Of course, those left-wingers, Labourite or otherwise, fingered as anti-Semitic never think of themselves as such. They’re anti-Zionist, they say. It’s the Israeli state they’re opposed to, not Jews as a whole. Yet the distinction rarely holds up, not least because their opposition to Israel, indeed the obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is so overdetermined. It’s not born of some actual, let alone vested, interest in this one particular conflict out of all the other conflicts in the world. No, it’s fuelled by their opposition to what Israel represents – its nation-building futurity, its embrace of liberal capitalism, its sheer modern-ness. And ultimately, that image of Israel, as the exemplar of capitalist modernity, both feeds into and draws on what anti-Semitism has always held Jewry to represent: the moneyed power behind the throne, and the source of the world’s problems.
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Samizdata quote of the dayOctober 5th, 2016 |
 38 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Good post – and their are actually two principles that the left must oppose involved in Israel.
First Israel is an example (the ultimate example actually) of an “independent nation state” – the modern left (all the way from some group of rioting “protesters” burning shops, to Mr George Soros) stands for “international cooperation” “world governance” – i.e the crushing of independent nation states. Many Zionists were leftists – but the basis of the Zionist principle is that of the independent nation state, which is in direct conflict with fundamental leftist world “governance” ideas.
The second principle is obvious and is pointed to in the quotation – but I will point it out anyway.
Israel is CAPITALIST – it turned its back on socialism long ago. It is a fundamental principle of leftism (both of the “liberal” Hobson type and the Marxist Lenin type) that capitalism is based on EXPLOITATION – for example of poor “Palestinian” Third Worlders by evil capitalist JEWS.
Hobson (the “liberal”) explicitly used the word “Jews” (not “Zionists”) when outlining his theory of “Imperial Exploitation” a century ago – according to the liberal Hobson (long before the Nazis pushed the theory) the British Empire was a front from the Jews and their obsession with robbing the poor and exploiting the workers. Yes modern “Liberal Democrats” did not invent this theory – it has been around a long time. After all such “Liberal Imperialists” as Lord Rosebery had married into “the Jews” (the boo-hiss Rothschilds – who are still being attacked to this day), and Lord Salisbury’s Conservatives also had connections with “the Jews”.
“Lenin” took this anti Jewish conspiracy theory (much as Karl Marx had taken the Jew hating ravings of Martin Luther and others – sometimes word-for-word as Paul Johnson pointed out) and applied them to businessmen (“capitalists”) generally, even ones who were not Jewish.
Just as Karl Marx claimed that a businessman was an “inwardly circumcised Jew” (Karl was not being friendly – in spite of his own family background) so “Lenin” applied the Jew hating conspiracy theories of the “liberal” Hobson to business as a whole – claiming in “Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (the last book he wrote before he came to power) that the Jews (err I mean the capitalists) were “exploiting” Africa, Asia and so on in order to get round “saturated markets” at home.
In this “Lenin” was trying to save the theory of Karl Marx (that capitalism led to lower wages over time) from obvious refutation – yes (said Lenin) wages had gone up when Karl Marx had said they would go down, but this was only because the wicked capitalists were exploiting the Third World.
Thus the very success of Israel is the reason the modern left hates it – after all its success MUST be based on the evil “Zionists” (read JEWS) robbing and exploiting the Third World Proletarians.
This theory is at the heart of “Exploitation” theory – the very heart of what it means to be a leftist.
Leftism without Exploitation theory (without the theory that “Big Business” and “the rich” are “robbing” and “exploiting” the poor) is like the play “Hamlet” without Prince Hamlet.
One can not really have the left without Exploitation Theory (even though the Labour Theory of Value was refuted one and half centuries ago – by Carl Menger and others, and many economists had never believed in the Labour Theory of Value in the first place ) – and that means Jews (no matter how leftist some of them are) are an obvious target, an obvious target because Jews are associated with trade and with production (with business). Like the Dwarves of Tolkien. Those “calculating folk with a great interest in the value of money” – but also those who could say “Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!” to those who tried to rob and murder them (even in the Hobbit Tolkien is NOT antisemitic in the Nazi sense, indeed he hated the Nazis and their robbery-under-the-cloak-of-Social Justice).
National Socialism (the Nazis) was called “the socialism of fools” by Marxists – but they did not defend Jewish “capitalists”, they (the Marxists) just wanted to treat ALL capitalists in the way the Nazis treated Jewish ones.
And poor Jews?
Easy – “henchmen”. As in “henchmen of the Kulaks” – a term that could be applied to someone who owned nothing at all (indeed was starving to death), but happened to say “stop murdering those people over there – murdering people is wrong”.
The poorest Jew in Israel (or outside it) can be labeled “henchman of the Zionists”.
Although I am sure that Jeremy Corbyn and co will dress it all up in nice sounding language.
