THE APPEARANCE OF POLITICAL ANTISEMITISM in the Arab and Muslim world is of relatively recent date. Antisemitism was believed to be an exclusively European phenomenon; Arab and Muslim spokesmen often argued that by definition they could not be antisemites because they were Semites themselves. But the terms “Semite” and “Semitic” refer to a group of languages, and the fact that Jews at one time spoke a language (Hebrew) related to Arabic no more ruled out conflicts between these two peoples than, say, conflicts between Russians and Germans, or French and British were eliminated because all of them spoke languages belonging to the Indo-European family.
The Koran and its interpreters had a great many conflicting things to say about the Jews, and these writings have been of importance in shaping Arab and Muslim attitudes to this day—especially in ages when fundamentalist religion figured prominently. At the time of the prophet Muhammad, Jewish tribes lived in the Arab peninsula, particularly in Medina and its vicinity. Muhammad tried without much success to convert them to his new religion. They refused to accept his message; eventually he fought them, defeated them, and most of them were killed.
But the Koran also says that Muhammad had Jewish friends and there is even a verse that can be interpreted as saying that Allah promised Jerusalem to the Jews. Verses preaching tolerance can be found: there should be no coercion in matters of religion (Sura 2:256); both Moses and Jesus were genuine prophets; Jews and Christians are referred to as ahl al-kitab (the People of the Book) and they should be better treated in Muslim societies than pagans.
It is equally easy, however, to find quotations stating that jihad (holy war) is the sacred duty of every Muslim believer, that Jews and Christians should be killed, and that this fight should continue until only the Muslim religion is left (Sura 8:39). As al Baqara, the second sura of the Koran, says about the Jews, slay them (the sons of apes and pigs) wherever you catch them. Or, as one of the two chief interpreters of Muhammad, Buhari, says, the last hour will not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews, until a Jew will hide himself behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or the tree will say, “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him” (Sahih, 4:52.176). This has been quoted countless times to this day, and it even appears in the constitution of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization. Jews are said to be treacherous and hypocritical and could never be friends of the Muslim. The fact that the holy writings of Islam contained many anti-Jewish declarations should not perhaps be regarded as something in the nature of exclusive, unprecedented hostility; similar hostile remarks can be found concerning Christians, all non-Muslims, and in particular pagans.
How did the Jews fare under Muslim rule? By and large, considerably better than in Christian Europe up to the eighteenth century, and there was no holocaust in the Muslim world. On the contrary, there were times and places in which the Jews prospered, materially and culturally. This is true above all with regard to Spain in the early and high Middle Ages; this period has entered Jewish history as the golden age of Andalusia.
Jewish historians of the nineteenth century have somewhat exaggerated the degree of freedom and well-being Jews in Spain and Portugal enjoyed. Certainly the Jews in these countries fared better than under the Visigoths who preceded the Muslim invaders, and better than under the Christian rulers who followed them. The exaggeration, deliberate or unconscious, probably came about to put the suffering of the Jews in Christian Europe into even starker relief. But it is also true that the Jews in Muslim countries were, as the Koran puts it, in a state of wretchedness because they had rejected Muhammad’s message. Jews were much of the time in daily practice and in principle regarded with contempt, cowardly and treacherous, and an element of corruption.
In Baghdad and elsewhere, Jews had to wear a yellow badge or headgear to distinguish them. There were major pogroms in Granada (1066) and Fez (1465) in which thousands were killed, and these were not the only attacks. Some North African Jewish communities were forcibly converted; in Yemen and Baghdad at various times many synagogues were destroyed. There was a new wave of pogroms in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, mainly in North Africa. In the Ottoman empire the authorities did not, on the whole, tolerate massacres of this kind.
The legal status of Jews in the Muslim world was that of dhimma; they enjoyed protection as second-class citizens (dhimmis). They were permitted to practice their religion (but not too loudly or ostentatiously), had to pay a special poll-tax (jizya), and were subject to a great variety of restrictions. They could not bear arms or be public servants (although Jews during certain periods did serve as administrators and even ministers). They were not permitted to ride horses or camels. In the street they had to give Muslims the right of way; they were not permitted to give evidence in court in their own defense. Muslims could marry Jewish women, but Jewish men were forbidden to have intercourse with Muslim women or to marry them.
