Antisemitism in The Arab World

Antisemitism in the Arab world refers to discrimination against Jews in Arab countries. While Arabs are also a Semitic people, the meaning of the English term "antisemitism" refers to discrimination against Jews (see Antisemitism: Etymology and usage).

Arab antisemitism is believed to have expanded since the 19th century. Jews, like other minority groups within the Muslim world, were subject to various restrictions long before that (see Dhimmi). However, despite its restrictive nature, dhimmi status also afforded the "People of the Book", provided they did not contest the inferior social and legal status imposed on them, relative security against persecution and welfare most of the time—a protection that was missing for non-Christians in most of Europe until the institutionalization of equality under a secular idea of citizenship after the French Revolution—and allowed them to enjoy their respective religious laws and ways of life.

Antisemitism in the Arab world has increased greatly in modern times, for many reasons: the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Christian Arabs; Nazi propaganda; resentment over Jewish nationalism (see Zionism); and the rise of Arab nationalism. The rise of political Islam during the 1980s and afterwards provided a new mutation of Islamic anti-Semitism, which gave the hatred of Jews a religious component.

For most of the past fourteen hundred years, according to Bernard Lewis, Arabs have not been antisemitic as the word is used in the West. In his view this is because, for the most part, Arabs are not Christians brought up on stories of Jewish deicide. In Islam, such stories are rejected by the Qur'an as a blasphemous absurdity. Since Muslims do not consider themselves as the "true Israel", they do not feel threatened by the survival of Jews. Because Islam did not retain the Old Testament, no clash of interpretations between the two faiths can therefore arise. There is, says Lewis, no Muslim theological dispute between their religious institutions and the Jews.

While there were antisemitic incidents in the early twentieth century, antisemitism has increased dramatically as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the state of Israel, and Israeli victories during the wars of 1956 and 1967 were a severe humiliation to the Arabs. The situation of the Jews in the Middle East worsened and almost all fled or were expelled from most Arab and Muslim countries. By the 1980s, according to Bernard Lewis, the volume of antisemitic literature published in the Arab world, and the authority of its sponsors, seemed to suggest that classical antisemitism had become an essential part of Arab intellectual life, considerably more than in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, and to a degree that has been compared to Nazi Germany.

In their 2008 report on contemporary Arab-Muslim antisemitism, the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center dates the beginning of this phenomenon to the spread of classic European Christian antisemitism into the Arab world starting in the late 19th century.