Arab antisemitic discourse: Importation, internalisation, and recycling

Esther Webman explores the significance of the Arab-Israeli conflict for the actualisation and radicalisation of stereotypes in the Arab world. She contends that the social construction of the Jews as enemies has been carried out in an era of emerging nationalism and nation-states, an era of change and searching for identity, and, with the Arab-Israeli conflict, it exacerbated the ethno-religious enmity between Muslims and Jews. The Arab antisemitic discourse developed a uniqueness and authenticity that differentiate it from western antisemitism. While borrowing themes from it, the sources were indigenous, stemming from religious and nationalist sentiments, thereby producing a unique symbiosis of Islamic anti-Jewish motifs and classical western antisemitic tropes, deriving from Christianity and from the repository of racist and political antisemitism.