Recent actions by the Israeli military in Gaza and Lebanon, and the responses to them, have prompted renewed fears of antisemitism among the British and other Jewish communities. Jonathan Sacks, the British chief rabbi, had already warned earlier this year of “a kind of tsunami of antisemitism.” Yet some voices from within these same communities are quick to deny any link between Israeli policies and anti-Jewish feelings. Rather, current enmity towards both Jews and Israel, notably from within the Arab and Muslim worlds, is explained as a phase in Jew-hatred stretching back centuries. Melanie Phillips promotes such a theme in her book Londonistan, where she writes: “the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews,” who, she says, are viewed by Islam as “a cosmic evil.” From this, it follows that the way Israel conducts itself is at most a minor factor in the hostility directed towards it.

This is certainly a convenient argument for those who have an interest in making it. But the evidence points in the opposite direction, as exemplified by the Israeli-Palestinian accords of the “Oslo years” in the mid-1990s, which sent Israel’s stock to unprecedented heights, both in the Arab world and globally. In the same period, according to leading Jewish research institutions, “a general lessening of antisemitic pressure was recorded.”

As for the claim of historical “Jew-hatred” in the Islamic world, its validity has been repudiated by no less an authority than veteran historian Bernard Lewis, a middle eastern scholar of impeccable pro-Israel credentials. In a presentation in 1985, he distinguished three kinds of hostility to Jews: “Opposition to Zionism, ‘normal’ prejudice (what has been described as ‘the normal rough and tumble between peoples’), and that peculiar hatred of Jews which has its origins in the role assigned to Jews in certain Christian beliefs.” Using the term “antisemitism” to refer to the third kind of hostility only, he remarked: “In this specialised sense, antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world.” Although he held that Jews “were never free from discrimination,” they were “only rarely subject to persecution.”

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