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American Socialism, the Jews, and Israel

March 5 2015

Even before the creation of Israel, significant elements of the international left opposed Zionism, embraced anti-Semitism, and defended the murder of Jews. A new book, Anti-Semitism and the Far Left, chronicles this history from the 1920s to the present. As Tony Michels writes in his review, Israel’s victory in the June 1967 war inaugurated an era of especially virulent rhetoric:

In the summer of 1967, American leftists began speaking about Israel in new, jarring ways. The Jewish state had just won a quick but transformative war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, resulting in the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. A good many leftists sided with Israel, but a growing number reacted against it with levels of vituperation more characteristic of the ultra-right than the traditional socialist left. From 1967 forward, one could hear angry, often outlandish, public pronouncements with growing frequency.

An article in the Students for a Democratic Society’s newsletter counseled Holocaust survivors and their children to leave Israel for “historically more appropriate place[s]” such as “the vicinities of Stuttgart, Liverpool, and Kiev.” The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s newsletter accused Israel of indiscriminately slaughtering Arabs and connected this to a long history of Jewish rapaciousness. “[F]amous European Jews,” the newsletter stated, had “long controlled the wealth of many European nations.” The Socialist Workers party dismissed objections to this calumny as “chauvinist hysteria.” The Maoist Progressive Labor party labeled Israel a “Nazi state” while the Weather Underground claimed Nazi propaganda owed a debt to “Zionist writings.”

Read more at Marginalia

More about: American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, Communism, Israel & Zionism, New Left, Socialism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic