Here, Mazower turns to Jew-hatred in the Arab world, which he argues emerged largely from the transformation of Palestine into Israel. Sometimes, the fury this unleashed transmuted into what he calls “conspiratorial antisemitism,” as it did in the United States—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion gained traction in both parts of the world as their Jewish populations grew. But more often, it was rooted in anti-colonial anger or hostility over land. Mazower does not consider those sentiments antisemitic, even if they have turned some people who feel them into antisemites. Interestingly, he demonstrates that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, did not understand Arab hatred of Israel as inherently antisemitic either. Mazower quotes Ben-Gurion telling a colleague in 1956, “If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel…. There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”
And yet in public, Ben-Gurion cast Israel’s Arab enemies as the new Nazis, their dislike of Jews as a new form of the unique and timeless hatred that had dogged the Jewish people for all time. He did not distinguish between different forms of Arab objection to Israel’s existence or policy; nor did he distinguish between different Arab and Muslim nations’ objections. Mazower doesn’t either, since his main interest is tracking the transformation of Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric into an official stance taken by the Israeli state. By the mid-’70s, Israel was describing all its opponents as antisemites and all public opposition to its behavior as antisemitism.
Mazower presents this stance as, to some degree, a defensive one. Even as Israeli leaders called Arab leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser the heirs to Hitler, Arab nationalists “traced a connection between Nazi racism and Zionism [and] consistently argued that Palestine should not be asked to pay the price for Nazi anti-Jewish persecution.” In 1975, the year after the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat first addressed the U.N. General Assembly, that body adopted a resolution describing Zionism as racism and analogizing it to South African apartheid. In Mazower’s estimation, “racism” and “apartheid” are words as weaponized as “antisemitism”; by insisting its opponents were antisemites, then, Israel was fighting fire with fire.