Seeing a correlation between the cultural and political decline of the Islamic Middle East and its increasing levels of anti-Semitism, Frank Musmar and Najat al-Saied argue that Arab countries should seek to change attitudes toward Jews if they want to put an end to decades of stagnation:
Pan-Arabism and Islamism created an enemy to explain away [Arab states’] failures. The Jews became the scapegoat for their inability to keep pace with Western scientific and creative development. Pan-Arabists and Islamists spent decades feeding Arabs a steady diet of conspiracy theories to convince them that the Jews were to blame for all that ailed their societies.
Despite the campaign of hatred directed at it by the Arab world from its earliest days, Israel developed rapidly and has won twelve Nobel Prizes—more per capita than the U.S., France, and Germany—to the Arab world’s six since 1966. Israel is a high-tech superpower and one of the world’s largest arms exporters, with annual arms sales of approximately $6.5 billion. Despite Israel’s small size, about 4.5 percent of its GDP is spent on research and development, double the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average.
Instead of striving to close the gap between Israel’s high-tech economy and the far less developed economies of the Arab world, including in the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs have thrown their energies into the anti-Semitic boycott, divest, and sanction movement and the delegitimization of Israel. The Arab states’ campaign of anti-Semitism in the service of creating an imaginary enemy does not appear to have worked to their benefit in any way. On the contrary: it has inhibited their development and ability to innovate.
Musmar and Saied argue that educational reform and relaxation of media censorship can do much to rectify the situation.
Read more on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/combatting-antisemitism-benefits-the-arab-world/