Israel was founded by a group of indigenous people who were displaced for millennia. The Jews have been one of the most prosecuted and marginalized groups throughout history. They experienced one of the most horrific genocides of the 20th century and half of the European Jews were killed by the Nazis (in fact the word “genocide” was coined to describe that very policy).
Israel is the only example of successful decolonization in human history. It is the only state which revived a previously unspoken language (Hebrew) in the region with LGBTQ rights and democracy.
The vitriol for Israel among many of the hard left is somewhat surprising. Is this due to anti-Semitism? Or perhaps a false dichotomy between oppressed and oppressors? I am genuinely confused by why so many in the west prefer to defend the right to self-determination of a religious state with almost no concern for LGBTQ people and democratic values.
In the past I have opined that Left Wing anti-Semitism was the result of the “bandwagon fallacy.” This is the propagation of false narratives by means of the popularity of the speaker. For example. Noam Chompsky is well thought of in progressive circles. His opinion is that Israel is an aggressor state simply because it possesses superior armaments and well trained troops. Israel is the “bad guy” because it has the ability to answer armed aggression with superior force. Progressives who admire Chompsky pile on to protect him, not bothering to ascertain for themselves the truth in the form of the historical record Chompsky says it so it must be true. Every time a famous progressive piles on, the truth becomes even more diluted and the false narrative becomes even more affected. So after Chompsky came Michael Moore and then Amy Goodman, and suddenly you have an anti-Israel/anti-Zionism cult firmly entrenched.
That narrative, as much as it may have some truth in it, is an oversimplification of the facts. As you know, propagating anti-Zionism was a component of Soviet foreign policy after 1950 and Israeli socialists’ rejection of Stalinism and Soviet-alignment (with Israel drifting towards the USA before ultimately solidifying an alliance with America about a decade later). The Soviet Union also found alignment with the Arab world and its shared interest in petroleum exporting to be far more useful that anything Israel could provide, and the PLO proved to be useful proxies, which is why you get historical oddities like Fatah participating in the 1979 Uganda–Tanzania War. Much of western Anti-Zionism still works from the playbook outlined in Yuri Ivanov’s 1970 book
Todays leftwing hatred of Israel and antisemitism is part of the tradition of the New Left. The New Left defined itself not only in opposition to western societies during the cold war, but also against the Soviet Union. Trotskyists quite often played an unfortunate role. there is certainly the case that individual accusations mediated via the PLO had an influence on the New Left. (Annie Kriegel has shown this to some extent with regard to France), but one should not make the mistake of believing that the tropes used to rationalize hatred for Israel are the reason. Often – as strange as it may sound – the Moscow-affiliated groups or parties like the DKP in Western Germany were more moderate than groups of the New Left, because despite spreading aggressive antisemitic propaganda, the destruction of Israel was not the program. What makes things worse today is that the dominant trends on the left are postmodernism and postcolonialism, not Stalinism or spontaneous. There is a tradition, but the whole thing takes place within a different conceptual framework.
In the beginning of the 80’s, at a same time that the Soviet-Arab alliance was already in place, and that the UN had already a strong anti-Zionist lean, a new kind of theoretical position started to gain momentum in left-wing academia: decolonization. What we’re seeing now is the anti-Zionist institutional structure created by the Soviet-Arab alliance (e.g. UNRWA, PLO/Fatah) being used by the ideological tenets of decolonization.
It started with the Soviet disinformation campaign but later morphed into the post-modern/ post-colonial leftist movement with the likes of Edward Said (supposedly Palestinian scholar who coined the term, “the other” in Orientalism) at Columbia University. This scholarship was never controlled by the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_from_the_Standpoint_of_Its_Victims
The Soviets did a good job at planting the seed for current anti-Western sentiment, though.
- After 9/11 and the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, leftists started to see Islam as oppressed and under attack by the western powers (hence the birth of the term “Islamophobia” and the crucifixion of progressive comedian Bill Maher). Israel (with support from the US) vs. the Palestinians feeds right into this narrative. Leftists love to “center” the voices of the oppressed, so the Palestinian narrative (and even the Hamas narrative) was allowed to spread through leftist movements without people even questioning it. They don’t like it when you question the perspective of the oppressed. Therefore, the far left was pretty much hijacked by an Islamist supremacist narrative. What I find most astounding in all this is the Islamic embrace of so very many policies that progressives traditionally protest (LGBTQ persecution, and the subjugation of women being two tips of that iceburgh)
- Israel’s shift to the right and specifically Netanyahu’s premiership have changed Israel’s global reputation. As I said, it was founded by leftists, but it’s no longer perceived as progressive, which is honestly fair given the current leadership (even though it’s still more progressive than any other middle eastern regime).
- Plain old anti-Semitism and ideas about Jewish power. Leftists in the US see themselves as opposed to corporate interests, wall street, “the rich”, etc. And they think Jews represent all of those things. They see Jews as having white privilege and Muslims as oppressed people of color, even though it’s an extremely skewed way to look at the world. Many of the leftists in the US likely resent the American Jewish community for its perceived economic/political success and blame them for the problems facing other communities in America. Many of them disparagingly label Jews as “white” and blame us for white supremacy (even though white supremacists hate Jews). It’s pure antisemitism.
Western Leftist thought still revolves around Soviet-Era ideas including several Anti-Semitic notions about Jews.
The racialization overlay of two Middle Eastern groups as if they’re more distinct than they actually are is an American idea that millennial and Gen Z Europeans have adopted. Hatred of Israel is something like the lowest common denominator of a left that has disintegrated into various splinter groups, grotesque sects and tendencies that have nothing to say to each other and sometimes hate each other more than almost anything else. the campaign against Israel offers mobilization potential and a resource for permanent moral indignation (on which the left is essentially based). n this sense, the rejection of Israel is understood as something very fundamental that is part of being on the left.
The “origin” of the current hatred of Israel is the New Left: the New Left “borrowed” its radicalism: it was dependent on movements outside Europe for its own revolutionary self-image. when Vietnam and South America became blunt, the Arabs provided this outside influence for the New Left. So the campaign against Israel has something to do with the crisis of the left and the leftist political framework.
If you look for example at Western Germany, as is well known, it was in West Germany that leftwing antisemitism became the most violent. (If this is largely unknown: Jeffrey Herf undeclared wars against Israel is half about West Germany. There is little new in it in the sense of a state of research, but in English it runs solid basic information) the student movement / the SDS in protest against the “emergency acts” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Emergency_Acts) In May 1968 had connections to society even outside of the university. The emergency acts are passed, i.e. the left loses. the student movement withdraws to the university, the SDS disintegrates. Unity was maintained by many local SDS groups by reorganizing themselves as “palestine committees”. something similar was seen in the UK in the early 00s with anti-apartheid activists: they simply switched from South Africa to activism against Israel.
Postmodern trends are quite important for the intellectual underpinning of the leftwing hatred of Israel now days. Basically it is the case that Pauline substitution theology is being repeated in a very striking way. Two things are important here: 1. Inability to understand antisemitism, 2. That postmodernism itself contributes to antisemitism.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-false-partners
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.26613/jca/5.1.97/pdf
