Perhaps the most startling aspect of the past year is the explosion of unambiguous anti-Semitism. Except that it’s only startling if you haven’t paid the least attention to the trajectory of the left over the last decade. Not to mention the past century...
Before we proceed on examining the origins of left anti-Semitism, let’s clear up something:
Mainly, the protestations that ‘anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism’.
Frankly, don’t piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining.
When left-wing politicians are marching alongside mobs bellowing, ‘Gas the Jews!’, it’s anti-Semitism. When left-wing politicians use Australia’s parliament to chant the genocidal Hamas death-chant ‘From the River to the Sea,’ an explicit call to exterminate the Jewish state, it’s anti-Semitism. As Jewish-Australian comedian Sandy ‘Austen Tayshus’ Gutman pointed out nearly a decade ago, when, of all the countries in the Middle East, the only one the left singled out is the Jewish state, it’s anti-Semitism.
The protestations of ‘anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism’ rings even more hollow when ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters march openly displaying swastika imagery, venerate images of anti-Semitic terrorists, and with placards demanding to ‘cleanse the world’ of Jews.
Try to get one of the left-wingers babbling about ‘Zionism’ to even define it, and you’ll be met with spluttering indignation at best. They can’t, because ‘Zionism’ is nothing more nor less than a code word for ‘the Jews’. Even the dimmest bulb on the left has cottoned on that it’s still not OK – quite yet – to openly fulminate against ‘the Jews’.
So, how did the left, whose fundamental conceit is that they are inalienably on the side of ‘good’, ‘the right side of history’ and, above all, the champions of the oppressed, come to so resolutely hate the most oppressed group in history? Even modern history (which, contrary to current left dogma, did not begin in 1948).
To understand the long history of left anti-Semitism, we have to go back to the grandaddy of all that is wrong with the left: Karl Marx.
But wait, you say, Marx was a Jew!
Yes, but he was a Jew who resented his own Jewishness and hated Jews.
Marx’s hatred of Jews is, perhaps, rooted in his own childhood experience of Jewishness being a vehicle for oppression. More importantly, Marx decided, in his own hateful ideological way, that Jews were synonymous with capitalism.
After all, many Jews were visibly successful in business, especially in banking and retail. The rise of modern capitalism also correlated – not coincidentally – with the rise of liberalism and emancipation in western Europe. So, Jews in western Europe were often enthusiastic about the very society that Marx so vehemently hated.
Marx, for all his blatherskite about ‘the oppressed’, conveniently ignored that the vast bulk of Jews at that time lived in grinding poverty in eastern Europe.
No, for Marx, Jews and Judaism were indelibly associated with capitalism. Chillingly presaging the revolting propaganda of the Nazis, Marx fulminated on ‘the Jewish Question’.
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power. If that wasn’t enough, Marx drove home the point, in what historian Bernard Lewis called ‘one of the classics of antisemitic propaganda’, that The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew…The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
Despite that, Jews have, in modern times, tended to be strongly left-wing because liberalism, and then socialism and communism, held out the promise of liberation of all people, Jews included. Also, the left-wing appeals to social justice strongly appealed to a culture and religion which had long stood for just that.
Ironically, despite the modern left’s obsession with Zionism, Zionism was actually a minority movement among European Jews. For Western Jews, the dream was of integration. They saw themselves primarily as British Jews, French Jews, German Jews and so on. A dream that wasn’t shattered until the 1930s, when the most assimilated Jewish populations in the world were rounded up for extermination. So, for a while, many Jews looked to Russia or America rather than their ancient homeland of Israel.
That dream went up in the smoke of the extermination camps. Worse, many of the enemies of Nazism had denied refuge to Jews fleeing the early days of the Reich. It was then that more and more Jews began to realise that the only way to have a safe haven in a hostile world was to take back their ancient homeland – where a continuous Jewish presence had persisted in the face of two millennia of often violent persecution.
