Abraham Accords Skeptics Ask Why Antisemitism Hasn’t Disappeared From Region As It Did From Germany On May 8, 1945

“…the Palestinian issue, which is the main source of Arab antisemitism going back to the seventh century.”

Washington, January 17 – Critics of the Trump administration’s most enduring international achievement, a peace agreement between Israel and several once-hostile Arab states on the Persian Gulf, continued to challenge it this week with the observation that in contrast to the Jew-hate of the Third Reich, which vanished from the popular consciousness as soon as the Wehrmacht announced its surrender to the Allies, ending the Second World War in Europe: plenty of Arabs in the Middle East still hate Jews.

Think tanks and commentators on the progressive end of the political spectrum maintained their dismissal of the 2020 Abraham Accords over the last several days, calling it a “cosmetic” step does little to address the underlying animosities of the region, mainly the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians, and that besides, the only difference between before and after in the regional culture involves official sanction for the crude, blatant antisemitism that characterized much of its rhetoric for the last several hundred years, but it remains very much an undercurrent in popular thinking that takes decades to change, unlike when Germany surrendered, at which point all the existential antisemitism in German culture magically disappeared the very moment the German armed forces signed the surrender documents on May 8, 1945, never to be mentioned again.

“Forgive my cynicism,” wrote Ira Nianschill of the Brookings Institute, “but it seems to be the Abraham Accords merely encourages sweeping Arab antisemitism under the rug, rather than addressing it in any substantial way. It’s very much unlike the end of the war in Europe, when Nazism, Jew-hate, and fascist leanings faded away as if by magic as soon as the Third Reich ended. No one in Germany hated Jews anymore, obviously. It’s not like that in this case, because of the Palestinian issue, which is the main source of Arab antisemitism going back to the seventh century. Forgive me if I’m not expressing myself as cogently as I normally do; concern for antisemitism isn’t something we’re used to displaying here at Brookings.”

Some analysts allowed that the superficial nature of the Accords could, under the right circumstances, prove helpful in a small way to addressing antisemitism in the Middle East, provided the root cause of it, i.e. Israel’s adamant refusal to dissolve itself and subject its citizens to Palestinian vengeance for offenses real and imagined, receives adequate redress in the near future. “It can certainly provide a good rhetorical opening,” acknowledged Amnesty International Director Agnes Callamard. “Perhaps one day the Arab world can, like Europe, scold Israel for failing to learn the lessons of its own experience at the wrong end of hatred.”

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