Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, based on often-interchangeable historic stereotypes, fan the flames of fear and hatred against the “other.” Thus Jews and Muslims serve as convenient scapegoats for many of society’s ills and leaders’ misguided agendas. In the post-9/11 world, the Iraq War, the breakdown of homogeneous societies in Europe, the rise of fundamentalism, and the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have only served to exacerbate these two forms of prejudice.
Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are breeding hatred and creating more difficulties in the face of any serious effort to solve the Israeli-Palestian conflict. They are threatening to transform it from a political into a religious conflict and thereby cloud the judgment of anyone attempting to resolve it, both in the region and in the broader international arena.
In this context, a group of Israeli and Palestinian scholars and journalists joined together to start the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture. Their goal is to clarify the positions of both sides and work toward a solution. By presenting the often clashing views held by the journal’s contributors, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism furthers the debate on these topics in its full complexity, marked at once by sharp differences and considerable common ground.