Jew hatred has become a Left-wing shibboleth - and it’s only getting worse
When did anti-Semitism become a Left-wing thing? Not very long ago there was a more-or-less universal understanding that attacking Jews, and trying to eliminate them en masse, was an attitude specifically associated with movements of the extreme Right. Nazi Germany’s systematic attempt to find a “final solution” to the Jewish problem (which is to say, the problem of Jews continuing to exist) became the most infamous state crime in modern history.
One of the political justifications for this – as opposed to the mystical one of racial purity – was that Jews were aligned with international Communist agitators who were a threat to the German nation that had to be defeated. At the same time as being accused of Left-wing subversion, they were also, of course, being caricatured as global capitalist conspirators whose banking monopoly threatened the economies of sovereign countries. The contradiction at the heart of this Jew-hatred persists to this day and serves a useful purpose to the opportunist camps of Left and Right who can summon up either of the tropes whenever they suit the circumstances.
In the McCarthyite purges of 1950s America, Jews were often identified as Communist fellow travellers, and many of the trade union organisers in the Jewish rag trade (like my own grandmother) were indeed Communist sympathisers. At the very least, American Jews of that generation were Left-liberal Democrats who regarded Republicans as class enemies. Many of their forebears had fled from the pogroms perpetrated by the Tsars and they tended to regard the Russian revolution as a deliverance from that threat of annihilation. Stalin was to destroy that idea with his own persecution of the Jews, who became cast as inherently sinister “rootless cosmopolitans”. It is this label that became the all-purpose anti-Semitic chorus for every nationalist movement: Jews had been for centuries – for millennia, in fact – a people who lived within countries while maintaining their own history and culture.
They were seen as permanent outsiders whose “roots” as Stalin would say, lay in their loyalties to a community that existed beyond national borders. And that idea – of a human bond that is based not on national identity but on common beliefs and moral rules – was supposed to be at the heart of Left-wing thinking. It was the basis for the original Marxist commitment to world revolution (represented by Trotsky) as opposed to the Stalinist heresy of “socialism in one country”.
But the question of today – the existence of Israel – should have thrown that theme into disarray. Jews now had a country of their own. They were no longer the eternal “rootless” outsiders who could be demonised by any insecure nationalist regime. That the expansion of the Jewish population in the Middle East was a direct consequence of the Nazi Holocaust was widely considered by those on the liberal Left as an unimpeachable justification. Add to that the social model of the kibbutz which was a quite radical collectivist form of communal existence – and Israel became idealised as a pioneering socialist experiment. The contemporary liberal Left – not just an ignoramus like Jeremy Corbyn but even sections of academia – has chosen to adopt this self-contradictory formula in which Jews are damned for being globalist manipulators of wealth with no loyalties to any country and simultaneously, ultra-nationalists who insist on their right to protect and defend their own land. Where Israel was once praised as the only successful progressive democracy in the Middle East, it is now castigated as a colonial oppressor.
One of the most bizarre aspects of this phenomenon is that so many of the regimes that the Left is willing to support simply because they are opposed to the existence of Israel are violent enemies of the rights of women and sexual minorities. There was something grotesquely absurd about the waving of LGBT+ rainbow banners in that first London mass demonstration supporting the Palestinian cause. Did those marchers have no idea what fate is likely to await anyone who openly promotes gay or trans activism under Islamic fundamentalist regimes?
And what about the rights of women to be educated, to appear in public without their heads covered, to have full lives as equal citizens? Do they think that the present government of Iran – which sponsors Hamas – is in sympathy with these principles? Do they believe that the young Iranian women who are currently risking their lives to defy this oppression are unworthy of consideration?
So social liberals now find themselves parading in solidarity with the adherents of despotisms which decree homosexuality to be punishable by death and women who appear in public without a hijab to be committing a crime.
The simple truth is that none of this is being examined or even discussed on the Left. Support for Palestine, which in the present circumstances, is indistinguishable from supporting Hamas rule in Gaza, has become part of a package of ready-made attitudes for the bien pensant liberal, and the Palestinian movement has benefited enormously from the tactics of infiltration and opinion-forming of the hardcore Left.
The broadcast media, and even the police, are caught in a contrived game of moral equivalence at which the professional Left has always been expert. Seeing Socialist Worker posters held proudly aloft among the Palestinian flags, amid chants that call for the elimination of Israel and its population, might have been shocking a generation ago – but not anymore. Does this all-consuming hatred of Israel take precedence over the commitment to basic human rights which the Left was once committed to defend? Does the hatred of capitalism – of which Jews are seen to be the expert practitioners – now cancel out every other moral principle?
What the Socialist Workers Party (an organisation I knew well in its previous incarnation as International Socialism) now supports is nothing less than what the Nazis once said about the Jews: that they and their global influence must be extirpated once and for all. I really would like to know if all of its members and their hangers-on are comfortable with that.