Muslim empires stretched from North Africa to South and Central Asia, and the treatment of Jews was by no means uniform. Hence, it is difficult to make sweeping generalizations. It could be argued that second-class citizen status was preferable to not having any rights at all. Jews were tolerated as long as they accepted their inferior status. Muslims did not hate and fear the Jews so much—they were not accused, after all, of having killed the founder of their religion (only of having tried to do so); they were not considered a dangerous element, only a weak and miserable one. This they had inflicted on themselves.
Muslims were always superior to the Jews, who had forfeited their erstwhile status as a chosen people by rejecting Muhammad. This, by and large, was the rationale for their status in law as in the conduct of daily life. If attacks against Jews and riots took place, this had to do mainly with the character of the rulers and also with suspicion and envy on the part of the general population, and because individual Jews had somehow attained positions of political influence and affluence. At times there was antisemitism from above, at other times from below, and sometimes little or none. If Jews prospered in a Muslim society, they were well advised to refrain from showing it. All this refers to the Middle Ages and the early modern age; there was a slow improvement in the position of the Jews during the last two centuries of the Ottoman empire.
IN ITS MODERN FORM, Muslim antisemitism appeared only in the nineteenth century, largely through the influence of Christian Arab communities. Accusing the Jews of ritual murder had been virtually unknown in the Muslim world, but with the Damascus affair in 1840, this European importation showed itself in the Near East. Pater Tomaso, a Capuchin monk in Damascus, suddenly disappeared. His fellow monks falsely accused the local Jews of ritual murder; heads of the community were arrested, tortured, and confessed; some died as the result of the torture. A local French diplomatic agent was the main force behind these accusations; the affair was publicized widely throughout Europe and provoked widespread protest until the Ottoman authorities admitted that the accusations had been wholly wrong. However, it was not to be the last attempt to charge individual Jews and Jewish communities with ritual murder; similar accusations were made in many cities in the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century—some as late as 1897–98 in Algeria and 1901–02 in Cairo. In all these cases, the charges originated with Orthodox and Catholic Christian communities, frequently with the support of European consular agents who were usually French or Greek. In parts of the Ottoman empire where Christian communities did not exist, such incidents did not occur. In the case of French involvement, there was probably a connection with the Dreyfus affair; many members of the French diplomatic and consular corps were anti-Dreyfusards as was true also of the French colonial administration in North Africa. A British ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Gerald Lowther, also played an important role in the propagation of antisemitic texts, and some of the European antisemitic literature was translated into Arabic before the turn of the century—for instance, August Rohling’s The Talmud Jew.
The Jewish colonization of Palestine (at that time part of Damascus district) began in the 1880s, but it was on a very small scale and provoked little interest outside Palestine. Nor did the Zionist congresses (the first took place in Basel in 1897) generate much attention. Najib Nasser, a Christian Arab, published in Haifa a periodical entitled Al Karmel that was anti-Zionist, and a Lebanese Christian, Najib Azouri, located in Paris and writing in French, went beyond anti-Zionism in a book, published in 1905, that echoed anti-Jewish allegations that had probably originated with the French right. However, these publications did not reach wide audiences. It was only with the First World War, the Balfour declaration, and the establishment of a Jewish homeland that anti-Zionism became a major issue for the Palestinian Arabs and, to a lesser degree, for the neighboring Arab countries, which had attained independence after the breakup of the Ottoman empire.
While Palestinian and Arab spokesmen had long asserted that their opposition to Zionism had nothing to do with their attitude toward Jews in general, who were their cousins if not their brothers and had always lived in peace in their midst, anti-Zionism turned increasingly into hostility against all Jews. This manifested itself early on in physical attacks—for instance, the massacre of the old non-Zionist Hebron Jewish community in 1929; the Baghdad-Farhud pogrom of June 1941 in which hundreds were killed; attacks in Constantine, Algeria, in 1934; and the Tripoli, Libya, massacres in 1945 and 1948 in which many scores perished. It manifested itself even more clearly on the ideological level. The Zionists, after all, were Jews and they enjoyed the support of fellow Jews around the world. Under these conditions, to make fine distinctions between good Jews and bad Zionists seemed unnecessary and, from a political viewpoint, counterproductive. The Iranian leadership not only wants to destroy Israel, it also maintains that the Holocaust never happened.
