To pluck but one example from the flood of high-level anti-Jewish invective, here are a few snippets from a sermon delivered on October 13 by Ahmad Abu Halabiya, former acting rector of the Islamic University in Gaza. The sermon, given the day after the barbaric lynching of two Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Ramallah, was broadcast live on the official television channel of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority:

Of course, it has long been a staple of Arab diplomacy that such sentiments themselves are to be understood as an expression of frustration with Zionism, not with Jews or Judaism. After all, did not Arabs and Jews coexist harmoniously for centuries prior to the advent of the Zionist movement?

But this idyllic picture is likewise at odds with the historical record. True, persecution of Jews in the medieval and modern Islamic world never reached the scale of Christian Europe. But that did not spare the "Jews of Islam" from centuries of legally institutionalised inferiority, humiliating social restrictions, and the sporadic rapacity of local officials and the Muslim population at large. In pre-Zionist Palestine itself, Arab peasants, revolting in the 1830s against a military conscription imposed by Egyptian authorities, took the occasion to ravage the Jewish communities of Safed and Jerusalem, and when Arab forces arrived from Egypt to quell the insurrection, they slaughtered the Jews of Hebron in turn. A century later, in June 1941, following an abortive pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, the Jews of Baghdad were subjected to a horrendous massacre in which hundreds perished. And so forth.

This is hardly to deny the clash of destinies between two national groups. But it is precisely because Zionism was construed as epitomising the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews in the Muslim-Arab mind that the Zionist enterprise could be portrayed in so lurid a light by politicians and intellectuals alike. As Lutfi Abd al-Azim, the editor of a prestigious Egyptian weekly, wrote in 1982, three years after the conclusion of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty:

Reflecting the Prophet Muhammad’s outrage over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish community, both the Qur’an and later biographical traditions of the Prophet abound with negative depictions of Jews. In these works they are portrayed as a deceitful, evil, and treacherous people who in their insatiable urge for domination would readily betray an ally and swindle a non-Jew; who tampered with the Holy Scriptures, spurned God’s divine message, and persecuted His messenger Muhammad just as they had done to previous prophets, including Jesus of Nazareth. For this perfidy, they will incur a string of retributions both in the afterlife and here on earth where they have been justly condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation.

As this summary suggests, the traits associated with Jews make a paradoxical mixture: they are seen as both domineering and wretched, both haughty and low. Coming to know Jews as a small subject community in their midst, most Muslims held them in the contempt reserved for the powerless. "I never saw the curse denounced against the children of Israel more fully brought to bear than in the East," wrote an early 19th century Western traveller to the Ottoman empire, "where they are considered rather as a link between animals and human beings than as men possessed by the same attributes." That was one side of the picture. As for the other, even Egypt’s President Sadat, the man who would go farther than any other Middle Eastern leader in accepting the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, could remind his people in April 1972 of why the Jews had to have been brought so low, and why their power was still to be feared:

Given the depth of anti-Jewish feeling in the Arab Middle East, it is hardly surprising that some of the hoariest and most bizarre themes of European anti-Semitism should have struck a responsive chord when they made their way there over the course of the centuries. Thus, special derision is reserved in Arab writings (as in Christian ones) for the biblical notion of the chosen people, seen in Anis Mansur’s words as the quintessence of "Judaism’s perception of the Jews as… masters of the universe – its peoples, lands, and skies…..to whom all other peoples are but servants, undeserving of belief in the Jewish God."

Although most of these incidents were of Christian manufacture, and although Ottoman authorities often extended help to the persecuted Jews, the libel itself was quickly internalized in the Muslim imagination, where it remains firmly implanted to this day. Thus, in August 1972 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia could confide to the mass-circulation Egyptian magazine al-Musawar that "while I was in Paris on a visit, the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained, and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they eat on that day." In Israeli Religious Thought: Stages and Sects, published by a respectable Egyptian academic press, Dr. Hasan Zaza, a professor of Hebrew at Ein Shams University in Cairo, accepts the veracity of blood libel despite his awareness that Jewish religious law specifically forbids the eating of anything containing blood.

As with the blood libel, the astounding popularity of the Protocols is directly related to the millennial disparagement of Jews as treacherous and grasping. When, moreover, the Zionists managed to harness international support for their enterprise – in the form of the Balfour Declaration and an endorsement of its pledges by the League of Nations – they utilised (so the argument runs) the same foul methods used against the Prophet Muhammad and other victims of ancient Jewish aggression. "We have known the Jews to be most tyrannical and despotic," the Jaffa Muslim-Christian Society complained in May 1920 to the district’s British military governor, reminding him

During the 1920s and the 1930s, these and other traditional Islamic perceptions coalesced with themes articulated in the Protocols to create a distinctly Middle Eastern version of the theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Thus, the prominent Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, an Orthodox Christian fully conversant with the surrounding Muslim society, could equate the Zionist enterprise with the crucifixion of Jesus – and also float the newer stereotype of Jewish domination of the great powers, whether the Romans at the time of Jesus or, now, the British. "There is little doubt that the British government is (morally and politically) bankrupt," Sakakini wrote in the 1930s "Who can have high regard for a government which is totally under the Jewish sway, like a slave?"

