Mick Hartley

We've heard it before, but Daniel Finkelstein in the Times puts it well: the left's hatred of Israel began in Soviet Russia:

The right place to start, I think, is with Lenin. More precisely, with Lenin’s theory of imperialism. At around the time of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik leader advanced his idea of the final stage of capitalism. His view was that the survival of capitalism was dependent on the profits of imperial adventure. End these profits and you could end capitalism.

From this derived the left’s idea that it should ally with anti-colonial resistance movements, whatever their broader politics. These groups — in the modern era, Castro’s Cuba, Chávez’s Venezuela, Khomeini’s Iran — were at the front line of the battle against global capital. And this is the only battle that really matters, the one from which all freedoms derive.

So it doesn’t matter if a group jails opponents or rapes women or throws gay people from buildings. As long as they help bring down capitalism — which, as anti-imperialists, they do — they are liberating forces and their other faults will dissolve once capitalism dissolves. Even the murderous, oppressive Houthis are “heroes” according to this calculation.

And Hamas are “friends”, to use the word employed by Jeremy Corbyn. Because all international problems must be squeezed into the battle against imperialism and colonialism, Israel is an imperialist power. There is no apparent discomfort on the left at describing the last refuge for Jews driven out of every other country as a conquering power sustained by wealthy financiers to advance international capitalist control.

Not to mention that Israel is the historic homeland of the Jews, there thousands of years before the Arabs came.

Partly as a defence mechanism against Jews seeking to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, the Soviets developed in the 1960s and 1970s what the central committee called “The Plan for Basic Organisational and Propaganda Measures Connected with the Situation in the Middle East and the Intensifying Struggle with Zionism”. They often used communist Jews to deliver their message so that they could deny antisemitism, even though their general antisemitism was undeniable.

The Soviets said that every day brought “new reports of the Israeli military, reviving memories of Hitlerites”. The (now common on the left) comparison with the Nazis, and the use of terms such as genocide, is thus decades old and a communist invention. “Zionism,” they argued in a televised press conference, “expressed the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.”

To this they added: “Zionists supply imperialism with cannon fodder in the struggle against the Arab people.” For in addition to the ideological reasons for their opposition to Israel, there were political and strategic ones. The Soviets wanted to recruit Arab governments and the Arab street to their side in the Cold War struggle with America. And virulent opposition to Israel helped them to do that.

The same calculations still rule in hard left circles.