17

When Israel was founded, an absolute aberrance for the Arab world, the traditions of the Dhimmi were compounded by hatred. Arab and Muslim anti-Judaism has led to the development of a peculiarly Islamic version of traditional Christian anti-Semitic myths, from the blood libel to the concept of world Jewish conspiracy epitomised by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To which one must now add the trend for tuming the Holocaust against the Jews in what has now become the widespread reproach of the victim-turned-oppressor. Israel, it should be said, is the one topic about which Arab caricaturists can express their anger unfettered. Everything else is taboo. Hence the excesses born out of a sense of frustration, but affected by a major contradiction which Joël Kotek brings to light: how to denounce Zionism as the Jewish version of Nazism, using words, pictures and aims themselves inspired by Nazism?