There were significant differences between European and Arab antisemitism. European antisemitism was rooted in a variety of theological and later racialist motives that did not apply, or applied to a lesser degree, in the Arab world. Nor did psychological, economic, and social factors that were relevant in European antisemitism necessarily operate in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Arab and Muslim antisemitism initially had nothing to do with economic crises and the rise of capitalism, and very little to do with the spread of globalization.
As Yehoshafat Harkabi pointed out many years ago, Arab and Muslim antisemitism was the result of, not the reason for, the hostile Arab attitude toward Israel; it gradually became a “means of deepening, justifying and institutionalizing this hostility among Arabs” and subsequently also among fellow Muslims. But it was not the only reason. Although in Europe the stereotype of the Jew was that of the parasite, in the Arab world, on the contrary, it was—especially after 1948—that of an aggressor, assassin, and warmonger. This was doubly unacceptable—that the Palestinian homeland was stolen was bad enough, but that the perpetrators were Jews, always considered weak and cowardly, was altogether unacceptable. Because Islam had been traditionally a warring, expansionist religion, the defeats of 1948 and 1967 by an enemy whom no one had ever taken seriously represented a great trauma for Islam’s adherents.
Arab antisemitism has changed its emphasis over time. Between the two world wars the emphasis had been on the revolutionary, Communist, atheist, and thus subversive character of the Jews. This also figured in the various declarations of the grand mufti of Jerusalem who found shelter in Nazi Germany. The fight against Bolshevism and world Jewry was more or less the same battle, and Bosnian volunteer units, established with the help of the mufti, took part in the murder of Yugoslav Jewry. Anti-Communism was the fashionable attitude at the time, but after World War Two this changed as the Soviet Union became a political ally of the Arab world. The emphasis thereafter was on the capitalist, imperialist, pro-American character of world Jewry.
The early European inspiration of Arab antisemitism has been stressed, and in later years too certain aspects of European antisemitism (including Holocaust denial and justification of Nazi crimes) continued to find a warm reception and many imitators in the Arab and Muslim world. This is true particularly with regard to the alleged conspiratorial character of world Jewry; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and similar literature including Hitler’s Mein Kampf found nowhere more enthusiastic readers and adapters than in the Arab and Muslim world. A Beirut edition of the Protocols figured on various best-seller lists. Rohling’s The Talmud Jew generated no less than twenty-two books in Arabic on the same subject. While in earlier years—up to the late 1960s—the “Jewish issue” had still been a minor one, in the late 1960s it became a central topic in Arab discourse. The miserable and despised Jew turned into a superhuman, demonic, almost omnipotent figure—a danger to the whole world, the instigator of a new world war. Belief in plots and conspiracies had a hallowed tradition in the Arab world and no further European encouragement was needed in this respect.
Another important feature of Arab antisemitism in recent decades has been its Islamization. Increasingly use was made of selective anti-Jewish quotations from the Koran, the fact that the Jews were perfidious, selfish, avaricious, obstinate, fraudulent, domineering, and bloodsucking. This kind of propaganda, which was also reflected in Arab belles lettres and cartoons, was bound to raise occasional doubts and contradictions—if the Jews were all cowardly pimps and degenerate prostitutes, how to explain that they had defeated the Arab armies?
This Islamization of antisemitism was clearly connected with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Muslim Brotherhood (especially Hamas in Palestine). The basic texts of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements contain openly anti-Jewish rather than anti-Zionist propaganda. It was in many ways a natural phenomenon considering the Zeitgeist in this part of the world, and it helped to maintain solidarity between Palestinians and Muslims elsewhere. Texts such as the books of Sayyid Qutb—often called the father of radical militant jihad, who was executed in Egypt in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser—targeted Judaism. According to these texts, Zionism was, of course, inimical to the Arabs and Muslims, but the Jews were responsible too for such other catastrophes as the breakdown of the caliphate in the early 1920s (they had allegedly unleashed World War One for this specific purpose), for the spread of atheism and materialism, the destruction of family ties, and the promotion of pornography.
