Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World

Secret Jewish power, American manipulation, and alleged foreign orchestration of domestic unrest recur in documented political and media narratives from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern settings.[2][4] Such narratives have appeared in government statements, newspapers, television dramas, and satellite broadcasting.[7][8] Textbooks, websites, and social media have provided additional channels.[4][9] Their circulation is not confined to Islamist movements: military supporters, government officials, opposition activists, and secular political figures have also advanced conspiratorial explanations.[2]

Conspiracy theories attribute events to hidden hands, secret groups, or unseen forces pursuing harmful or dominating aims.[1] Memories of documented foreign interventions can provide context for political suspicion without proving later allegations about particular crises or attacks.[2] Research on conspiracy narratives in Middle Eastern political discussion remains limited.[2]

Antisemitic narratives form a particularly well-documented strand, including allegations that Jews secretly control media or banking, engineer terrorist attacks, or manipulate conflicts within Arab societies.[8][10] Other examples accuse the Muslim Brotherhood, the United States, or rival political and religious groups of covert alliances and hidden agendas.[2][11] The distinction between the existence of a published allegation and public acceptance of it is important: broadcasting, publication, and interviews establish circulation, whereas surveys address particular questions among specified populations.[3][7]

Nineteenth-century European influence helped introduce some modern anti-Jewish conspiracy themes into the Middle East through Arabic-speaking Christians with commercial, educational, and cultural connections to Europe.[12] The 1840 Damascus Affair was an important episode in the circulation of the blood-libel accusation.[12] For a considerable period afterward, these ideas made little or no headway among most Arab and non-Arab Muslims, rather than constituting a timeless or universally shared outlook.[12]

Freemasonry had existed in the Middle East since the mid-eighteenth century and encountered hostility from local Christians.[13] European Judeo-Masonic conspiracy narratives circulated through Christian authors, including Jesuit and Maronite writers, from the mid-nineteenth century; Nazi propaganda provided another channel from the 1920s, with particular emphasis on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[13] Arabic anti-Jewish books and pamphlets also appeared in the late nineteenth century, often through Christian authors translating or adapting European works; an Egyptian edition of August Rohling’s The Talmudic Jew appeared in 1899.[12]

The Protocols appeared in the Russian Empire in 1903, falsely presenting itself as evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy.[5] Arab nationalists in Iraq and Palestine cited it in the early 1920s, and a complete Arabic translation by Lebanese Maronite Antun Yamin appeared in Cairo in 1925.[12] An Arabic translation was also available in Syria by 1925.[5] Gary Saul Morson explains that the forgery borrowed closely from Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a work criticizing Napoleon III, and recast passages as speeches by Jewish plotters; the textual similarities helped expose the fraud.[14]

Awad al-Huri’s Asl al-Masunniya (The Origin of Freemasonry), published in Beirut in 1929, became an influential local expression of the Judeo-Masonic myth.[13] Al-Huri portrayed Freemasonry as Jewish in origin and nature and imagined a conspiracy extending back to the first century.[13] Later versions of this myth drew on both his work and the Protocols.[13] Anti-Masonic discourse had been relatively marginal before Israel’s establishment; the Judeo-Masonic narrative gained popularity after 1948, when local Freemasons faced repression.[13]

Nazi Arabic-language radio propaganda and cooperation with Islamist leaders, including Jerusalem mufti Amin al-Husseini, combined existing anti-Jewish beliefs with conspiratorial imagery of “world Jewry.”[15] Al-Husseini also advanced the allegation that Jews intended to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, framing Jews as engaged in a war against Islam.[15] That allegation subsequently recurred in political and educational material.[15][9]

Documented foreign interventions supplied a different historical background to political suspicion: examples include the Sykes–Picot agreement, the Suez Crisis, and the CIA’s ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.[2] These events provide context for distrust of outside powers, but do not substantiate later allegations that foreign actors secretly caused particular domestic crises or attacks.[2]