It was in fact the Soviets who told the UN General Assembly that Jews, so recently marked for extermination by Russia’s bitterest enemy the Nazis, were owed a state. Stalin was one of the main supporters of the establishment of modern Israel. Stalin gave de jure and de facto recognition of Israel. Perhaps as a consequence, the early Israeli state had a decidedly socialist flavour. The Daily Worker gushed about the ‘brave young socialists’ of the commune-like kibbutzim. Stalin also saw Israel as, at the very worst, a neutral state in the Middle East to foil American and British power.
But the paranoid Stalin became uneasy when he realised just how popular Israel was in the Soviet Union.
Stalin had already turned the Jew, Leon Trotsky, into the great internal enemy of Soviet communism. When Golda Meir visited Russia and drew huge crowds, Stalin’s paranoia went into overdrive. So Stalin began a campaign of pogroms-by-any-other-name, such as the so-called ‘Doctor’s Plot’, in which ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ became a code-word for Jews, just as ‘Zionist’ is today.
Worse – for the Jews – the new Arab states either became outright socialists, such as Iraq, or, like Egypt, played the Soviet Union and the USA against each other. These Arab states were viciously anti-Semitic. Israel became a convenient whipping-boy to unite an Arab world as fractured as ever – and no longer of much use to the Soviets.
Even worse, in the eyes of the left, Israel succeeded. There’s nothing the left like to pretend to love so much as a victim, and suddenly, Israel was winning. As Saul Bellow said, if Israel had lost the wars of extermination the Arabs repeatedly launched, the left would have sent 30,000 blankets to the surviving orphans.
But Israel won. Boo, hiss.
To compound its sin of success, post-1967 Israel moved ever closer to the USA. Boo, boo, hiss, hiss.
Right at this time leftism was undergoing a seismic shift in the West, with the 1960s and the rise of the New Left, and its utter obsession with dividing the world into oppressed and oppressors. So emerged the wholly spurious leftist dogma of Israel as a ‘white coloniser’. Never mind that much of the population of Israel is not ‘white’, that millions of them were refugees from the brutal post-1948 expulsions from Arab countries. Ignore, too, that the Jews are the indigenes of the Levant.
So, you had a West burdened by the guilt of the Holocaust, which, as guilt so often does, turns against the victim. Coupled with that was the tiny Jewish state that was not only not settling for being a victim, but also beating back the Soviet-sponsored Arab states. In the ’60s, the Soviets began establishing ‘universities’ in Syria and Iraq, where anti-Semitic propaganda was the norm.
For instance, Mahmoud Abbas obtained a PhD from the ‘Patrice Lumumba University’, which he published as the The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, perhaps one of the most vile anti-Semitic tracts since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Abbas claimed that Zionists secretly collaborated with the Nazis to engineer the Holocaust, in order to encourage the survivors to ‘embrace Zionism and emigrate to Palestine’. The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, Abbas claimed, was a ‘cover-up’ to stop Eichmann revealing the truth of the Jews’ complicity in their own genocide.
So if you’re wondering where the dumbfounding leftist dogma that ‘Zionism is the same as Nazism’ began, there’s your culprit.
Israel’s ‘problem’ status for the left really culminated in the late ’70s. At the same time that the Western left was throwing itself behind the furiously anti-Semitic Khomeinist regime, Israel invaded Lebanon to relieve the persecution of Maronite Christians in the country’s civil war; a war which was mainly perpetrated by ‘Palestinian refugees’.
This was the very time that future left leaders, like George Galloway, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, were coming of age. They did so in a stew of left-wing hatred of Israel. So a cohort, none of whom were particularly bright but able to memorise the anti-Semitic propaganda they were bombarded with in their youth, have continued to spew their vile dogma to this day.
Worse, with the left-wing Long March almost totally conquering academia, entire subsequent generations have soaked up the same hateful propaganda like sponges.
Still, even a dogmatic dullard like Jeremy Corbyn is dimly aware that it just wasn’t acceptable to openly rail against ‘the Jews’. That was for the ‘Nazis’ and the looney fringe of the right.
But now they’ve been given the free pass card they so desperately wanted. Nobody indulges in unhinged hate quite like the self-righteous – and for the left, self-righteousness is as natural as breathing.
So now, under the self-righteous banner of ‘anti-War’, the left have finally got the excuse they were hanging out for – and they’re exploiting it to the hilt.
