Mick Hartley

Juliet Samuel (previous post) focused on the Islamic element in our current antisemitism crisis. There are two cheeks to the problem though. Allister Heath in the Telegraph looks at the other side of the red-green alliance.

What has happened to the progressive Left? It used to fight poverty, climate change and racism. Today, many of its adherents obsess about Israel, about Jews, about “Zionism”, and sound indistinguishable from the fascists and Black Shirts they once fought against.

Veterans of the Battle of Cable Street must be turning in their graves: like Squealer and Napoleon in Animal Farm, the far Left has transformed into those they once despised. It’s now a case of “four-legged anti-racism good, two-legged anti-Semitism even better”.

The degeneration is complete; the horseshoe theory of politics is confirmed. A group that bemoans Russian influence everywhere has swallowed uncritically a Soviet campaign of anti-Israel delegitimisation launched in the 1950s for purposes of repression and Cold War realpolitik. Activists who claim they are immune from misinformation have embraced TikTok psyops. A modern movement is renewing the most ancient of hatreds. Trans advocates who dismiss religion as the “opium of the people” collaborate with Islamists.

It’s not Jews, we keep being told, it’s the Israelis. If only they didn’t “overact”, there would be no anti-Semitism; if only British Jews repudiated Israel, they would be left alone. The anti-Semites supposedly have no agency and merely respond to unbearable provocations. Everything about this narrative is a lie, and it will destroy the West if it succeeds in rotting our minds, warping our critical faculties and chasing away the Jewish diaspora.

There was once a legitimate debate about whether Zionism, the idea that Jews should again have their own state in their ancestral homeland, was the best way forward for the long-suffering Jewish people in the context of decolonisation and emancipation. Pogroms in Russia and the Middle East, the West’s refusal to let in fleeing Jews in the 1930s, the Holocaust, the UN’s creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of virtually all Jews from Muslim countries resolved that question. Zionism became the reality. Anti-Zionism was obsolete.

Yet anti-Semites, from the pro-Nazi ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to the fools involved in setting up UNRWA to ensure the Israeli-Arab conflict couldn’t be resolved, were having none of it. The KGB’s Operations Zarathustra and Sionistskiye Gosudarstva culminated in the 1975 UN declaration that Zionism was racism, and the Western far-Left gradually realised the potential of that Big Lie.

Many activists have now embraced antizionism, spelt without a hyphen to distinguish it from the traditional pre-1948 variety. It is a specific, modernised hate ideology with an eliminationist agenda that targets the state of Israel, and only Israel, for dissolution, projects upon it everything they loathe about the West, and comes with an entire, warped analytical framework. It is the new anti-Semitism for our times.…

Antizionism claims Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians, a new lie that it kills children (the original blood libel), enforces apartheid (a new untruth) and betrays every tenet of woke “social justice” ideology.

Crucially, all of these claims are axiomatically unchallengeable under the totalitarian, anti-rational premises of “postcolonialism”. Jews are redefined not as refugees (often from Arab lands) but, in an act of gross inversion, as “white settler colonisers”. They are oppressors, by definition, genocidal, self-evidently, and can never be victims. One doesn’t need to prove this; asserting it is sufficient.…

The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the allies did to the Nazis. It trivialises the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitimate, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalises intifada terrorism as freedom-fighting.

There’s an undeniable relish in the enthusiasm with which the genocide libel is thrown at Israel. The term “genocide” – “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”, according to Raphael Lemkin – was coined in direct response to the horror of the Holocaust. The victimhood of the Jews, as represented by that one all-powerful word – the epitome of human evil, the “crime of crimes” – has long rankled with antisemites. What a delight now to throw it back in their faces.