ism? This issue is a continuing open wound for Israel supporters and even the average Jew who would like to feel comfortable in his/her Diaspora community. Furthermore many Jews consider themselves liberals identifying with most messages purveyed by the news media and "intellectual" classes. Yet when it comes to Israel and Jewish identity, the extreme Liberal/Left condemns Jewish national self-expression and in particular the right to self-defense as evidenced by the never ending media slant against Israel when reporting the recent Gaza operation. An investigation of Hamas hostilities against Israel and its ideology demanding the destruction of the Jews are in very short supply.In a very short time during the 20th century Jews went from being a persecuted and then exterminated minority to a people willing and able to defend itself. The transition from the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel (the nation state success of the Jewish national liberation movement – Zionism) caught many by surprise. Traditionally, Jews were expected either to cocoon themselves in orthodox communities in western democracies or to be extremely liberal and do battle for everyone's human rights while repressing their own identity. There was the old adage – "Be a Jew at home and a man in the street". As seen throughout much of the world, such a policy did not stop persecution or even anti-Semitism. Jews broke the stereotype with the establishment of the Jewish State. Jews refused to assimilate or to relegate themselves to a second class status, they would establish their own state and defend themselves. Deep down many in the West saw this as an affront, believing in the words of historian Arnold Toynbee that "the Jews were relegated to the trash heap of history."
The New Left arrived by the 1960s and their more extreme factions viewed the State of Israel not as an historic right of a people in their rejuvenated nation/homeland but somehow as a state tainted by original sin. The primary sin is one of having established a state at all, the secondary is the defeat of the Palestinians and Arab world which not only rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan but invaded with five Arab armies (plus the Palestinian irregulars themselves) but failed to halt the creation of the Jewish State. Supposed proof of the Jewish crime is the non-establishment of the Palestinian State and the refugee problem resulting from the war they forced on the Zionist movement. They always neglect to explain that it was the Arabs who rejected the UN Partition (two-state solution, Res. 181) while the Jews accepted. They also forget to mention the persecution of Jews throughout the Arab world and the Jewish refugees caused by the Arab invasion at the outset of the 1948 war.
None of this is just a matter of criticizing Israeli government policies, a right held dear by Israelis themselves, but rather a radical Liberal/Left perspective in de-legitimizing the Jewish State, the only democracy in the Middle East. In their view, only the Jews have no right to a nation state in their ancient homeland.
Because many of the new style anti-Israel liberals feel guilt for the world they inherited, quite a few become journalists or "intellectuals" in order to correct the mistakes of their parents. It is known that many in media believe themselves to be on a mission. They feel terrible and even guilty about the Holocaust and Jewish persecution in general, cannot deny it and certainly cannot correct the damage. As a blight on the societies from which they originate they also feel a responsibility for what was done and need to obviate their historical moral responsibility and assuage their own collective conscience. The best way to do so is to prove the Jews are just as bad. If you can illustrate that everyone is persecuting someone on a similar level then anti-Semitism and its culmination in the Holocaust were not so bad after all. Or in the reverse –" So the Jews were persecuted, look, they are doing the same to the Palestinians." Hence a clash between two national entities is made to look as if the Jewish State committed "war crimes" and the comparison of Israel to the Nazis is not far off.
Secondly, there is Liberal/Left guilt over issues of colonialism. At the same time that Europe was carving up the world there was the rise of nationalism including that of the Jews
(Zionism). A Jewish national – British agreement was contained in the Balfour Declaration recognizing the rights of the Jewish People to a national home in what Europe calls Palestine and what Jews refer to as the Land of Israel. This territory is certainly a twice claimed land by two different peoples, but that is far from colonialism where the object is to exploit the local population and their natural resources. British and Jewish national interests coincided for less than a generation as Britain held the League of Nations approved Mandate for the national home. London repudiated its responsibilities to the Palestine Mandate in 1939, even preventing Jewish immigration to Mandated Palestine from Nazi Europe, thereby condemning millions to death.The extremist Liberal/Left strives to see the Jewish national liberation movement as typical European colonialism. For the most part they are unfamiliar and not interested in the longings of the Jewish People for the Land as expressed by the founders of modern Zionism and if they are familiar, they deny Jewish claims. By equating Jewish nationalism with colonialism Israel is a de facto illegal state. Such logic awards them the best cover possible for every anti-Israel (or even anti-Semitic) act in the guise of liberalism and their crusade for "justice". These Liberal/Left activists now feel much better and can justify their anti-Israel and at times anti-Semitic behavior.