Similarly, the Palestinian politician Rashid Hajj Ibrahim warned in the late 1940s that Jewish ambitions ran well beyond Palestine to encompass the entire Middle East. "The Jews covet Egypt," he argued,

Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who wrote an account of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, ascribed the Arabs’ defeat in that conflict to their failure to recognize that Jews now exercised worldwide domination. "The old generation perceived the Jews…as a cowardly, avaricious, and submissive group which we could easily throw into the sea," he lamented, but in the modern era the Arabs face an organized evil with tentacles all over the world. "We are not fighting the Jews you know," he went on, but rather "the powers that defeated Hitler and Japan; we are fighting world Zionism, which exploits Truman, enslaves Churchill and Attlee, and dominates London, New York and Washington." Forty years later, in 1988, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad would express the same sentiment in no less explicit terms:

The traditional blood libel is still in wide circulation in today’s Egypt, together with a string of other canards whose tenor may be glimpsed in the title of an 1890 tract recently reprinted by, of all sources, the Egyptian Ministry of Education: Human Sacrifice in the Talmud. Jews have been accused of everything from exporting infected seeds, plants, and cattle in order to destroy Egyptian agriculture, to corrupting Egyptian society through the spread of venereal diseases and the distribution of drugs. Similarly popular are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which may be in wider distribution in Egypt than anywhere else in the world. In Protocols fashion, the hand of "world Jewry" is seen behind everything from the destruction of Russian society to the downfall of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl to the control of world public opinion through the film industry.

In Syria, whose late president supposedly made a "strategic choice" for peace in the mid 1990s, anti-Semitism remains an integral part of political and intellectual discourse. Particularly favoured in Syria is Holocaust denial, another staple of Arab anti-Semitism that is sometimes coupled with overt sympathy for Nazi Germany.

The same can be said of Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority (PA). Indeed, the seemingly sudden and spontaneous outburst of naked racial and religious hatred since October of last year is perfectly in line with the PA’s systematic effort – flagrantly violating its obligations under Oslo – to instil in its people, and particularly in its young people, an ineradicable enmity not only for the state of Israel but for Jews and Judaism.

As part of this effort, Palestinians have been informed of the most outlandish Jewish plots to corrupt and ruin them – outlandish, but wholly congruent with the medieval myth of Jews as secret destroyers and poisoners of wells. Thus, the PA minister of health, Riad al-Za’anun, has charged Israeli doctors with using "Palestinian patients for experimental medicines," while a Palestinian representative to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva accused them of injecting Palestinian children with the AIDS virus. For his part, the PA minister of ecology, Yusuf Abu Safiyyah, indicted Israel for "dumping liquid waste… in Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza" – a charge famously amplified by Suha Arafat when, in the presence of Hillary Clinton, she told an attentive audience in Gaza in November 1999 that "our people have been subjected to the daily and extensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children."

In their schoolbooks, Palestinian children learn about an evil Jewish persona, traceable to biblical times, which accounts for the worldwide persecution of the Jews through the ages. They are indoctrinated with the idea that Jews are, and always have been, implacable enemies of Islam, people who "called Muhammad a liar and denied him, (who) fought against his religion in all ways and by all means, a war that has not yet ended until today." The Bible and the Talmud come in for special abuse as the principal sources of Jewish moral depravity. As one such textbook, The New History of the Arabs and the World, puts it, fabricating a talmudic passage out of whole cloth with malignant inventiveness:

In most instances, however, Arab anti-Semitism has served rather to exacerbate distrust and hatred of Israel, thus rendering the possibility of real reconciliation ever more remote. The smallest incident can suffice to pierce the thin veneer of official "anti-Zionism" resulting in a torrent of abuse directed not just against Israel and its leaders but against Jews pure and simple – a people, in the words of the Egyptian government daily al-Akhbar, who "should not be trusted because they are a nation of vagabonds filled with hatred toward the entire world."

That such reprehensible lies, and much worse, can appear in the official newspaper of a government at peace with Israel for two decades suggests how deeply anti-Semitic bigotry is entrenched in Arab societies. Whatever happens in the specific conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israel in the coming days and months, for the foreseeable future Muslim-Arab lands seem destined to remain the only regions in today’s world where anti-Semitism – not anti-Zionism – still constitutes state policy.

Dr Efraim Karsh is Professor and head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and is the author of many books on the Middle East, including most recently, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923. Reprinted from Commentary, December 2000, by permission.