Mick Hartley

From Stalin to Hamas: The Return of the Left that Doesn’t Learn? A lengthy interview with Mitchell Cohen at Fathom…an extract:

Anti-Zionism is part of a larger intellectual crack-up on the left with distant roots. There is now a kind of meeting point between simplistic post-modernism and simplistic anti-imperialism. This conjuncture can be called ‘the anti-imperialism of fools,’ a phrase that echoes the famous criticism of antisemitism on the left in the late 19^th century by socialist August Bebel. When some on the left tried to blame ‘Jewish capitalists’ for Europe’s woes, he called it ‘the antisemitism of fools.’ Formulations of both the antisemitism of fools and anti-imperialism of fools depend on intellectual twisting and turning until somehow, no matter what, blame is ascribed to, respectively, Jews and Zionists. Ominously, that ascription is often there before the twisting and turning.

Opposition to imperialism and colonialism has always been part of any morally intelligent left-wing programs and should be. Decolonisation after World War II was of world historical importance. In many ways it culminated in Nelson Mandela’s heroic leadership of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid. But three decades later, the party he led is in miserable shape, as is South Africa as a whole, and it faces electoral decline. So, it seeks to make itself the moral leader of the ‘Global South’ and accuses Israel of genocide and apartheid but won’t condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a species of scapegoating and has attracted great support in parts of the world including from the western left. But those supporters are reminiscent of what a New York literary critic, Harold Rosenberg, once called (referring to New York intellectuals) as a ‘herd of independent minds.’

Nobody can take a walk in Tel Aviv or Haifa and see apartheid. Using such words is a vulgar, opportunistic misapplication of political terms, corrupting their content. If you believe that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’ then you can also believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 American elections and that Hamas with its Islamist supremacism is a force of liberation even if – well, sorry about that little slip by brave ‘resisters’ – they rape Jewish women.