Strangely, as the decades pass since the Nazi regime fell in 1945, historians assess its impact on the Middle East as greater and greater; Küntzel’s excellent study adds significantly to that process. Coming from a a far-left background, for the past quarter century Küntzel has focused his great talents on antisemitism in general and the German role in particular.
This book, a fine translation of Nazis und der Nahe Osten: Wie der islamische Antisemitismus entstand (2019), views the Arab attack on the nascent Israeli state in 1948 as an “aftershock” of the Holocaust. The author explains:
the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda was one of the decisive factors that led to the Arab states going to war against Israel in May 1948. I show that there is an ideological link between the Nazi war against the Jews and the Arab war against Israel three years later so that the latter can be interpreted as a kind of aftershock of the great catastrophe of 1939–1945.
More broadly, “rather than antisemitism resulting from the exacerbation of the Middle Eastern conflict, it was the other way round: antisemitism exacerbated the conflict.”
Küntzel dwells on difficulties the Nazis faced in promoting their brand of Judeophobia: their “efforts to mobilize Arabs against Jews had shown them that Muslims did not understand and rejected their racial antisemitism. They therefore laid new stress on promoting an Islam-related variant of Jew-hatred.” He places special emphasis on a mysterious 1937 document Islam-Judentum (Islam and Judaism) that the German government picked up, stating that it “opened a new chapter in the history of antisemitism.”
But it was shortwave radio that brought these ideas to the masses: the barrage “embedded Islamic antisemitism in the consciousness of the ‘Arab Street’ and continued to exert its influence even in the postwar period.” Indeed, Küntzel concludes his groundbreaking analysis by documenting how Nazi ideas continue to influence Muslim attitudes and actions vis-à-vis Jews.
Daniel Pipes
Founder, Middle East Forum
