The Origins of Jew Hatred

By Khen Lim



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Dennis Prager’s headline article in this Sunday’s Lux Mundi (download here) today reveals what we already know about the world around us. The intense hatred for Israel is today part of the daily news that we cannot escape from.

While Mr Prager has given us very valid reasons why people today don’t have any sympathy for Israel’s plight, we should revisit the question but on a Biblical footing in order to get to the real root of the problem.

So why do the Arabs hate the Jews so much? Before we explore this, it is important to understand the distinction between an Arab and a Muslim. Not all Muslims are Arabs. There are American Caucasians who are converts with Arab-sounding names. By the same token, we have millions of Muslims in Indonesia alone.

Similarly, not all Arabs are Muslims. An Arab should be singled out as one who speaks Arabic and interestingly, the historical Arabs were in fact the Semitics of the Arabian Peninsula. Today non-Muslim Arabs include the Kurds, Berbers, Copts and Druze. There are also plenty of Arab-Christians in the region although, in recent years, they have been massacred almost daily. Therefore not all Arabs hate the Jews; only the ones who go by the faith of Islam and they aren’t all in the Middle East as well.

The root of this hatred goes all the way back in the Bible to the days of Abraham. We know that the Jews were the descendants of Abraham through his covenanted son, Isaac. On the other hand, the Arabs came from Abraham’s illegitimate son, Ishmael, who was born from a tryst that did not have God’s approval (Gen 16:1-16).

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Isaac was the one God had promised Abraham and Sarah. He was to be the one that they should have patiently waited for and he would be the only one to inherit the blessings of Abraham (Gen 21:1-3). Ishmael had nothing of that sort. He was not the son of a covenant from God. In other words, he was not the promised one. He was not anointed to receive the blessings of his father and from this, sprang a deep chasm of animosity that would last untold lifetimes. 

We see this animosity when Ishmael mocked Isaac (Gen 21:9) and while we will never know what words were exchanged, we can understand they were not pleasant. The word ‘mock’ means to deride a person in a scornful or contemptuous manner. Being the protective mother (all good mothers are), Sarah witnessed this and went straight to Abraham saying, “Drive out this maid and her son, for the son of this maid shall not be an heir with my son Isaac” (v.11).

And summarily, that was done. Abraham arose early the following morning and helped prepare Hagar and Ishmael for the journey into the wilderness with bread and water (v.14). None of this would have gone amiss with young Ishmael. It is not remiss to believe that he would feel contemptuousness towards Isaac.

In the wilderness, unbeknownst what harsh hand fate would deal them, the Egyptian maid cried out and God heard her plight. And at that point, Ishmael’s role was defined in sharp focus for all of mankind to sit up and take notice. God said, “I will make a great nation of him” (v.19). But well before this – in fact, Ishmael wasn’t even born yet – the angel of the Lord had made an even greater prophecy, saying, “Behold, you are with child, and you will bear a son and you shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He will be a wild donkey of a man, his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him; and he will live to the east of all his brothers” (16:11-12).

Readers can all agree that this prophecy doesn’t make Ishmael sound anything like someone whom we will end up liking. When God says that he’d be a “wild donkey of a man,” that is already ominous enough but to add further that, “his hand will be against everyone” and vice-versa, that simply does not make him very popular with all of us.

Because the bitterness between Isaac and Ishmael was actually quite short-lived from the Biblical standpoint, it doesn’t fully explain the hostility we see today between the Arabs and Jews. It does, however, reveal where the spark had come from and it does provide the setting. Islam, as a religion, has in fact played on this enmity with profound effect over the millennia.

Written in the Qur’an are serious contradictions that have shaped the instructions to all Muslims against the Jews. At one point, Islam’s holy texts tell Muslims to be brotherly towards the Jews but at another point, the hypocrisy reveals that Muslims must attack the Jews who refuse to proselytise. And that’s not all.

The Qur’an goes headlong against the Hebrew Bible by switching the places of Isaac and Ishmael as to who the true son of promise is. We know it’s Isaac but they tell the world it’s Ishmael and that we stole the title from him. We know in Genesis 22 that Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac to the Lord but the Qur’an had turned around and said it was actually Ishmael. Fuelling animosity through deceptions and lies has given us centuries of unwarranted disasters.

And of course we know all about the political enmities. When the United Nations apportioned a sliver of land in the Middle East to the Jewish people to call their home, there were massive protestations from the Arabs. It is mindful to remember that until then, this piece of land was inhabited by Arabs even if the Jewish made up one-third of the population then. With intense hatred, even the offer of an Arab Palestinian state as part of the United Nations’ plan was rejected outright.

Image source: en.wikipedia.org

Before that, we should also be aware that Hitler’s campaign to annihilate the Jews was more than ably supported by Islam’s Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (al-Quds) Haj Amin al-Husseini (above with Heinrich Himmler). Indeed there were not just political but also military links between the Nazis and Muslims that primarily focused on contempt, propaganda and collaboration against their common enemy that obviously included the Zionists.

In fact Albert Speers in his bestselling memoir of his time as a Nazi commander called “Inside the Third Reich” (1970) recalled Hitler being impressed by what he learned from “a delegation of distinguished Arabs.” The delegation had said to him that the world would have been “Mohammedan” if only the Battle of Tours (c.8AD) took on a different outcome and if it had, the Germans would have become heirs to “a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and in subjugating all nations to that faith.”

Speers then said, “Such a creed was perfectly suited to the German temperament.”

Arab Muslim ideology was also mired by Hitler’s fascist idealism. Through the Second World War, intensive programs of propaganda were launched in which Nazi Germany had a substantial hand in it. Nazism proved remarkably popular with the Arabs in the Middle East. Hitler himself was so well received that they gave him reverential names such as Abu Ali in Syria and also Muhammad Haidar in Egypt.

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When the Nazis annexed France in 1940, the Arabs were truly over the moon, shouting and taunting at the British and French soldiers, saying, “No more Monsieur, no more Mister, Allah’s in heaven and Hitler’s on earth!”

In fact the relationship was so warm that wealthy Arabs travelled to Germany during the Thirties to learn and bring back fascist ideals to incorporate into Arab Nationalism, the kind that shaped the likes of Egypt’s Gamer Nasser in their destructive Arab rhetoric against Israel almost a decade later.

The impact was so great although we don’t hear much of it these days. Back then, fascism had such strident influence on Ba’athism that Sami al-Jundi, friend of its founder, said, “We were racists. We admired the Nazis. We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books that were the source of the Nazi spirit. We were the first who thought of a translation of Mein Kampf. Anyone who lived in Damascus at that time was witness to the Arab inclination toward Nazism.”

Ever since time immemorial, there has not been any respite in the hatred for the Jews. It has only worsened.

We know the reason. But because the world does not know Him, they don’t have the foggiest idea why.