Mick Hartley

The tropes of today's demonisation of Israel as a racist coloniser, oppressing the brave Palestinians in their noble anti-imperialist struggle, were originally set out by the Soviets back in the Sixties. Izabella Tabarovsky in Tablet on the left’s addiction to "warmed-over Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda from half a century ago":

What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.

A quick excursion into the Soviet-sponsored Third World, aka the left-wing universe of yesteryear, helps put many things into perspective—from the disastrous “anti-racism” U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 that launched a massive new global wave of anti-Israel demonization to the current grotesque spectacle of progressives using “anti-colonialism” to justify the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians in a land where Jews have lived for more than 3,000 years of their collective history as memorialized in the works of Greek and Roman historians; monumental inscriptions by neighboring kingdoms; such globally recognized works as the New Testament, the Koran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and by world-famous monuments like the Arch of Titus in Rome.

That what we are watching is less an upsurge of a new and terrifying phenomenon than the zombielike repetition of the state-sponsored propaganda of a dead empire that was hardly known for truth-telling explains why the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like déjà vu to those of us who grew up in the USSR. We’ve heard it all before: anti-imperialism mixed with anti-Zionist sloganeering; anti-racism interwoven with the demonization of the Jews; incantations about “world peace” and “friendship of the peoples” intertwined with the fomenting and financing of wars in faraway lands. One example in particular stands out as an illustration of profound Soviet cynicism with regard to the Third World: While calling for the boycott of the apartheid regime in every international forum, Moscow didn’t for one second stop trading diamonds with South African companies De Beers and Anglo American. As perestroika got underway and Soviet foreign policy priorities began to shift, some in Moscow started reaching out to the South African regime to convince it not to surrender power to Nelson Mandela.

Those who try to explain the contemporary left’s anti-Israel derangement by pointing to the latest academic fashions, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, or to specific news events of the day often miss the point that the precise language used by the anti-Israel left today to condemn the Jewish State has been a conventional part of left-wing discourse for decades—and that it originated in the USSR. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, wrote Stephen Norwood, the American far left “repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.” Similar trends were on view in the United Kingdom. “By the early 1970s, it was generally accepted across the [British] far left that Zionism was a racist ideology and that Israel was comparable to apartheid South Africa,” wrote Dave Rich in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present.

So why wasn't all this nonsense discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Why didn't the left acknowledge its egregious errors? Well – that's not how it works. Too much had already been invested by sections of the left in the centrality of Zionism as the spider at the centre of a web of evil imperialism – and figures like, say, Jeremy Corbyn, are not noted for their flexibility of thought, or their willingness to change their thinking in the light of new evidence and new circumstances. And, of course, it plays very nicely into the antisemitism that never quite goes away.

Somehow, liberal America has slept through all of it. Having won the Cold War, it didn’t even bother to disarm and discredit the ideas it opposed, the way it had after it defeated Nazi Germany. Too many American intellectuals had been leftists or had leftist parents or had been fellow travelers with leftist causes to want to look too closely at the moral and physical rot of the empire that America defeated—a victory that moreover belonged to the arch-enemy of the American left, Ronald Reagan. Why give Reagan and his fellow anti-communists and troglodyte McCarthy-ites credit for having been right?

That the left has held onto the Soviet language of anti-Zionist struggle, down to retaining the same stilted epithets, despite the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union is a testament to the disenchantment of Western liberals with what they should have remembered as a heroic and deeply meaningful struggle that rescued close to a billion people around the world from totalitarian slavery. It also testifies to the enduring utility of anti-Zionism as a political tool. Throughout the Cold War, this ideology helped unite political actors with agendas so different as to be virtually irreconcilable; it continues to do the same today. Anti-Zionism allows the Western left to ally itself with jihadists, who stand against everything the progressive left has ever claimed to represent. That these crude, immoral politics and ideology, shaped by illiberal, anti-Western, anti-democratic regimes with the blood of millions on their hands, are being presented to young Americans as the main paradigm to make sense of the world is a scandalous historical irony.

Young Americans and young Brits.