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Understanding Left-Wing Hatred of Israel, and Blindness toward Anti-Semitism

April 11 2016

Responding to the rise of anti-Semitism within Britain’s Labor party, and the way the global left has turned viciously against Israel, Jamie Palmer dissects the thinking that leads some to decry every form of bigotry except that directed against Jews:

A lot has been written in recent months about the unwelcome resurgence of political correctness and identity politics and the exasperating doctrines of the social-justice left. I will simply make the curt observation that the “progressive stack”—an organizing principle designed to foreground the voices of those deemed to be “marginalized”—has not been kind to Jews.

This is partly because those in charge of arranging ethnicities into a hierarchy of oppression are still trying to decide whether or not Jews should be considered “white” and therefore “privileged,” and, as such, undeserving of the social protections from racism afforded to other minority groups (as though it were within their rights to define the Jews in the first place). . . .

As the recent wave of stabbings and car-rammings [in Israel] has demonstrated, the left is simply unmoved by Palestinian terror. Anti-Zionist Jews . . . will of course continue to be warmly welcomed and invited to join the left’s tireless struggle against the baleful power of the Zionist entity and Jewish capital. For anyone and everyone else, unconditional support for the Palestinians and hostility to the state of Israel—not just for what it does, but for what it is—are now the sine qua non of authentic European leftism. . . .

For this to change will require a stark reappraisal of what the left values as well as what it despises, and the courage to interrogate some of its most sacred articles of faith. Regrettably, at present the appetite for this kind of painful self-criticism remains negligible.

Read more at Tower

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Leftism, United Kingdom

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