Historian’s book on Nazi World War II propaganda targeting Arab world to be republished
Times of Israel · LC · trust 32/100
Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.
A prominent historian’s book about Nazi propaganda targeting the Arab world during World War II will be reissued in the spring after going out of print, the author, Jeffrey Herf, said on Monday.
Herf, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland, said it was important to reissue the book, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” to better understand the current moment and to dispel misconceptions about Hamas’s ideology, which he says echoes the Nazis’
“Hamas should be understood as a fusion of Nazi ideology and Islamist ideology,” Herf told The Times of Israel. “One of the most important falsehoods about Hamas is that it is a progressive movement.”
Yale University Press first published the book in 2009.
Herf said Yale University Press had later taken the book out of print.
“It’s been very frustrating with Yale and I do not understand why they’re taking this position,” Herf said. “They’ve made ready availability of the book more difficult.”
Herf said he did not know why the university’s press had let the book lapse.
The title remains available as an e-book on the Yale University Press website, but physical copies are hard to come by. The 335-page paperback costs more than $400 on Amazon.
Yale University Press told The Times of Israel, “It was a business decision to not reissue a title from 2009, and to return the rights to Professor Herf.”
“We wish him the best of luck with his book in its newest incarnation and with his new publisher,” a spokesperson said.
Herf said he had reacquired the rights to the book himself and that ibidem Press, an academic publishing house in Germany, will republish the print version.
The publishing house confirmed the company will republish the book as a paperback, with a new foreword by Herf, in the spring of 2027.
The book will be distributed in North America by Columbia University Press and will be featured in the Spring 2027 Columbia University Press Catalog, ibidem Press told The Times of Israel.
“Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World” examines the Nazi regime’s massive outreach to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa from 1939-1945.
The Nazis flooded the Middle East with Arabic and Farsi propaganda via shortwave radio. At the time, radio had a larger audience than print in the Middle East because much of the region was illiterate and radio broadcasts were played in public areas, like cafes, according to Herf’s research.
The Nazis found common ground with Arab collaborators in a shared antipathy toward Jews, Zionism, and the Allies, and introduced their Arab allies to modern antisemitic conspiracy theories. Their most famous collaborator was Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
One of the Nazi broadcasts cited in Herf’s research, from 1942, told listeners, “You must kill the Jews, before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews, who have appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security.”
“Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for? The Jews are planning to violate your women, to kill your children, and to destroy you,” the broadcast said.
The propaganda effort led to an intersection of Nazism and Islamism that continues to impact the region today, Herf wrote.
Hamas’s 1988 covenant, for example, blames Jews for World War I and World War II, and cites the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious Russian antisemitic forgery — all hallmarks of Nazi ideology. IDF soldiers have reported finding a copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in Gaza.
Herf told The Times of Israel that the history was important because many on the left have come to view Israel as “a form of Nazism and fascism, and that anti-fascism meant attempting to destroy the Jewish state.”
Some on the left, meanwhile, believe Hamas is aligned with progressive, leftist, and anti-imperialist movements. Anti-Zionist protesters in the US have expressed support for Hamas and the influential far-left streamer Hasan Piker has said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel.
“Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” meanwhile, draws attention to Hamas’s ideological connections to fascist, reactionary ideology, as opposed to modern liberalism, Herf said.
“Hamas belongs in the tradition of modern counter-revolution, of modern reaction. They are not Nazis in the sense that they are just a mirror or image of the Nazis, but they are part of that longer reactionary tradition,” Herf said. “The publication of ‘Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World’ is a very upsetting book for those liberals, or people who call themselves liberals, in the United States and Western Europe or anywhere in the world who want to present Hamas as some kind of progressive phenomenon.”
Herf’s other work has covered Nazi Germany, post-World War II Germany, antisemitism and Israel.
His most recent book, “Three Faces of Antisemitism,” published in 2024, examines discrimination against Jews from the far left, far right, and from Islamists.
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