The Egyptian revolution and subsequent struggles over political authority illustrate how conspiracy accusations could change with the political environment.[2] A newspaper study examined coverage before the 2011 revolution, between the revolution and the Tamarod movement, and after the military removed President Mohamed Morsi.[2] Mentions of conspiracy theories increased after the revolution and continued rising after Morsi’s ouster.[2]

When restrictions eased, the semi-independent newspaper al-Masry al-Youm published theories alleging a Muslim Brotherhood–military conspiracy.[2] After the military regained control, both that newspaper and state-run al-Ahram promoted claims that the Brotherhood intended to dismantle the state; al-Ahram also alleged an American plan to control Egypt through the Brotherhood.[2] Supporters of Egypt’s military separately attributed the founding of the Islamic State to Hillary Clinton.[2]

Other Egyptian allegations during the 2011–12 upheaval accused Israel of inciting Muslim–Christian sectarian conflict and conducting a commercial war against Egyptian exports.[16] In 2013, Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan promoted claims on Twitter of a secret Jewish or Israeli alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, including a video alleging that such an alliance sought to establish “Greater Israel.”[11] These accusations placed the Brotherhood in contradictory conspiratorial roles: an alleged instrument of foreign power in some accounts and an alleged partner of Israel in others.[2][11]

Related accusations crossed the boundaries between Arab and non-Arab politics.[2] Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused the United States of using the Islamic State, the PKK, and Gülenists to weaken Turkey, while officials in the UAE and Iraq promoted claims connecting Barack Obama’s perceived approach to Iran with supposed Shi’a ancestry.[2] These examples demonstrate the range of political targets without making Turkish politics part of the Arab world.[2]

Explanations of the September 11 attacks circulating in Middle Eastern statements and media blamed American domestic extremists, the United States government, or Israel’s Mossad, while other accounts simply rejected Arab or Muslim responsibility.[7] Such arguments appeared in government statements, newspaper editorials, television discussions, and street interviews.[7] In November 2002, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz alleged that “the Zionists” were responsible.[7]

One influential falsehood claimed that “4,000 Jews” or “4,000 Israelis” had advance warning and stayed away from the World Trade Center.[8] The allegation first appeared on Hizballah’s Al-Manar television on September 17, 2001.[8] Its numerical basis was a September 12 Jerusalem Post report that Israel’s Foreign Ministry had received names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.[8] That tentative accounting was distorted into an assertion of foreknowledge and organized absence; there was no mass absence of any group from the World Trade Center that day.[8]

Pew’s 2011 survey found that no surveyed Muslim public reached 30 percent agreement with the proposition that groups of Arabs carried out the attacks.[3] Agreement stood at 22 percent in Jordan and 21 percent in Egypt, declines of 17 and 11 percentage points respectively from 2006; it was 28 percent in Lebanon and 27 percent among Muslims in Israel.[3] Seventy-five percent of Egyptian respondents expressed disbelief.[17] These results concern acceptance of Arab responsibility, not selection of a particular alternative explanation.[3]

A separate 2008 poll produced more specific findings: 43 percent of Egyptian respondents and 31 percent of Jordanian respondents blamed Israel, compared with 3 percent in Turkey.[18] Across the surveyed countries, most respondents who rejected al-Qaeda’s responsibility either answered that they did not know or blamed the United States, rather than Israel.[18] Another reported poll published in Lebanon’s An Nahar assigned 31 percent of responses to Israel and 27 percent to Osama bin Laden, but the available account omitted sample size, field dates, and methodology.[19]

Interviews in Egypt in 2011 revealed differing explanations rather than a single alternative narrative.[17] Former Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mehdi Akef called al-Qaeda an American expression; other Brotherhood figures alleged American involvement, a revolutionary socialist invoked imperial interests, and a government minister questioned the evidence for al-Qaeda’s responsibility.[17] Activist George Ishak instead answered, “Al Qaeda, of course.”[17]

Interviews published in 2021 likewise recorded individual suspicions: a Jordanian interviewee questioned whether al-Qaeda could have acted without American knowledge, while Saudi and Palestinian interviewees suggested fabrication or exploitation of the attacks to justify American military intervention.[20] Ahmad Rafiq Awad of Al-Quds University linked the circulation of such claims to distrust of American policy and the reach of online platforms.[20] These interviews illustrate particular views rather than representative distributions of belief.[17][20]