I wonder if the fact that Israel is unapologetically a Jewish state has anything to do with it. By which I mean that other states in the West seem very apologetic about being an English state, a Swedish state, a German state and so on. It’s unequivocally unmulticulti (yes I know many Arabs live happily in Israel etc etc etc).
Not really, if the lefts animosity towards Israel is simp-y down to it being Jewish then this does not explain why it (including the UK labour party) was so overwhelmingly pro Israeli up until the late 1960s.
Look,I’d shoot a Socialist just for being a Socialist. Being an Anti-Semitic piece of excrement is just redundant.
Although Paul Marks is right that Israel today has lost much of the socialist idealism (or, if one prefers, socialist idiocy) that once characterised it (and was often less statist than other forms of socialism), Israel still has more than some other countries: how many kibbutz are there in Singapore, for example? So I think Paul’s suggested reasons for the modern left’s dislike are very secondary. If they were the main reasons, another state would be the target.
A less secondary reason – but still secondary in my view – is that Jewish diaspora history tends to make a nonsense of modern leftist theories. How dare penniless, discriminated-against Jews prosper instead of behaving as other oppressed minorities do? Why, it’s almost as if the group itself has more to do with its long-term fate than those wicked WASPs! Leftists naturally do not care for the prompters of such badthink.
Mainly, however, they hate Israel because, as the quote says, they are anti-semites. Anti-semitism has its quieter periods. Read Kipling’s “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and see the pre-WWI children assuring Kadmiel that the mediaeval anti-semitism he knew is dead and gone, the very idea of it a joke. It came back post-WWI and then Hitler’s deeds made it very quiet indeed post WWII – for a time. Now it is coming back again on the left.
(The left’s ideology infects some who are not labelled left: my poem is about Merkel, nominally right-wing but channelling the left on the issue in question.)
I wasn’t alive at the time, but from the way people talk I’d always imagined that the Multiculti thing was a bit more recent than that.
I don’t really remember Israel being described as ‘a racist state’ or ‘an apartheid state’ until the 90’s, but again that may just have been because that’s when I started having opinions about such things.
Karl Marx was a ferocious anti-semitic because he was a Socialist, and Jews were in the path of Socialist goals.
Being always different and resisting to be assimilated they were a big problem for Socialism and normalization of all people. It is the same reason that the Marxist Left now targets white men. In general White men are now added to the Jews(Israel) as a problem to be “fixed” by the Marxists.
Note taht Marxism is just a Tribalism structure scaled up to whole World.
It was Karl Marx that wanted a “World without Jews”(. Not necessarily genocide but the destruction of its character which in the end is the same thing. And we know what Marxist heirs did to whom they found in their path.
Much before the Nazis.
http://hurryupharry.org/2009/06/09/karl-marx-radical-antisemitism-ii/
Who cares? Joining a kibbutz is voluntary. A kibbutz is communism as a lifestyle choice, which is fine by me.
Precisely. Unfortunately there aren’t any Libertarian Communists. Make a Commune with people that agree with them. Many world problems would disappear. Instead they have always to oppress.
There a wide range of reasons for anti-Israel sentiment.
I do think that the fact that Israel is unapologetically a Jewish state does have something to do with opposition to it. Yes, as Paul Mark says Israel is a genuine nation state in a world increasingly hostile to such a thing, but more importantly Israel is a nation state explicitly for a specific religious/ethnic group, which adds substantially more fuel to the anti-Israel fire.
The truth is that anti-Israel folks do have a good point regarding the settlements in Judea and Samaria: this policy just is not consistent with modern democratic ethos and is arguably apartheid.
IRL I’m often surrounded by leftist, secular American Jews who bemoan the “fact” that Israel will have to one day choose 2 of the 3 key aspects of its current identity: territorial, democratic, and Jewish-majority. Due to demographic trends, they claim, Israel will no longer be able to control Judea/Samaria (and have Jewish settlements there), be majority-Jewish, and be a democracy. Naturally, the argument goes, Israel must eventually dismantle the “settlements” and thereafter come to recognize a Palestinian state. Cuz democracy and Jewish-majority are just too important, apparently.
I privately chuckle.
First of all, any excuse to get rid of democracy is a good one but this scenario, if correct, strikes me as a particularly great reason to be rid of democracy. Second of all, the demographic data far from clearly indicate a strong trend in favor of the Palestinians/Muslims. Thirdly, they are disconnected from reality; polls indicate that the young Jewish Israeli public is increasingly hostile to a two-state “solution”. For example:
Notice the huge difference between 18-29 year olds vs those 50+. Stark.
