Two Veterans of the New Left Reveal a Familiar Blindspot

Born into Jewish Communist families, Richard Flacks and his wife Mickey both left the Kremlin-backed Communist Party of the USA in the late 1950s, following Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” revealing Stalinist crimes, and became prominent figures in the emerging New Left. The couple eventually settled in Santa Barbara, California, where Richard joined the university’s sociology department and the couple committed themselves to building “socialism in one city.” In his review of their joint memoir, Making History, Making Blintzes, Harvey Klehr writes:

Both Mickey and Dick [as Richard calls himself in the memoir] joined Communist youth groups and attended Communist camps where the kids sang with Pete Seeger and idolized Paul Robeson. Growing up during the “Red Scare,” they felt alienated from an American society that was, as Mickey puts it, “capitalistic and corrupt, racist, anti-Semitic (or, if Jewish, self-hating), lowbrow, anti-intellectual, and generally and profoundly evil.” Dick’s parents lost their jobs after refusing to testify before committees investigating Communist influence among teachers (but both found employment in private schools). . . .

Yet their sensitivity about anti-Semitism is not particularly consistent:

Since Communism and social democracy have both failed, the couple calls for a new New Left based on the idea that “all social relations—both macro and micro—should enable everyone to participate in making the decisions that affect them.” The key, they say, is to capture the Democratic party and expel its corporate supporters and financiers. . . . Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, they believe, is evidence that socialists can transform America by focusing on concrete policies and avoiding inflammatory and divisive debates about ideology. They are also encouraged by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s new Labor party in England. Never mind that Corbyn is an anti-Semite.

That Communists and other enemies of democracy have insinuated themselves into organizations that once shunned them (the newest example is the emergence of a Communist caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America) is in part a consequence of the notion purveyed by Mickey and Dick Flacks that there are no enemies on the left.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, Communism, History & Ideas, Jeremy Corbyn, New Left

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF