During the two years following the October 7th Hamas massacres, the question of Mein Kampf‘s circulation in Gaza and the broader Middle East emerged as a focal point of public debate, driven largely by IDF public relations efforts that systematically disseminated images of Arabic translations found in Gazan homes.
These PR campaigns generated significant attention on social media, where photographs of the book discovered in various locations became emblematic of the cultural reality of much of Palestinian society. Yet beyond the heated symbolic contest of the information war, a more fundamental empirical question remains unasked and unanswered. The book is indeed a bestseller, but what is the actual readership and influence of Mein Kampf among Arab readers?
To understand why Mein Kampf cannot plausibly enjoy mass readership in the Arab world, one must first reckon with what the book actually is. Hitler drafted the original text between 1924 and 1926 while imprisoned in Landsberg am Lech following the failed Beer Hall Putsch.
The result was a sprawling, nearly unreadable work split across two volumes totaling over 700 pages in the original German. Historians have long recognized that its autobiographical sections are exercises in propaganda rather than reliable memoir—omitting, fabricating, and distorting historical fact to cast Hitler as a messianic figure whose entire life trajectory pointed toward his destined leadership of Germany.
Ian Kershaw and other biographers have documented the book’s systematic falsifications: Hitler’s claim to have agonized over joining the German Workers’ Party was likely invented (his commander may have simply ordered him to join), and his assertion that he was the party’s seventh member was demonstrably false—he was member 555, a fact the party’s founder Anton Drexler noted in an unsent 1940 letter.
Beyond its historical unreliability, Mein Kampf is stylistically torturous. Its prose lurches between ponderous pseudo-philosophical abstractions and sudden eruptions of vulgar invective. Hitler writes in interminable sentences dense with substantives, drowning the reader in phrases like “the cornerstone for the end of German domination in the monarchy” or forcing “the less strong and less healthy back into the womb of the eternal unknown.”
To understand why Mein Kampf cannot plausibly enjoy mass readership in the Arab world, one must first reckon with what the book actually is.
The text makes extraordinary claims without argument, jumps between topics without transition, and reflects what can only be called a paranoiac’s highly personalized view of reality. This stylistic disaster was partially calculated—Hitler sought to mimic the philosophical weightiness prized by Germany’s educated lower-middle class, a population that consumed works on art, science, and philosophy where other countries’ equivalents read light fiction.
The result is a text saturated with 1920s German journalistic clichés, references to obscure Bavarian political feuds, and theoretical discussions of “the state” and “race” that follow no logic beyond Hitler’s psychological need for self-magnification.
Most critically, Mein Kampf is spectacularly specific to its moment: Weimar Germany, Bavarian separatist politics, the particular constellation of nationalist factions Hitler sought to dominate. No casual reader approaching the text cold, stripped of extensive historical context, could make sense of its arguments, references, or stakes. The book is both conceptually incoherent and politically parochial. In short, it’s utterly inaccessible to anyone but specialists or committed nerds.
Given globally low reading rates and the relatively small book markets in most Arab countries, the reality is straightforward: virtually no one actually reads Mein Kampf in the Arab world. Yet copies of the book are undeniably prevalent. I have personally encountered numerous editions and translations on newsstands and in bookshops across Egypt, Morocco, the West Bank, Dubai, and elsewhere. This apparent contradiction resolves once one understands what these “translations” actually are.
Mein Kampf has never been translated into Arabic in its entirety—a task that would be both economically prohibitive and functionally pointless given the book’s turgid inaccessibility. What circulates instead are excerpted translations of the text’s most incendiary anti-Jewish and anti-Western passages, typically sourced from English excerpts available online or copied from earlier partial translations produced in Egypt and Iraq during the 1930s, when National Socialism did enjoy genuine popularity among segments of young Arab intellectuals. (I have written many essays that delve into actual Nazi and German intellectual influence during the interwar years)
These translations, copyright-free and often anonymous, are printed by third-rate publishing houses as cheap mass-market paperbacks and distributed widely with inventive cover artwork featuring heroic images of the Führer. They function as quick money-making ventures, analogous to the dollar-bin public domain editions of Nietzsche’s Will to Power available on Amazon. The same distribution logic applies to the other Arabic antisemitic bestseller, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I owned copies of both books in Egypt.
The book is both conceptually incoherent and politically parochial.
These books are purchased but seldom read. They function instead as objects of curiosity and symbolic meaning-making. Mein Kampf has become an artifact, a totemic object, within the Arab Hitler folklore prevalent across significant swaths of Arab societies—itself embedded within a broader antisemitic symbolic complex that recasts Hitler as a kind of alter-Muslim, an alter-Muhammad victimized by Jewish villainy before he finishes his salvific Final Solution.