The Assad government portrayed the Syrian uprising as a Zionist plot from its outset in 2011.[4] A week after demonstrations began in Daraa, Syrian state media cited an unnamed official alleging that more than a million recorded messages had arrived from abroad, especially Israel, instructing rioters to use mosques as operational bases.[4] This was a regime allegation, not established evidence of messages or Israeli direction.[4]

Rival Syrian actors assigned Israel incompatible roles.[4] The government depicted the rebellion as a Zionist conspiracy, while opposition narratives accused Israel of helping Assad remain in power.[4] Opponents of the Islamic State circulated a further claim, beginning in 2014, that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a Jewish Mossad agent named Simon or Shimon Elliott.[4] Versions appeared on websites, social media, in Syrian publications, and in the Arab press, sometimes invoking documents supposedly leaked by Edward Snowden.[4]

The al-Baghdadi narrative imagined an operation to penetrate countries threatening Israel, destroy them, and establish control over the Middle East.[4] It served to attack the Islamic State’s religious and political legitimacy by portraying its leader as an agent of the enemy.[4] In a separate example following the Paris attacks, Fatah’s official Facebook page posted a cartoon in November 2015 showing Benjamin Netanyahu beside an Islamic State fighter pointing a machine gun toward the Eiffel Tower; the juxtaposition implied an Israel–Islamic State conspiracy.[21]

Conspiratorial explanations also extended beyond political violence.[8] After the December 2004 South and Southeast Asian tsunami, Mahmud Bakri suggested in Egypt’s Al-Usbu on January 1, 2005, that underwater American–Israeli–Indian nuclear tests had caused it.[8] The claim spread into press coverage in Indonesia, Turkey, and elsewhere, although the tsunami was caused by an earthquake.[8]

The Protocols circulated through Arabic translations, republication, commentary, and dramatization.[22] Examples include a translation first published in 1951 and a roughly 600-page 1996 edition of Ajjaj Nuwayhid’s translation, in which fewer than 100 pages contained the forgery itself; forewords, commentary, and material presented as scholarly filled the remainder.[22] A Beirut edition appeared in 1996, while a 2005 Syrian edition alleged that a Zionist conspiracy orchestrated September 11 and predicted Israel’s eventual destruction.[5]

Egyptian television’s Knight without a Horse, also rendered Horseman Without a Horse or The Horseless Rider, adapted the myth in 41 episodes in 2002.[22] It was serialized on about 20 Arab television channels and networks during Ramadan that year.[7] In 2003, Hizballah-controlled Al-Manar broadcast the 26-part Syrian-produced The Diaspora (Al-Shattat), which drew heavily on the Protocols and depicted an antisemitic blood-libel allegation.[8]

Gary Saul Morson reports that the Protocols received endorsements from Gamal Abdel Nasser and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education, appeared as genuine in Hamas’s charter, and was presented as authentic in a Palestinian Authority school textbook.[14] His review also identifies Egyptian and Syrian television adaptations, but does not measure how many viewers accepted their claims.[14] Morson describes further adaptations outside Arab settings, including an Iranian Protocols of the Elders of Qom targeting Shiites and versions portraying Baha’is as a Zionist front.[14]

Visual media provided another vehicle.[22] A Qatari newspaper cartoon of November 13, 2006, depicted Fatah and Hamas seated at a negotiating table while an Orthodox Jewish figure secretly placed a grenade beneath it.[22] The image assigned an imagined Jewish outsider responsibility for internal Palestinian conflict.[22] Regional satellite outlets, including Al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi TV, and Al-Arabiya, meanwhile changed information circulation by breaking state-controlled broadcasting monopolies, although some programming also amplified existing stereotypes and narratives of Arab victimization.[7]

A review of Saudi state textbooks for 2018–19 identified passages alleging Jewish and Israeli plots to destroy al-Aqsa and denying the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount.[9] Reproduced excerpts claimed that Jewish organizations continually planned to destroy or burn the mosque and that rabbis invented the account of Solomon’s Temple as a pretext for its destruction.[9] Another passage alleged that images of the Dome of the Rock distracted attention from excavations supposedly preparing al-Aqsa’s destruction; it appeared in Hadith and Islamic Culture 3 – Quarterly, page 328, with nearly identical wording in Hadith 2, page 248.[9]

A further textbook passage represented Zionism as progressing through three stages: Israel in Palestine, “Greater Israel” in the Arab Mashreq, and a “Global Jewish Government.”[9] These were conspiratorial curriculum claims, not substantiated descriptions of Zionist aims.[9] A passage presenting the Protocols as historical fact had been identified in a review of 2010–11 textbooks, but did not recur in the 2018–19 edition examined, despite other intolerant content remaining.[9]

The Abraham Accords, announced in August 2020, became the subject of a conspiracy claim that a Jewish–Zionist–American plan sought to establish a new religion, “al-Ibrahimiyya,” and undermine Islam.[6] Clerics, academics, and commentators advanced the allegation through manifestos, fatwas, articles, books, and conferences.[6] One strand focused on the UAE’s Abrahamic Family House, announced during its 2019 Year of Tolerance and designed to include a mosque, church, and synagogue.[6]

A February 2021 manifesto signed by 32 Islamic organizations portrayed adherence to an Ibrahimic faith as repudiation of Islam and alleged that Jewish tourism initiatives could enable a takeover of the Arab world.[6] Critics within the region rejected the premise: a UAE official explained that the Abrahamic Family House was intended to highlight distinctions among religions, while Egyptian commentator Jamal Abu al-Hasan called the alleged new faith “a fib that no one is talking about or preaching.”[6]

Following the October 7, 2023 attack, antisemitic expressions in Arab discourse included claims of Jewish control over global media and narratives denying or distorting the scope and nature of Hamas’s war crimes.[23] The account identifying this increase did not provide a quantified estimate of prevalence.[23]

Allegations of American or Zionist plots can deflect blame from authoritarian governments’ shortcomings and encourage nationalist unity.[2] In the Syrian case, the external-plot narrative helped justify force against demonstrators, explain failure to contain the crisis, shift responsibility for humanitarian disaster, discredit opponents, and rally support around the regime.[4] Opposition allegations of Israeli support for Assad could similarly divert attention from internal divisions and failures.[4]

The circulation of multiple explanations can also make political loyalty appear more important than establishing objective facts.[2] Walter Laqueur argues that turbulent periods make conspiracy narratives attractive and that governments may circulate the Protocols to divert responsibility for domestic discontent.[1] Syrian-born activist and media commentator Hussam Hendi likewise argues that some Arab governments use anti-Israel narratives to bolster their regimes while repressing citizens; he recalled growing up with two official television stations controlled by the Assad government.[24]

Antisemitic conspiracy narratives place Jews in the role of an all-powerful hidden cause of otherwise disparate events, including terrorism, political division, and perceived threats to religion.[8][10] Claims of Jewish control over media and banking reproduce antisemitic stereotypes, whereas criticism of Israeli government policy is not inherently antisemitic.[10] Likewise, political criticism of peace agreements is distinct from allegations that normalization conceals a Jewish plot to destroy Islam.[6]

The available survey questions measure different things: Pew’s 2011 question concerned acceptance of Arab responsibility for September 11, whereas the reported 2008 poll asked respondents to identify responsibility more specifically.[3][18] Rejecting one explanation cannot automatically be counted as endorsing an Israeli or Jewish conspiracy.[3] The poorly documented An Nahar poll also cannot bear the same evidentiary weight as a survey with accessible methodological information.[19]

Television adaptations, textbook passages, cartoons, and interview statements establish that particular narratives circulated, not that all Arab audiences accepted them.[14][20] Much of the documented material concerns antisemitic themes and selected national cases, while research on the wider subject remains limited.[2][22] Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern populations are therefore not interchangeable categories, and evidence from one country or audience does not establish a uniform regional prevalence.[3][18]