What do you think?
Rate this book
Zionism in Arab discourses
Zionism in Arab discourses presents a ground-breaking study of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through analyses of hundreds of texts written by Arab Islamists and liberals from the late-nineteenth century to the 'Arab Spring', the book demonstrates that the Zionist enterprise has played a dual function of an enemy and a mentor. Islamists and liberals alike discovered, respectively, in Zionism and in Israeli society qualities they sought to implement in their sown homelands.
Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation.
Focusing on Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian political discourses, this study uncovers fascinating and unexpected Arab points of views on different aspects of Zionism; from the first Zionist Congress to the First Lebanon War; from gardening in the early years of Tel Aviv to women's service in the Israeli Defence Forces; from the role of religion in the creation of the state to the role of democracy in its preservation.
232 pages, Hardcover
Published March 29, 2016
About the author
Uriya Shavit
18 booksUriya Shavit (Hebrew: אוריה שביט) is an Israeli author and Full Professor at Tel Aviv University (TAU). He specializes in research on Islamic law, theology, and politics in modern Islam, Muslim minorities in the West, processes of liberalization and democratization in the world, and the Haredi society in Israel.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 30, 2026
Tel Aviv University scholars Uriya Shavit and Ofir Winter have produced a meticulous, decade-spanning study of how two rival ideological camps in the Arab world, the Islamists and the liberals, have read, misread, and often plagiarized the Zionist playbook.
The book opens with a Jordanian-Palestinian friend of the authors who visits Israel for the first time and is astonished to see Arab citizens strolling Tel Aviv boulevards, a small but telling illustration of how thoroughly the Arab imagination has substituted fantasy for fact.
The central thesis delivered by Shavit and Winter is elegant in its irony. Both Islamists and liberals, who agree on precious little else, share a double-barreled view of the Zionist enterprise, treating Israel simultaneously as a hated enemy to be destroyed and as a secretly admired role model to be imitated. Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in 1928, lit the fuse of Islamist opposition to Zionism while his own movement was still in diapers, and that fuse, the authors demonstrate with documentary precision, burned with identical ferocity across Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Gaza through every decade that followed, producing figures such as Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, who co-founded Hamas in Gaza in 1987, and ideologues such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who declared that a Muslim ought to skip visiting the Al-Aqsa mosque rather than set foot in Israel.
The anti-Semitism documented in this book is breathtaking in its brazenness and its reach. Al-Qaradawi, al-Maqadma, Sayyid Qutb, and the authors of the Hamas Charter all drew freely from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated Tsarist forgery, and integrated its paranoid scenarios of Jewish world domination, Jewish responsibility for the French Revolution, communism, and even Nazism into mainstream Islamist scholarship, textbooks, and mosques.
Qutb declared that Allah had dispatched Hitler to punish the Jews, and this statement, along with dozens of equivalents, was accepted without contestation across the Islamist intellectual establishment. The Filastin al-Muslima journal compared Schindler's List to Jurassic Park, a comparison whose ugliness speaks for itself. The book catalogs these positions without theatrical outrage, letting the sourced quotations carry the moral weight, and the weight is considerable.
These are venomous, racially coded, genocidal ideologies documented in the writings of respected clerics and senior political figures, encoded in founding charters, and broadcast from influential platforms across the Arab world from the 1930s through the Arab Spring.
Against this grim dossier of hatred, Shavit and Winter introduce the book's genuinely surprising second strand: the covert admiration of Zionist achievement that runs through both Islamist and liberal Arab writing alike. Islamist thinkers praised Zionist organizational discipline, diaspora solidarity, religious cohesion, and long-range planning; liberals praised Israeli pluralism, freedom of expression, scientific Nobel laureates, and democratic resilience.
Liberal journalists in Jaffa as early as 1912 wrote admiringly of the Hebrew language revival; the al-Ahram editorial board in 1925 called the founding of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem a lesson Arabs should study to their benefit; and the exiled Jordanian intellectual Shakir al-Nabulsi praised Israeli democracy openly in the same breath that his colleagues demanded Israel's destruction.
The tension between these two positions, enemy and exemplar, reflects a broader Arab relationship with the West.
The thesis that Israel functions as both punching bag and secret crush in Arab ideological writing, is so well-documented that disputing it would require ignoring several hundred primary sources, which is a tall order even for the professionally incurious wokesters. The Islamist chapters are particularly damning: the book lays out, citation by citation, a tradition of state-sponsored, cleric-endorsed, charter-encoded Jew-hatred that drew freely from a Tsarist forgery and dressed it up in Quranic authority. Calling this antisemitism is accurate; calling it scholarship, as some of its producers claimed, is a stretch of theological proportions.
The liberal chapters offer a more complex picture and, frankly, a more hopeful one. Arab thinkers who praised Israeli democracy, Hebrew university culture, and Zionist organizational genius were taking a genuine intellectual risk, and the book honors that courage without sentimentality.
