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As one of the editors of this journal, I wholeheartedly concur with Neil Kressel's expectation of the social science literature that it stand “at the forefront of battles against bigotry”; and, it is in this spirit that Ira Brenner and I agreed to publish Dr Kressel's paper, which vividly documents the intensity of hatred and anger that has developed in the Arab world and beyond towards Israel in particular, and by extension and conflation, toward the Jewish people in general.
It is important to state at the outset that both personally and professionally, both as an Egyptian-Coptic-American and as a psychoanalyst with a background in social anthropology, that the hatred and bigotry that Kressel describes as currently extant in Arab and Muslim cultures toward the Jewish people is both horrifying and deeply disturbing, and challenges all of us who believe in the peaceful co-existence of all peoples to attempt to ameliorate this shocking turn of events.
Kressel acknowledges the recency of the development of “anti-Semitism” in the Arab Middle East, which is in quotes here because the Arabs consider themselves (and are considered) to be Semites. And therefore, the vast majority of Arabs eschew the term “anti-Semitism” as applied to them as being nonsensical because to suggest that the Arabs are anti-Semitic is to suggest that they are, as a cultural grouping, anti-themselves.
In any case, although Kressel notes the relative newness of the intensification of hatred and anger toward Israel, and, again, by extension, toward the Jews, he commits the very error he admonishes his fellow social scientists of committing: i.e., of “shielding a significant danger from scrutiny” (Kressel: this issue p. 199), by wholly ignoring the impact of the social-psychological dynamics of the Occupation on the Palestinians, Arabs, and by extension, on the co-religionists of the majority of these peoples. In this regard, it is important to note that, with the exception