Mick Hartley

A sustaining myth for many on the pro-Palestinian left is that it's the Arab and Muslim world that has had to pay the price for European antisemitism. The rampant antisemitism in the Middle East is then effectively cast as a Western, European creation. It's what Alaa-al-Ameri used to believe:

As an Arab and a Muslim, I recognise this story only too well. It is one that I inherited and told myself for a very long time. That was until I could no longer ignore the dishonesty of this account of Arab and Muslim history.

After all, if this tale is close to the truth, why have pro-Hamas protesters around the world been shouting ‘Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud’ – a reference to the seventh-century murder and expulsion of Jewish tribes from the Khaybar oasis in the Arabian Peninsula – rather than something that relates to Deir Yassin? If a massacre and the formation of Israel in 1948 was the catalyst for Muslim anti-Semitism, why did Izz ad-Din al-Qassam – the cleric after whom Hamas names its rockets and murder-brigades – form the anti-Semtic Islamist group, the Black Hand, as early as the 1930s? And why was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, (considered by both the British and Nazi Germany to be the leader of the Arab world at the time) so keen to bring the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East?

If you had asked me those questions when I was younger, I would have reeled off a list of grievances about Jewish refugees from Europe infringing on native Arab populations in the 1920s and 1930s. But in recent years, I changed my mind. I looked around at my home city of London, which has been utterly transformed by immigrants like me, and saw the arrogance and hypocrisy of my position.

I was casting Jewish refugees from Europe as villains, while regarding myself as a worthy victim. I was justifying the actions of those who violently rejected Jewish migration into Mandate Palestine during the Holocaust, while considering myself unquestionably entitled to refuge in the West.

This same hypocrisy runs through the ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations that have erupted across Europe. These protests, shot through with pro-Hamas sentiments, have made Jewish communities fear for their safety in countries that promised they would never have to again.

The other glaring blindspot in this story is the forgotten history of Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa, expelled from Muslim lands.

Indeed, more than half the Jewish population of Israel has arrived there over the past 75 years from the rest of the Middle East. In my own country of birth, Libya, a Jewish presence dating back thousands of years has been utterly erased by anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust forced Europeans to face up to their dark history of anti-Semitism. But the Arab and Muslim world has never had to do the same, despite the uncomfortably close connection between Nazi Germany and the leaders of what later became modern Islamism.

The truth is that Arab and Muslim societies have their own anti-Semitism problem and it is one that they have nurtured and generated themselves. It is undeniable that the hatred of Jews by non-Jews in the Middle East, rooted in a theology and a history that deems Jews inferior to Arabs, long predates the establishment of the Jewish State. And that hatred has only become more intense the more that Jews have survived and thrived, despite their persecution.

Now more than ever, it is imperative that we do not fall for modern, Westernised justifications for the oldest hatred.