To most Westerners, there are two default explanations for the Israeli-Arab conflict: either it is a response to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, or it is the product of ancient hatreds that stretch back to a time before memory. Neither explanation gets close to the truth, which Matthias Küntzel’s recent book Nazis, Islamic Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East seeks to expose by examining how so many Arabs came to hate Jews. Daniel Ben-Ami writes in his review:

It was the Nazis, Küntzel argues, who played the key role in bringing genocidal anti-Semitism to the region. Küntzel identifies several channels through which the Nazis exerted their influence. From 1937 onwards they gave financial backing and other forms of support to Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. . . . The Nazis distributed large numbers of Husseini’s pamphlet, Judaism and Islam, first published in Cairo in 1937. For Küntzel, it was a seminal document, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial anti-Semitism that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century.

Finally, even when it was clear that the Nazis were losing the Second World War they still provided support for a forthcoming Arab war against Israel. This included an attempt to provide a large store of light arms for Muslims to use to fight the nascent Jewish state.

Yet, Ben-Ami observes, some of the seeds were sown even before Husseini and Hitler came on the scene:

Earlier developments had already prepared the ground for the Nazis’ ideological intervention in the region. Christian missionaries had already begun to export traditional European conceptions of Jews into the region in the 19th century. For example, the idea of the blood libel—that Jews drank the blood of non-Jewish children—was an import from Europe.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.