BOOK REVIEW: Nazism's legacy in the Arab world

(JNS) — Arab antisemitism is not a response to the creation of Israel, it is the driving force behind the Arab-Israeli conflict. Too many people reverse cause and effect. They blame the antisemitism suffered by world Jewry on the existence of Israel.

This is the central thesis in Matthias Küntzel’s book “Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East,” newly published in an English translation.

Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, holds that the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was an aftershock of World War II and a direct result of antisemitic Nazi propaganda. In effect, the Nazi war a...