And from another angle: One can be pro-Palestinian, but why be pro-Hamas or pro-Hezbollah? - For the same reason that many justified Adolf Hitler's persecution of the Jews. The British leftist Philip Lothian (1935) explained away "the brutality of the National Socialists" as a "reaction to the treatment given to Germany" since WWI. He continued on to the issue of Jewish suffering by insisting that Jews will get their rights returned only "by giving Germany her rightful place in Europe" (War and the Liberal Conscience by Michael Howard, p. 104). From the 1930s and into the 1950s this radical Left both in Europe and the US supported Stalin, Soviet Russia, Mao and countless communist dictators. They either denied or ignored Stalin's and the Warsaw Bloc's persecution of the Jews. Being internationalist in perspective, they believed the Jews were a fossilized relic to be assimilated, and if not voluntarily, then by force. It is interesting that no other People was commanded to self-liquidate as were the Jews. This is known as "the liberal's anti-Semitism" as coined by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte.
So when the Old Left (1930s - 50s) became the New Left (1960s) and then the rejuvenated 21st century reconstituted Left, they were not unduly worried with demands by Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah for the destruction of Israel and the Jews or with Article 7 in the Hamas Covenant stating, "The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslem, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'" Not a few of these Leftists generally excuse such remarks as a response to "oppression" and consider it all "posturing". If only Israel did this or that (or even committed suicide), "it would all end" they explain. What they forget is that the Moslem Brotherhood of which Hamas is the Palestinian wing, was established in 1928 long before the State of Israel and that Hizbollah's rise to power in Lebanon is connected to the Iranian revolution, beginning in the 1970s.
Interestingly, the resurgent Liberal/Left of today shows little interest in Taliban massacres in Afghanistan, the Somali civil war, the Algerian civil war, the southern Sudanese War, the civil war in Sri Lanka, the civil war in eastern Zaire, the conflict between Russia
and Chechnia (or Georgia) or the internal decimation of the population in Zimbabwe, just to name a few recent and ongoing causes to champion in the name of justice and humanity. Millions have been tortured and slaughtered in the above conflicts, yet it is simply unfathomable the disinterest taken by the western Liberal/Left press and intellectuals in general. How is it that only the existence of the Jewish State bothers their conscience? Many of today's anti-Israel Liberal/Left have seemingly never read the Hamas Covenant, yet condemn Israel's actions to halt Islamist aggression. Overall, the average journalist/academic is not anti-Semitic or even anti-Israel, but in the name of journalistic "balance" repeats the claims made by those who are. This same group is the most dangerous since they can become the satellite communications mob, the mass following urged on by the rabid anti-Israel bias in much of the news media and among the intellectual gurus. The supposedly "fair-minded" Liberal/Left use innuendo against Israel by focusing on "Palestinian suffering" while barely mentioning Hamas (or previously Arafat/Fatah) for the responsibility to ensure the well being of their own people and not constantly engage in the "armed struggle". We can assume the majority does not have evil intent. In the end they will apologize for "not knowing" or "not understanding" should disaster eventually strike. In order to avoid such an eventuality the radical Liberal/Left media and intellectuals must be exposed for their sins.
Otherwise Islamist anti-Semitism will continue making deep inroads through the more extreme Liberal/Left elements in the West. The danger of such attitudes moving towards the mainstream will certainly undermine the truly liberal democracies since it will not stop with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic diatribes but erode democracy itself.
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