The anti-Jewish component in Islamist doctrine is by no means restricted to Palestinian Arabs and the neighboring countries. It appeared prominently in Iran after the Khomeini revolution, when the Protocols were given wide publicity; among other accusations, the Jews were made responsible for homosexuality and lesbianism. The Jews, the Khomeinists argued, were in the forefront of anti-Islamic propaganda. And in a country not noted for Islamist leanings and even farther distant from Israel than Iran, Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister of Malaysia, in a speech in 2003 which attracted worldwide attention, said that the Europeans killed six out of twelve million Jews “but today the Jews rule the world by proxy.” Further, he said that they survived two thousand years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights, and democracy, so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, and that they may enjoy equal rights with others. The speech was widely applauded by the many Arab and Muslim statesmen present.
Anti-Jewish statements by prominent Muslim clerics are heard by Arab-speakers throughout the world. Sheikh Youssef el Qaradhawi, who because of his weekly program on A1 Jazeera is perhaps the most influential of these—he’s also known as the mufti of television—said that “there is no dialogue between us and the Jews except for the sword and the rifle.” In his appearances in Europe, this aspect of his teachings was always played down or even denied, but in this and countless other instances reference was made not to Zionists and Israelis but simply to Jews. Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi—possibly more respected than Qaradhawi due to his position as Sheikh A1 Azhar, the head of the Cairo religious seminary, the most famous and authoritative in the Muslim world—in his 1966 dissertation discussed the dark history of the Jews with particular emphasis on their crimes, atrocities, and their deceptive practices. Quoting the Koran, he called the Jews “pigs and apes,” but in a subsequent change of mind, caused perhaps by the intervention of Egyptian leaders, he later declared that this should not be done.
As these Muslim preachers saw it, the whole world was hostile toward Islam, and the Jews were even more hostile than others. The Jews were the chief agents of imperialism and democracy (a movement unacceptable to Islam because it places the sovereignty of the people and individual human rights above Allah). According to these clerics, America, the great Satan, was more powerful, but Israel and the Jews, albeit the weaker little Satan, were more virulent and dangerous; the Jews were racists and had to be destroyed before the kingdom of Allah could be established on earth.
ISLAMIST ANTISEMITES have collaborated with European antisemites of the left and with the neofascist antisemites in convening various conferences, protest meetings, demonstrations, and declarations. The main ideological contribution of Islamism has been in the field of conspiracy theory. These theories have a long history in Europe, dating back in their modern form to the French Revolution and perhaps even earlier. Although indigenous conspiracy theories had long existed in the Middle East and the Muslim world, the willingness to believe them was probably greater there than anywhere else.
After World War Two the neo-Nazis, the Trotskyites, and especially the Arab media claimed that the Zionists had entered a conspiracy with Hitler to kill millions of Jews and, on the wave of pro-Jewish sympathy after 1945, to establish a Jewish state. After September 11, 2001, the production of conspiracy theories went into high gear. Among the theories: the attacks in Manhattan and Washington had been planned and carried out by the Jews, particularly by the Mossad; was it not true that the Jews working in the World Trade Center had been warned not to go to work on that day?
Other non-Islamist conspiracy theorists argued that the attacks had been launched by al-Qaeda but that Osama bin Laden was an agent of the Mossad whose real name was Ben Landau. Muslim spiritual and political leaders argued at one and the same time that the attacks could not possibly have been carried out by their coreligionists because they lacked the needed sophistication and that they were proud that such a deadly blow had been administered to the hated Americans. According to public opinion polls, a majority of Arabs believed that the attacks of September 11 had been carried out by the Jews—even though bin Laden had said that his supporters had done it.
Still other conspiracy theories maintained that Israel was deliberately supporting the radical Palestinian resistance so that it could hold on to the occupied territories and perhaps kill or expel all Palestinians if violence further escalated or at a time of war. From this perspective, the American president was seen as a puppet of the Israelis who could easily blackmail him because they knew compromising details about his family. In earlier years, conspiracy theorists from the extreme right had argued that the Jews had been able to blackmail Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky affair—at a decisive stage in the war against terror, the argument went, the president was preoccupied with his own intimate problems.
For the left wing and Islamist believers in conspiracy theories, events in the Middle East were only a small part of a giant global plot in which the neoconservatives (most of them Jews) played a decisive role. The philosophical writings of Leo Strauss on Plato, Spinoza, and Hobbes became the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The possibilities of developing new conspiracy theories in this crowded field are endless. They have become an important component of the new antisemitism, but its motives and its great attraction for people from various parts of the political spectrum have as yet been insufficiently studied.
The new Judeophobia is not limited to propaganda; there have been violent attacks against Jewish institutions in Argentina (probably organized by the Iranian government) in which scores of people were killed, against Jewish restaurants in Paris, and against individual Jews in many European countries. Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, and Nicholas Berg, another American civilian, were murdered (and their murders were televised) in a particularly gruesome way because they were Jews, not Zionists. There have been many such cases, and though contemporary Islamists have also killed many non-Jews in Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere, the question arises: why were Jews singled out? Why did antisemitism become perhaps the most important single factor in the new Muslim ideology, not only in North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, but perhaps even more prominently among the strong and growing Muslim diaspora in Europe? Why the prevalence of “kill the Jews” slogans that had not been heard in the streets of Europe since the days of Adolf Hitler?
This new antisemitism had more than one motive. The Muslim immigrants in Europe came from countries in which latent antisemitism had been endemic, and it was therefore easy for radical preachers to whip up anti-Jewish feelings based on traditional religious and cultural motives. These Muslims, especially the younger ones among them, had a great many complaints against European societies which, they claimed, did not treat them as equals and, however permissive, often did not permit them to transfer their traditional customs to Western Europe if these conflicted with the laws of Western societies. In addition, there was a great deal of free-floating aggression among these young, often unemployed, Muslim males that needed an outlet.
A culture of violence came into being and European Jews, a small minority, were an obvious target in these circumstances; it was obviously less risky to attack Jews than members of the majority ethnic groups, even though such confrontations also took place frequently. There was envy: the Jews, many of them relatively recent immigrants, had been successful; many of them were well-to-do, had influential positions in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. Why were the Muslim immigrants less successful? It could only be the consequence of a conspiracy of deliberate discrimination.
Then there was Israel. The Jews had stolen Arab land, had expelled the original inhabitants, and were cruelly oppressing those under their rule. They had driven the Palestinians to utter despair; Arab television was showing daily the effects of occupation and the martyrs giving their lives in the struggle against the enemies of Allah. Was it not the duty of every believer to show solidarity with his brethren under attack?
The incitement of the preachers in the mosques played an important role, but the anti-Jewish attacks might have happened even without the Islamic religious component, as other examples show. In the United States, for instance, the black-Jewish alliance of past decades had broken down and antisemitism in segments of the black population had became prevalent, but this had little to do with what the Koran and its interpreters were saying about the Jews. Furthermore, the Palestinian cause was not that close to the heart of the American blacks.
As far as the Muslim communities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia are concerned, there can be little doubt that the recent major wave of antisemitism was exacerbated as the result of the existence of the state of Israel. Antisemitism would have been rampant among these immigrants even if Israel had not existed, but Israel gave them a cause for which support could be rallied outside their community—and it gave them an effective slogan. The anti-Jewish propaganda of Al Jazeera, Al Manar, and other television channels gave them an enormous outreach in the Middle East as well as in Western Europe, an outreach far larger and more intensive than antisemitic movements had enjoyed in the past.
What could Zionism and Israel have done to defuse this development? The main raison d’être of Herzlian Zionism had been to find a secure homeland for the Jews and to solve the Jewish question in Europe by evacuating them to a country where they could live a normal life. The Zionists were accused of settling in a country with which the Jews had a close historical connection but ignoring the fact that this country, Palestine, was not empty.
This accusation is only half true; while Palestine was not empty, its total Arab population was at the time (in 1900) about one-quarter that of Vienna, where Herzl made his home. In other words, it was not exactly overpopulated. But, it is argued, was it not a sacred country for Muslims all over the world? Yes and no: it contained important Muslim religious shrines but it was not sacred to the extent that the Arab peninsula was, an area in which, the Koran says, no non-Muslim should reside. Palestine was not empty in 1900, but it is also true that there had been a Jewish presence in the country throughout history—there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, well before Zionism appeared on the scene.
In retrospect, it is doubtful that a conflict between Jews and Palestinians could have been prevented. As the Palestinian Arabs (whose number was growing faster than that of the Jews prior to 1948) saw it, they had been reduced to a minority in their homeland. If the Jews needed a home, why should they, the Palestinians, suffer the consequences of European antisemitism? So they went to war against the partition of Palestine in 1948 with the help of the neighboring Arab countries—and lost.
