ABSTRACT
One commonly hears in the vast corpus of propaganda and polemics that surrounds the Arab-Israeli conflict the statement made that Jews tend to be overly sensitive, seeing antisemitism around every comer and in all forms of opposition. In fact, Jews are commonly accused of raising the bugaboo of antisemitism in order to silence the genuine political dissent of people who are in no way antisemitic but merely anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, or anti-the-policies of the particular Israeli government in power. Western antisemitism never concerned itself with the Arabs, and no less sincere antisemites than the Nazi leadership felt few if any qualms about entertaining the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni in Berlin during the war. Nevertheless, the claim that they were Semites as well provided a convenient defense in Arab polemics that their justifiable attacks upon Zionism and Jewry were in no way related to some base form of prejudice.