The authors, both Tel Aviv University scholars, bring to the work the dual advantage of linguistic fluency and the kind of proximity that makes the subject personal rather than theoretical. Hatred documented with evidence ages better than hatred denied for comfort. Blind herd chanters need to read this!
❤️ 🇮🇱
The book opens with a Jordanian-Palestinian friend of the authors who visits Israel for the first time and is astonished to see Arab citizens strolling Tel Aviv boulevards, a small but telling illustration of how thoroughly the Arab imagination has substituted fantasy for fact.
The central thesis delivered by Shavit and Winter is elegant in its irony. Both Islamists and liberals, who agree on precious little else, share a double-barreled view of the Zionist enterprise, treating Israel simultaneously as a hated enemy to be destroyed and as a secretly admired role model to be imitated. Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in 1928, lit the fuse of Islamist opposition to Zionism while his own movement was still in diapers, and that fuse, the authors demonstrate with documentary precision, burned with identical ferocity across Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Gaza through every decade that followed, producing figures such as Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, who co-founded Hamas in Gaza in 1987, and ideologues such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who declared that a Muslim ought to skip visiting the Al-Aqsa mosque rather than set foot in Israel.
The anti-Semitism documented in this book is breathtaking in its brazenness and its reach. Al-Qaradawi, al-Maqadma, Sayyid Qutb, and the authors of the Hamas Charter all drew freely from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated Tsarist forgery, and integrated its paranoid scenarios of Jewish world domination, Jewish responsibility for the French Revolution, communism, and even Nazism into mainstream Islamist scholarship, textbooks, and mosques.
Qutb declared that Allah had dispatched Hitler to punish the Jews, and this statement, along with dozens of equivalents, was accepted without contestation across the Islamist intellectual establishment. The Filastin al-Muslima journal compared Schindler's List to Jurassic Park, a comparison whose ugliness speaks for itself. The book catalogs these positions without theatrical outrage, letting the sourced quotations carry the moral weight, and the weight is considerable.
These are venomous, racially coded, genocidal ideologies documented in the writings of respected clerics and senior political figures, encoded in founding charters, and broadcast from influential platforms across the Arab world from the 1930s through the Arab Spring.
Against this grim dossier of hatred, Shavit and Winter introduce the book's genuinely surprising second strand: the covert admiration of Zionist achievement that runs through both Islamist and liberal Arab writing alike. Islamist thinkers praised Zionist organizational discipline, diaspora solidarity, religious cohesion, and long-range planning; liberals praised Israeli pluralism, freedom of expression, scientific Nobel laureates, and democratic resilience.
Liberal journalists in Jaffa as early as 1912 wrote admiringly of the Hebrew language revival; the al-Ahram editorial board in 1925 called the founding of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem a lesson Arabs should study to their benefit; and the exiled Jordanian intellectual Shakir al-Nabulsi praised Israeli democracy openly in the same breath that his colleagues demanded Israel's destruction.
The tension between these two positions, enemy and exemplar, reflects a broader Arab relationship with the West.
The thesis that Israel functions as both punching bag and secret crush in Arab ideological writing, is so well-documented that disputing it would require ignoring several hundred primary sources, which is a tall order even for the professionally incurious wokesters. The Islamist chapters are particularly damning: the book lays out, citation by citation, a tradition of state-sponsored, cleric-endorsed, charter-encoded Jew-hatred that drew freely from a Tsarist forgery and dressed it up in Quranic authority. Calling this antisemitism is accurate; calling it scholarship, as some of its producers claimed, is a stretch of theological proportions.
The liberal chapters offer a more complex picture and, frankly, a more hopeful one. Arab thinkers who praised Israeli democracy, Hebrew university culture, and Zionist organizational genius were taking a genuine intellectual risk, and the book honors that courage without sentimentality.
The authors, both Tel Aviv University scholars, bring to the work the dual advantage of linguistic fluency and the kind of proximity that makes the subject personal rather than theoretical. Hatred documented with evidence ages better than hatred denied for comfort. Blind herd chanters need to read this!
❤️ 🇮🇱
June 1, 2025
Great book detailing the treatment of Zionism by Arab ideological elites. Explains why the seeming duality of looking up to zionism and hating zionism isn't really a duality at all.
March 3, 2017
Excellent chronological review of Islamist and Liberal views for Zionism and Israel since the 30’s of the 20’s century till the revolutions of 2011. It can save lots of time if u r interested in the developing of Liberals or Islamists’ vision for Israel. But i think this review presented by the authors may need another edition within few years to keep up with new generation of Liberal Egyptians that started to emerge since 2012.
The only problem with this book is the definition of a Liberal. The authors has used some names as examples of Liberal thinkers or writers that are not considered liberal in the political spectrum such as Alaa Aswani, Burhan Ghalyun.
I enjoyed reading it.
The only problem with this book is the definition of a Liberal. The authors has used some names as examples of Liberal thinkers or writers that are not considered liberal in the political spectrum such as Alaa Aswani, Burhan Ghalyun.
I enjoyed reading it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews