“If today’s Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason.”

So writes an associate of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Joel Fishman, in “The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel” (Jewish Political Studies Review, spring 2007), an insightful new piece of historical research.

Mr. Fishman begins by noting today’s topsy-turvy situation: Because Israel defends its citizens against terrorism, conventional warfare, and weapons of mass destruction, it is perceived as a dangerous predator. A 2003 survey, for instance, found that Europeans see Israel as “the greatest threat” to world peace.

How did such an insane inversion of reality — the Middle East’s only fully free and democratic country being seen as the leading global menace — come to be?

Mr. Fishman’s answer revisits World War I, which post-Cold War analysts increasingly recognize as the disaster under whose shadow contemporary Europe still lives, and explains European governments’ renewed policies of appeasement and Europeans’ attitudes toward their own culture.

During that conflict, the British government exploited the era’s advances in advertising and publishing to try to shape the thinking of its own and the enemy’s civilian populations.

The peoples of the Central Powers heard messages designed to undermine support for their governments, while citizens in the Entente countries were fed news reports about atrocities, some of them false.

Notably, the British authorities claimed that imperial Germany had a built a Kadaververwerkungsanstalt, or corpse conversion factory, that used the bodies of Entente soldiers to produce soap and other products.

When the British eventually learned the truth after the 1918 armistice, this British disinformation left a residue of what Mr. Fishman calls “skepticism, betrayal, and a mood of postwar nihilism, ” and had two disastrous implications for World War II.

First, it made the Allied public skeptical about German atrocities against Jews, whose realities bore a close resemblance to the imaginary horrors the British had disseminated. Reports of horrors in Nazi-occupied territories were regularly discounted, which is one reason General Dwight Eisenhower arranged for the immediate documentation of the reality of Nazi concentration camps as soon as they were liberated.

Second, the initial success of British propaganda inspired Adolf Hitler. In his book “Mein Kampf ” (“My Struggle,” 1925), Hitler admiringly notes the British precedent: “At first the claims of the [British] propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people’s nerves; and in the end, it was believed.”

A decade later, this admiration was translated into the Nazi “Big Lie” strategy, which turned reality on its head by making Jews into persecutors and the German people into victims and created a vast propaganda machine to drum these lies into the German psyche.

The defeat of Nazi Germany temporarily discredited such methods of inverting perceptions of reality. But some escaped Nazis carried their old anti-Semitic ambitions to countries now at war with Israel and whose goals include attempting to murder Israel’s Jewish population.

Thousands of Nazis found refuge in Egypt, with smaller numbers reaching other Arabic-speaking countries, notably Syria. Mr. Fishman’s essay particularly examines the case of Johann von Leers (1902–65), an early Nazi party member, a protégé of the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, a lifelong associate of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, and an overt advocate of genocidal policies against Jews. Von Leers’s 1942 article “Judaism and Islam as Opposites” lauded the Muslim world for its “eternal service” in keeping Jews “in a state of oppression and anxiety.”

Von Leers escaped Germany after 1945 and a decade later turned up in Egypt, where he converted to Islam and became a political adviser to President Nasser’s Department of Information. There, Mr. Fishman recounts, he “sponsored the publication of an Arabic edition of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ revived the blood libel, organized anti-Semitic broadcasts in numerous languages, cultivated neo-Nazis throughout the world, and maintained a warm, encouraging correspondence with the first generation of Holocaust deniers.”

Such groundwork, Mr. Fishman shows, proved its value after Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, a humiliating defeat both for the Soviet Union and its Arab allies. The subsequent Soviet-Arab propaganda campaign denied Israel the right to defend itself and inverted reality by relentlessly accusing it of aggression. Precisely as Hitler had detailed in “Mein Kampf,” if these impudent claims were at first thought insane, in the end they were believed.

Today’s political madness, in other words, is directly linked to yesterday’s Nazi insanity. Might then some of today’s anti-Zionists be ashamed to realize that their thinking is, however repackaged, merely an elaboration of the genocidal deceptions espoused by Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler? Might they then abandon these views?

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is the director of the Middle East Forum.