Israelis, a party of schoolgirls this time, in 1997. Rather than building a monument to the man, King Hussein paid a condolence visit to the bereaved families in Israel.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that peacemaking of itself brings an end to habits of hate. Antisemitism continues to thrive in Egypt, the Arab country longest at peace with Israel. The demonology is explicitly antisemitic, not merely hostile to or critical of Israel. Pictorially, Jews are regularly depicted as hook-nosed, money-hungry power-seekers, just as Holocaust denial finds a ready slot in the columns of daily newspapers. The chief offender is the opposition press, but the government-sponsored papers are not guiltless either. Some of this vilification is influenced by external politics: there was an increase in the intensity and frequency of antisemitic journalism during the period of the last Likud government. But it has been absent neither before nor after Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister. Holocaust denial, in fact, is more entrenched in the pages of the daily press than ever before.

The following examples, translated by the Anti Defamation League in New York, are an unexceptional selection of antisemitic items to have appeared recently in the Egyptian press:

The Al-Ahram al-Arabi of 1 May 1999, in a feature entitled ‘The Jews are Liars’, reproduced in full the text of a bogus report by a convicted Holocaust denier, Fred Leuchter, which purports to prove that the gas chambers never operated in the mass extermination of European Jews under the Nazi regime. The paper pontificated on this spurious scoop: Leuchter’s Report "by itself constitutes a death verdict on the false legends told by the State of Israel." Considering the difference in context, the aims of European and Arab antisemites is remarkably similar. Holocaust denial is but the first step in a purportedly true appreciation of the Jews, legitimising subsequent efforts to renew attacks upon them, whether in antisemitic measures at home, or in renewed warfare against Israel abroad.

The Egyptian Gazette of 9 March 1999 published a full-page interview with Dr Abd el-Wahab El-Meseiri, the author of a newly published eight-volume antisemitic encyclopaedia entitled Jews, Judaism and Zionism, for which he won first prize at the Egypt book fair. Meseiri’s magnum opus was praised editorially as "a work of utmost importance" as "many are forced to try and learn more about the enemy [Israeli Jews] through careful study, which enhances the ability to deal with their weaknesses and fortes on an equal footing." Jews are a malignant minority to be understood, the better to defeat them, not a neighbour with whom to live in peace.

The opposition daily, Al-Usbu, of 18 January 1999, printed an article alleging that Jews have conspired to falsify verses of the Koran in a translation marketed in the United States. As so often in antisemitic literature, a wholly imaginary conspiracy, unproved and unprovable, is asserted to serve the purposes of erecting a wholly unappeasable enemy whom duty and common sense alike require one to destroy.

Nabil Amar, in the pro-government daily Al-Ahram, of 8 December 1998, opined: "Has there been any change at all in the personality of the fanatic Jew, as it has come to be known and described in the literature and heritage of most of the nations of the world? That is to say, has there been any development of his character traits after his state has been established and he has obtained international influence? For example, is there any difference between Netanyahu’s traits, when he is negotiating with the Palestinians, Lebanese and the Syrians, and those of the money-lender from the play ‘The Merchant of Venice’?" Antisemitic notions of Jewish sharp practice and essential untrustworthiness serves the dual purposes of mobilising opinion in favour of whatever hard line Cairo has chosen at that moment to adopt and rationalising further hostility into the indefinite future.

The opposition Al-Shaab of 17 November 1998 featured an anonymous article entitled ‘The Talmud, the Jews and Human Sacrifice’. Citing a book, The Jews in Egypt in the Modern Era, the author asserts that "Jews carry out human sacrifices to please their blood-thirsty God … [The Talmud says] ‘We have two ways of satisfying our God: the first is on the Feast of Matzah [Passover], using matzah mixed with human blood, and the second is the circumcision ceremony of our children." This while the Jewish Encyclopaedia says, ‘The rabbis have given their approval for carrying out human sacrifices of Christians to our God.’" Like European antisemites of old, this execrable piece relies on a bogus literature of the antisemites’ own devising to prove what earlier bigots have merely stated. It is an old libel, all of a piece with the worst obscenities uttered by Syria’s Tlas, with the difference that it appears in the press of a country with whom the Israelis have been at peace for two decades.

