In the last decades of the 19th century, reports began to appear in medical and scientific literature that there was a disproportionately high incidence of diabetes—a disease still little understood—in Jews. Based on modern medical knowledge, there is reason to speculate as to why this might have been true. But, writes Arleen Marcia Tuchman, the data are largely suspect, and might reveal more about the authors than the patients:

For one, most writers who mentioned this link [between Jews and diabetes] rarely provided statistics to back up their claims. They simply repeated what everyone else was saying. And those who did offer up numbers and patterns offered statistics that were often unreliable. Not only did physicians usually draw on select populations, whether from their own private practice, the patient population of a specific hospital, or those seeking relief at expensive spas, but it was not always clear how to determine whether someone was Jewish—especially when calculating mortality rather than morbidity rates.

Some of [the contemporary suggestions about a Jewish predisposition to diabetes] were decidedly antagonistic toward Jews. J.G. Wilson, a surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service, was particularly disdainful. In a study he conducted on “Jewish psychopathology,” . . . he referred to Jews as “a highly inbred and psychopathically inclined race.” Wilson made this claim while he was stationed at Ellis Island, the U.S. port of entry for most East European Jews. His sense of discomfort with [with Jews was apparent in] his insistence that Jews had such a high rate of this disease because of “some hereditary defect” exacerbated by “the practice of inbreeding.”

The hostility that Wilson evinced in his discussion of Jews and diabetes was, however, the exception rather than the rule. Far more common in the diabetes literature was subtle trafficking in negative stereotypes. Thus one physician attributed Jews’ high rate of diabetes to the love of the “Hebrew race” for “high living,” adding that “they are given to parties, they congregate together and have frequent and irregular meals.” William Osler wrote of Jews’ particularly “neurotic temperament.” A journalist weighed in, blaming Jews’ “racial tendency to corpulence.” And Haven Emerson, professor of preventive medicine at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a previous commissioner of health for the city of New York, put the onus on Jews for spreading what he called “this great luxury disease.”

On March 5, Riyadh appointed Salman al-Dosari—a prominent journalist and vocal supporter of the Abraham Accords—as its new minister of information. Hussain Abdul-Hussain takes this choice as one of several signals that Saudi Arabia is inching closer to normalization with Israel:

Saudi Arabia has been the biggest supporter of Palestinians since before the establishment of Israel in 1948. When the kingdom’s founder Abdulaziz Ibn Saud met with the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Red Sea in 1945, the Saudi king demanded that Jews in Palestine be settled elsewhere. But unlimited Saudi support has only bought Palestinian ungratefulness and at times, downright hate. After the Abraham Accords were announced in August 2020, Palestinians in Gaza and Ramallah burned pictures not only of the leaders of the UAE and Bahrain but also of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).

Since then, many Palestinian pundits and activists have been accusing Saudi Arabia of betraying the cause, even though the Saudis have said repeatedly, and as late as January, that their peace with Israel is incumbent on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While the Saudi Arabian government has practiced self-restraint by not reciprocating Palestinian hate, Saudi Arabian columnists, cartoonists, and social-media activists have been punching back. After the burning of the pictures of Saudi Arabian leaders, al-Dosari wrote that with their aggression against Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians “have liberated the kingdom from any ethical or political commitment to these parties in the future.”