Taming the Middle Eastern Elephant: Confronting Antisemitism in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The Holocaust has become sanctified as a one-off historical tragedy that has little to do with our own times except as a warning of what could happen again in some theoretical dystopian future. There seems to be a large blind spot for the lethal antisemitism that has long blighted Muslim countries and remains prevalent today throughout the Middle East and the world. This failure of collective vision has been responsible for inflicting incalculable and avoidable suffering on generations of both Jews and Arabs - as was vividly illustrated by the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 and the war it triggered. Drawing on multiple scholarly sources, Professor David Stone summarises the overwhelming evidence that eliminationist antisemitism is the ’elephant in the room’ - the underlying cause and principal driver of the hundred-year long Arab-Jewish (now misleadingly reframed as Israeli-Palestinian) conflict - and is the main reason it remains unresolved. Until that political and genocidal bigotry is confronted, the conflict is likely to continue. The book concludes with a call to action. There is a moral obligation upon all of us - regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion or politics - to acknowledge this apparently immoveable obstacle to peace and to insist that the international community takes action. The most urgent priority is to alert the world to the existence of antisemitic antiIsraelism. The purpose of this book is to empower readers with the knowledge to take that crucial first step towards peace and justice not just for Israelis and Arabs, but for humanity as a whole.

David Stone is a clinical epidemiologist who has worked in the UK and Israel. He has advised UK Governments, the European Union and the World Health Organization on a wide range of public health topics. In recent years, he has sought to enhance understanding of Israel and the Middle East and to counteract the growing scourge of antisemitism. All of his work is predicated on the importance of an evidence-based approach. He is academic advisor to StandWithUs UK, an educational NGO that advocates for peace based on education.