Mick Hartley

Yesterday I posted that Hadley Freeman trailer for her Jewish Quarterly article Blindness: October 7 and the Left. Now there's an extract at UnHerd – Why the Left failed on October 7:

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn….

When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt….

One of the biggest problems with this framework is its inability to accommodate competing rights, and the idea that two groups can both be right. I got a glimpse of this in 2015, when I started to write about gender ideology, which argues that trans women should be accorded all the rights biological women have, such as access to female single-sex spaces. The problems seemed glaring to me, but as I quickly learned, asking any questions sparked furious accusations of transphobia from the progressive Left.

Identity politics, you see, is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad. So, in the case of gender ideology, trans people are all good, and women who are anxious about the erosion of their rights are evil. And so identity politics gave Left-wing men a self-righteous cover so they could deride women like me, and feel morally superior for doing so.

It’s a similar story with the progressive Left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the Left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews. This comparison between how women and Jews are discussed in identity politics is not new. In February, Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet magazine that, thanks to the energetic efforts of gender ideologue and anti-Israel academic Judith Butler, antisemitism has been “queered”, meaning anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist is seen as analogous to a bigot who hates trans people. Only trans people and Palestinians are seen as oppressed, and never women or Jews….

Powerful piece.