Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives

14. The Roots of Antisemitism in the Middle East: New Debates

14 The Roots of Antisemitism in the Middle East: New Debates Matthias Küntzel “When I witnessed the events in Imbaba, I realized [the Jews were behind them],” wrote journalist Safaa Saleh on May 13, 2011 in the Egyptian government newspaper Al-­Gumhouriyya, following clashes between Copts and Muslims in Cairo’s Imbaba district that had claimed twelve lives. “There is no disaster in the world that was not caused by the Jews,” declared Saleh, calling in evidence a star witness: “Hitler said, ‘I could have exterminated all of the Jews, but I left some of them [alive] so that the world would know why I exterminated them.”1 In the West, such statements would have been met with outrage, but not in Egypt, where positive references to Hitler and the destruction of the Jews have been an accepted part of pub­ lic discourse for decades. In this respect, at least, the uprising of 2011 that deposed former President Husni Mubarak changed nothing. Irrational ideologies are harder to defeat than illegitimate rulers. This is certainly true in the case of Egypt, where the ousted Mubarak was condemned as a friend of Israel and the protestors carried placards in which the president’s face was covered with Stars of David.2 The emergence of mass movements for change in the Arab world has not, therefore, removed the need to tackle Arab antisemitism; on the contrary, in a context of heightened po­ liti­ cal activism and major reorientations, that need has become more pressing than ever. It is, therefore, all the more regrettable that researchers into antisemitism are divided into separate camps. While all agree that in no other part of the world is antisemitism as widespread and commonplace as in the Middle East, the unanimity vanishes when it comes to explaining the causes and context of this antisemitism. The Roots of Antisemitism in the Middle East | 383 On the one hand, there are those who claim that hostility toward Jews in the Arab world has merely developed in direct response to Zionism and Israeli policies. On the other hand, some insist that Islamists and Nazis introduced and reinforced an antisemitic interpretation of the conflict. The former school emphasizes the differences between Arab antisemitism and its European forerunner, while the latter stresses their similarities . The former asserts that the only way to remove the antisemitism is to resolve the Middle East conflict, the latter that that conflict can only be resolved after the removal of the antisemitism. The disagreement is not about whether a connection between the Palestinian conflict and this antisemitism exists, but about the nature of that connection. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and comment on the key features of this controversy. However, the reader should be aware that the author is a participant, not a neutral observer, in this debate and this attempt to take stock is also a contribution to it. The Dominant Paradigm The conventional explanation for Arab antisemitism links it directly to the Middle East conflict. Prominent scholars such as Yehoshafat ­ Harkabi and Bernard Lewis pioneered this still dominant position some decades ago. “Arab anti-­Semitism,” wrote Harkabi in 1972, “is not the cause of the conflict but one of its results. . . . If the Arab–Israel conflict was settled, anti-­Semitic manifestations would die out.”3 In 1985, Bernard Lewis wrote in the same vein, “For Christian anti-­Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-­Semites, it is the cause.”4 While advancing this argument, Harkabi and Lewis did not try to downplay or excuse the antisemitism itself. On the contrary, according to Harkabi, it was particularly “vigorous and aggressive,” “fervent and vengeful.” Since it “regards the Jews as a pathological phenomenon, a cancer in the flesh of humanity, it rejects their right to a future and cherishes the ideal of a world without Jews.”5 Lewis too talked of a “Nazi-­ type anti-­ Semitism [that] came to dominate Arab discussions on Zionism and Judaism as well as of the state of Israel.”6 Today many antisemitism researchers and Islamic Studies and Middle East experts draw a different conclusion from the alleged link between 384 | Matthias Küntzel this hostility to Jews and an actual conflict. They argue that while the German form of Jew-­ hatred derived from irrational delusions, the Arab world is behaving less irrationally since its Jew-­ hatred is underpinned by a genuine conflict of interests. Let me illustrate the point...