Daniel Finkelstein in today’s Times – Left’s obsession with Zionism has history:
It’s a bore to discuss whether any given piece of anti-Zionism is antisemitic, since this distracts from considering whether something is, say, grotesque or stupid or extreme, all things you can be without being antisemitic. So, let’s just say the Greens have chosen to support a policy that endorses violence that will almost entirely be aimed at Jewish people, that makes going to synagogue a racist act deserving of harassment (they rejected an amendment exempting synagogue attendance) and that singles out the world’s one Jewish state for eradication, leaving half the world’s Jews defenceless. I will leave you to decide for yourself whether that is antisemitic.
The most important decision a political party can make is about who it doesn’t include. The most significant act of Nigel Farage’s political career was that people who wanted to work with the neofascist right couldn’t be part of Ukip. Neil Kinnock chose to expel Militant. The Greens allowed anyone in. They boast (and still boast) of all their new members. But they have, in fact, simply been overrun by hardcore far-left activists.
And Islamists. Never forget the Islamists.
The reason the nature of this takeover is so obvious is because of the topic they have chosen. Zionism. It is an obsession of the far left. It is always the issue they go to first and the one thing they can’t leave alone. I first started having to engage with this when I was in my twenties, while Zack Polanski was still at King David High School and Habonim Dror, and before he began his long march on Saint Petersburg.
Which of course leaves this question: why? Why is Zionism an obsession of the far left? And anyone who wants an answer to that question should try reading Gal Beckerman’s book When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.
The Marxist idea is to create one smooth, borderless world without religions or peoples or ethnic attachment. More generally this is naturally impossible to achieve through consent and can only be advanced by genocidal murder and deportation, which is exactly what Stalin attempted against the Poles (including my father). But internally there was a specific problem with the Jews. Thought to be the easiest to assimilate, Soviet Jews had begun, after the war, to find a voice and an allegiance. They were demanding to be allowed to live in Israel.
It might be worth mention here that the Marxist idea of one smooth, borderless world bears a grim resemblance to the Islamist idea of one smooth borderless world: the new caliphate.
To accede to this demand would have been to accept that Marxism was hollow and adherence to it only achieved by compulsion. It would be an acknowledgment that a perennially oppressed people didn’t see socialism as deliverance. It would have been the ultimate contradiction of the Marxist idea.
The socialists could not (and cannot) bear an actual plan providing real safety, in contrast with their fantasy protection which promises only spiritual and cultural erasure followed by murder.
So, as Beckerman relates, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union established a “Plan for Basic Organisational and Propaganda Measures Connected with the Situation in the Middle East and the Intensifying Struggle with Zionism”, and in accordance with the plan held a press conference in March 1970, just as the Soviet dissident movement got under way.
This is what the party had to say: “Every day brings new reports about the crimes of the Israeli military, reviving memories of the barbarity of Hitlerites. This aggression has become a component of the imperialist, neocolonialist plot directed against the people and progressive regimes of the Middle East and closely intertwining the interests of oil monopolies and international Zionist operations … Zionism has always expressed the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie. It has now reached the apogee in preaching national intolerance and hatred. Zionists supply imperialism with cannon fodder in the struggle against the Arab people.”
Is any of this sounding familiar?…
A message, explicitly and deliberately created as Soviet propaganda (this is simply historical fact), has now found its moment and its audience in the Green Party. A terrible war has provided political fuel. And parts of the Muslim community have provided a voting base. This may be why, despite a similar affront to the Marxist principle of borderless secular societies, the Greens did not pass a motion condemning the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
The Greens have lost their party. And they aren’t going to get it back. This is who they are now.
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