Up until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the New Left in Western Europe and America maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Zionism; thereafter, it embraced the anti-Zionism of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments. Jeffrey Herf explains East Germany’s continuous record of hostility to Israel, the adoption of the same attitude by the radical Left in West Germany following the Six-Day War, and the anti-Semitism that persisted just below the surface in both countries:

One striking feature of both the East German Communist regime and the West German radical Left was a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older anti-Semitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist, and even exterminatory. . . .

[Another] distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel, first in the Soviet bloc and then in the global New Left, was the indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel’s enemies spread lies about Zionism’s racist nature and their willingness to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of anti-Semitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel’s victory in June 1967. . . .

[L]eftist Holocaust inversion [link to Kramer] rested on very old and false [claims] of enormous power and great evil that religious and secular anti-Semites had attributed to the Jews. Rather than acknowledge that the Jews, like any other nation with a state of its own, had defended themselves against a real threat and won a war, the Communists and the radical Left applied to the state of Israel the negative [stereotypes] once applied to the Jews of Europe. While anti-Semites before 1945 had described the Jews as the center of a powerful international conspiracy, the anti-Zionists of the cold-war era described Israel as the spearhead in the Middle East of a conspiracy led by the U.S. and supported by West Germany. . . . In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the idea of the powerful and evil Jew, so familiar in the history of European anti-Semitism, assumed a new form of a powerful and evil Israel.

Last week, Jordanian police arrested sixteen members of the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood for acquiring explosives, trying to manufacture drones, and planning rocket attacks. The cell was likely working in coordination with Hamas (the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood) and Hizballah, and perhaps receiving funding from Iran. Ghaith al-Omari provides some background:

The Brotherhood has been active in Jordan since the 1940s, and its relations with the government remained largely cooperative for decades even as other political parties were banned in the 1950s. In exchange, the Brotherhood usually (but not always) supported the palace’s foreign policy and security measures, particularly against Communist and socialist parties.

Relations became more adversarial near the turn of the century after the Brotherhood vociferously opposed the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. The Arab Spring movement that emerged in 2011 saw further deterioration. Unlike other states in the region, however, Jordan did not completely crack down on the MB, instead seeking to limit its influence.

Yet the current Gaza war has seen another escalation, with the MB repeatedly accusing the government of cooperating with Israel and not doing enough to support the Palestinians.

Jordanian security circles are particularly worried about the MB’s vocal wartime identification with Hamas, an organization that was considered such a grave security threat that it was expelled from the kingdom in 1999. The sentiment among many Jordanian officials is that the previous lenient approach failed to change the MB’s behavior, emboldening the group instead.