Left-wing anti-Semitism has its roots in the 19th century, writes Alan Johnson. In the 20th it was transformed, under Soviet auspices, into anti-Zionism. And now the anti-Zionist left is eager to find common cause with Islamist anti-Semites:
[L]eft-wing anti-Zionism has been converging with some forms of Arab nationalism and even political Islamism—which are both now coded as singularly progressive. The left has its own version of Orientalism, which infantilizes the Palestinians and Arabs, puts them beyond criticism, and makes them the subject of endless Western left-wing delusions. For example, take Jeremy Corbyn’s truly incredible claim that Hamas and Hizballah are “bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region.”
This convergence . . . was smoothed by two developments on the left. In the East, the Communist bloc’s decades-long “anti-Zionist” propaganda campaign injected an “anti-imperialism of idiots” into the global left during the cold war. We are talking about the mass publication and global distribution of anti-Semitic materials through the Communist parties and their fellow travelers. . . . Two-hundred-and-thirty books were published in the USSR alone from 1969 to 1985 about a supposed Zionist-Masonic conspiracy against Russia. These books had a combined print run of 9.4 million.
In the West, . . . anti-imperialism . . . was raised to a radically new status in the 1960s. . . . [The Israeli-Palestinian conflict] was reframed. No longer was one people involved in a complex unresolved national question with another people. Now Israel became “a key site of the imperialist system” and the Palestinians became “the Resistance” to imperialism. . . .
Now, to support Israel’s enemies—whatever these enemies stood for, however they behaved—was a left-wing “anti-imperialist” duty: in other words, anti-Semitism went “progressive.”
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/the-left-and-the-jews-time-for-a-rethink/