The book is not consumed for its arguments but exists as part of the atmospheric antisemitic sensorium that structures public life in places like Hamas-ruled Gaza. (I’m almost certain that if there is a market for the book in a place like the UAE at all, it is for expat Egyptians, Palestinians, etc., and not for native Gulf people.)
According to accounts from people involved in Cairo’s printing industry, sales of both Mein Kampf and the Protocols remained stagnant until the early 2000s. The books sat in warehouses with modest but unremarkable circulation. The Second Intifada, the September 11th attacks, the leftist propaganda of the global anti-war movement, and the rise of Al Jazeera transformed this landscape drastically, driving mass interest in antisemitic literature and even prompting new translations in more attractive bindings.
One edition of the Protocols I owned during this period featured a preface by the Grand Mufti of Al-Azhar Mosque. While much of this popularity subsided during the Arab Spring as Arab societies turned inward to confront domestic upheaval, these texts had already become formative documents for the Arab millennial generation and its Islamist movements.
What this pattern reveals is the nature of contemporary antisemitism in mass Arab society. In my expositions on Arab intellectual and philosophical antisemitism, antisemitism often operates indeed as a sophisticated philosophical worldview that rivals and seeks to displace the Judaic grammar of reality, finally. Mass and populist, while dependent on the former, have a different substance altogether. It is less a coherent ideology derived from textual study than an ambient cultural atmosphere, a taken-for-granted structure of feeling that permeates public discourse and shapes interpretive frameworks.
Mein Kampf and the Protocols function not really as actual texts to be read but as totemic objects within a broader symbolic economy—physical artifacts that validate and reinforce existing antisemitic commitments rather than texts that generate those commitments through persuasion or seduction. The books exist as props in a pre-established mythology, lending the weight of Western “authority” to antisemitic beliefs already embedded in popular consciousness through other channels dominated by predatory elites, Qatari, leftist, Islamist, Arabist, and others.
It is the text of unread presence—a mode of cultural authority that operates precisely through non-engagement. The unread book functions as a pure sign, its material presence sufficient to anchor and legitimate beliefs that precede any encounter with any arguments or ideas, where possession and display substitute for comprehension. In such economy of meaning, Mein Kampf, or any other book really, need not be understood to be effective; its effectiveness lies precisely in remaining unread, preserving its mythological potency by never being subjected to the banality of actual interpretation or actual encounter.
The question is not how many Arabs have read Mein Kampf—the answer is vanishingly few. The question is why the book’s unread presence suffices, and what this reveals about the depth of the problem.
The book’s very materiality functions as an offensive sign—a sign emptied of textual content yet densely referential, gesturing toward an entire labyrinth of meanings that constitute a counter-symbolic economy. This economy incorporates not only classical Nazi antisemitism with its fantasies of Jewish world domination and financial conspiracy, but also the post-war mythological complex itself: the narrative of Hitler’s heroic defeat at the hands of unjust forces, anti-Zionism, Palestine, and, ironically, the perverse inversion that recasts Jews themselves as “the real Nazis” committing genocide.
The book operates as a symbolic spear-tip thrust against an opposing system of signs—the post-war Western moral order in which Hitler signifies absolute evil and the Jew embodies paradigmatic victimhood.
In possessing Mein Kampf, one stakes a claim against this entire edifice, against the supposed Jewish “domination” of Hollywood, against Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and the Academy’s awards to Holocaust movies, against the Western system of morality and identity constructed upon Holocaust memory as its sacred center, and most importantly, against any claim of legitimacy for Israel.
The unread book becomes a condensed negation, a material refusal of the meaning-world that defeated Hitler, elevated Jewish suffering to the status of founding trauma for liberal civilization, and gave legitimacy to Zionism.
This matters because it clarifies what the presence of Mein Kampf in Gaza or Cairo bookshops means. It is not evidence of a population carefully studying Nazi ideology and drawing lessons from Hitler’s theory of the Führerprinzip, his obsession with syphilis as racial poison, or his elaborate distinctions between state-nationalism and völkisch nationalism. It is evidence of something simultaneously less and more dramatic, more intractable: an antisemitic cultural matrix so normalized that Hitler himself can be casually appropriated as a signifier for an anti-Jewish Arab folk heroism, his book purchased as a curiosity or conversation piece, its actual contents remaining unread but its symbolic presence serving to ratify beliefs that require no textual justification.
The question is not how many Arabs have read Mein Kampf—the answer is vanishingly few. The question is why the book’s unread presence suffices, and what this reveals about the depth of the problem. For contexts like Gaza, where this antisemitic atmosphere has become thoroughly embedded in educational and cultural institutions, no superficial intervention will suffice—only systematic, generational transformation of the entire meaning-making cultural mechanism.
Published originally on November 21, 2025.