Millions of people were expelled from their homes after World War Two in Europe as well as in Asia, but eventually they were resettled and the situation was normalized within a generation or two. If the Jews in Palestine had numbered a hundred or at least fifty million, this normalization would probably have happened in the Near East too. Muslims and Arabs have accepted throughout history their expulsion from countries that had once been in their power—from Spain to the Balkans to India. But they could not possibly accept that the Jews, that small and despised minority, should want to take over Palestine. Hence, they refused to resettle the refugees and wanted to continue the attacks against the Jews in the hope that over time the many would prevail over the few.
Prior to the Six-Day War, there was no room for a compromise settlement with the Palestinians, who rejected the very existence of Israel as a matter of holy principle. But after 1967 Israel could and should have made an effort to find a modus vivendi with a neighboring Palestinian state. Instead, they waited for an Arab initiative that never came. They were hanging on to the occupied territories and they solemnly declared that an undivided Jerusalem was theirs and would never again be divided.
While radicalism and religious fundamentalism swept the Muslim world, there was a religious-nationalist wave in Israel also. Although it affected a smaller part of the population, it was a vociferous and politically influential minority. Oblivious of political and demographic realities, it followed a political line that was bound to provoke not only Palestinians but Muslims everywhere. This greatly contributed to the spread of antisemitism in the Muslim world and to the international isolation of Israel. Those unwilling to give up the occupied territories with an Arab majority claimed that Arabs were unappeasable, would not be satisfied with Israeli compromises, and wanted Israel to disappear from the map.
This may well have been true for the extremist groups, and it is probably correct that the great majority of Palestinian Arabs would not have been saddened by the demise of Israel. But it is also true that the Arab extremists were not in a position to achieve their eventual aim nor, had they achieved some of their goals, would they have had the all-out support of the Muslim world to pursue their maximum, ultimate aims.
There was a reasonable chance that a provisional compromise solution could have been reached, and nothing endures like the temporary. It was probably this fear of losing wider Muslim support once a provisional solution had been achieved that made the Palestinian radicals and leaders such as Yasser Arafat refuse to accept a partial solution. But if so, Israel should have acted unilaterally, which it did not; hence the steady aggravation of the situation.
Of particular importance in this context was the status of Jerusalem. Up to 1967 virtually all Israeli politicians were aware of the stake that the major religions had in this city. But the victory in 1967 and the occupation of Temple Mount had an intoxicating collective effect, something not dissimilar to the “Jerusalem syndrome” affecting individuals. This led to the various declarations and resolutions never to divide the city again and not to share sovereignty, and this, in turn, facilitated the Islamization of antisemitism.
It is not easy to define and categorize Islamic antisemitism according to Western lines. It is not racist; Islam, being a religion that extends over various continents and many countries and includes white and black people, cannot possibly subscribe to a theory believing in superior and inferior races—at least not on the abstract level.
In some ways the Muslim attitude toward Jews resembles the Communist attitude toward Jews in Stalin’s days. In principle, Communism was opposed to any form of ethnic or racial discrimination, but in reality some peoples were considered more equal than others. In a similar way, the original Muslims (the Arabs) are considered superior to those who embraced Islam only later in history. Nor can the world of Islam accept Jews and other non-Muslims as equal citizens in a society based on shariah; the strong emphasis on conspiracy theories also puts it into a category apart. Although Christianity too had such total, seemingly boundless ambitions, engaged in crusades, established the inquisition, and burned witches, this was many centuries ago; like other religions, it has outgrown its role as a militant church while radical Islam has not. In the twenty-first century it has become the central force in the attacks against Jews.
It is absurd to argue that contemporary Muslim antisemitism is wholly unconnected with the existence of Israel and the policy of Israeli governments. But it is also true that this antisemitism is acting as a lightning rod used both by governments and Islamists; were it not for Israel and the occupied territories, the underlying aggression would find other outlets. It would, in all probability, turn even more against Arab and Muslim governments that have disappointed the hopes of broad segments of their societies. The aggression would not lessen as far as anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism are concerned. Instead of shouting “death to the Jews,” the radical young Muslims demonstrating in the streets of Europe would find another cause to embrace and another address for their attacks, as the riots in France in 2005 have shown. This function of antisemitism as a lightning rod in Europe as well as in the Arab and Muslim world is often underrated.