The Al Ahram of 14 November 1998 carried this bald assertion: "The Jews have been behind all the wars and their goal was corruption and destruction. This is their means of getting rich quick after wars." This is a claim made repeatedly by European antisemites over the centuries, utilising the usual stereotyping of Jews as rootless cosmopolitan speculators on the make, to the cost of their host countries. It is ideas of this order that permitted Nazism and fascism to emerge, to popular approval, in Europe this century.

A certain Mustafa Mahmoud goes further in the publication October of 4 October 1998: "Any one who studies the Jewish heritage cannot help but feel that all conspiracies against religions and generally all destructive upheavals and the undermining of values and basic principles – all are the result of this heritage. Jewish guidance directs every axe of destruction … Satan worship is part of Judaism and especially its concealed aspects, such as the Kabbalah, as is the goal of destroying monotheistic religions." Here there is no subtlety, shade or nuance, as there rarely is to bigotry. All destructiveness and strife in the world is traceable to a single convenient source: the Jews.

When reading these choice snippets of Egyptian opinion, one wonders whether the journalists concerned are simply devoid of all critical faculties, for this is journalism of licence and intellectual disorder. However, its purpose and existence is to be explained by perceptions of Jews as incompetent schemers who are now accomplished conspirators; stateless petitioners who now wield power in their own behalf; and the importation of defective western thinking, all applied to a conflict whose resolution does not destroy but enhances Jewish statehood. Destroying Israel might no longer be routine policy in the councils of responsible Arab governments. But the aspiration that once inspired pan-Arabists and now transfixes Islamic extremists remains. Its purpose is to focus resentment, deter internal criticism and, in a sense, mollify the populace in the idea that Arab-Israeli peace must be regrettably concluded, since the devilish Jews are too strong.

Contemporary Arab antisemitism, it might be objected, is less serious than it appears, if only because few Jews remain in the Arab world, the historical communities of Baghdad, Fez, Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria and Yemen having long been liquidated by persecution, massacre, flight or emigration in the past half century. In fact, residual Jewish communities in Arab states and especially in neighbouring Iran remain at risk, as demonstrated by the recent case of trumped-up charges of sedition against a dozen Iranian Jews. Moreover, antisemitic attitudes can seriously imperil peace, amply demonstrated in the Egyptian case, where formal peace is an overlay to a situation in which two societies still have but perfunctory and limited contact; in which few Egyptians visit Israel; in which the intelligentsia almost to a man remains implacably hostile to Israel and Jews; and in which a violent Islamist opposition movement makes it its business to kill Westerners visiting the country, with special emphasis on Israelis.

What is to be done? The power for doing something lies entirely in the hands of Arab governments and elites who either encourage or turn a blind eye to the phenomenon. Arabs living in western countries, away from the currency of such hate and in position to weigh the evidence, can play a part. It was welcome that Dr Christine Asmar delivered a paper on this unpopular subject to last year’s AMESA Conference in Canberra.

The defamation of Jews in Arab countries has received little attention within the formal processes of peacemaking until now. That might be understandable, as Israel pursues its immediate national interests and seeks to avoid creating another issue which will necessitate reciprocal concessions in response to Arab assurances of action which are difficult to implement and test. However, there are disadvantages, in terms of peace making itself, in avoiding the issue entirely. Moreover, the United States, and especially the Europeans, who seek greater involvement in the peace process, would contribute significantly to ultimate peace in making an issue of the matter in their discussions with Arab leaders.

Europeans are said to feel responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict, insofar as European antisemitism propelled thousands of Jews from the Continent to Palestine. They would be assisting the resolution of the conflict itself and atoning for past injustices by pressing the matter in Arab capitals.

Copyright © AIJAC 1999
Last Updated 3 September, 2001