Source: https://knessetjeremy.com/2016/09/06/poll-on-national-referendum-support-of-2-state-vs-1-state-wcomprehensive-breakdown/
The irony for me, as an extreme supporter of Israel, is that those opposed to Israel do make some good points. Israel exercises sovereign control over great many people who cannot vote in Israeli elections. Israel is an explicitly religious state that increasingly teaches religion in public schools. Israel’s immigration policy is highly bigoted. Israel routinely restricts the movement of non-citizens who live in land Israel controls. I just happen to mostly like these things.
I just want to note that prior to 1967 only two countries in the world recognized Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank i.e. who recognized the 1949 cease fire lines as being an international border – Pakistan and Great Britain.
Mmmm ?
Not that it should matter, Taylor. What should matter instead is what the people who actually live there want – but there is no way of knowing what the Arab occupants of the West Bank really want, is there.
What the people who live in a territory rarely has much to do with the realpolitik of who controls it.
Not true, Laird – it depends on many factors, with the size of the territory (state) being a major one: very generally speaking, the smaller the territory, the more responsive its government to the wishes of the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_legislative_election,_2006
Hamas won when the Palestinians voted in 2006.
Was the Palestinian Liberal Party on the ballot? And was there a referendum with the question “Would you like to be annexed by the Zionist Entity” as one of the options? Why don’t you get a clue, or at least refrain from responding to comments not addressed to you?
Don’t believe so. Your point?
That party had (and has) grossly insufficient support among the Palestinians I think so that might have something to do with not being on the ballot.
There were plenty of parties not named Hamas that Palestinians could have voted for that were not dedicated to the destruction of Israel, but Hamas won the election.
Don’t think so. Not sure what your point is, though? Are you implying that I think a majority of the Palestinians would answer in one way to such a question while in reality a majority of them would answer in a different way?
It’s Israeli leftists who think there can be peace with a Palestinian state armed with tanks, APCs, and F16s 20 miles from Tel Aviv who need to get a clue. Naftali Bennett is the future.
Sorry if I touched a nerve; you claimed that “there is no way of knowing what the Arab occupants of the West Bank really want” but Hamas won in the last Palestinian elections (runner-up parties aren’t so great/nice in my book either) and Hamas was and is dedicated to the destruction of my people, so I felt an obligation to correct the record.
I was specifically addressing Taylor, and there is a reason why I never respond to your comments – I’d appreciate reciprocity on that front.
If you say dumb shit about something I care about in the future then I may correct the record unless Perry de Havilland or another editor instructs otherwise.
I don’t think this is some kind of “safe space”, but maybe I’m wrong.
For hard-core Sociallards, the existence of Israel refutes the idea of an iron law of History moving towards collective happiness. Also, the disappearance of the kibbutzim mocks their beliefs that communal living is inevitable. If Israel was now The United Kibbutzim of Israel, the left would still be supporting it.
The Mohammedans have their own interpretation of history, where Mohammedism always expands and expands. No contraction should be possible. They want to give God another chance to finally get it right!
There are many valid reasons to criticise Israel that are not anti-semetic, but from experience I generally put the onus on those who are criticising Israel to explain why:
1) Out of the 193 member states of the UN – young, old, small, large, rich, poor – the only one whose existence they object to happens to be the one run by Jews.
2) Why their criticism sounds as though it’s been copied from a Hamas pamphlet.
The vast majority of Israel’s critics are unable to do so.
“There a wide range of reasons for anti-Israel sentiment.
I wonder if the fact that Israel is unapologetically a Jewish state has anything to do with it. By which I mean that other states in the West seem very apologetic about being an English state, a Swedish state, a German state and so on. It’s unequivocally unmulticulti (yes I know many Arabs live happily in Israel etc etc etc).
I do think that the fact that Israel is unapologetically a Jewish state does have something to do with opposition to it. Yes, as Paul Mark says Israel is a genuine nation state in a world increasingly hostile to such a thing, but more importantly Israel is a nation state explicitly for a specific religious/ethnic group, which adds substantially more fuel to the anti-Israel fire.”
Typical cretinism. Arab states have Arab in their own name: Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Republic etc etc well where are the protests for the Circassians, Yahzadis, Assyrians, Kurds etc?
The usual anti-Israel sentiment I encounter is based not on capitalism, not on suffering of Palestinians, but on perpetual US foreing aid to Israel, second highest after Afghanistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#Recipients
Add to it the aid to Israel’s neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Palestine, which is payment for not attacking Israel, and the sum total is some serious money (but still a tiny drop in total US budget)
Alisa
My point was that Israel’s critics often claim to be acting in support of “International Law” but when one digs down they are just sating “International Law is whatever I say it is.”
For the record I’m in favor of some sort of two state solution, just not the ones that are on offer today.
Taylor, is a sense those people are correct. “International Law” is a great fiction which can be (and is) used to justify just about anything you like. The reality is that there is no such thing, so anyone can make it up. The closest we come to a real “international law” is treaties, which are ratified by, and binding upon, the signatories thereto. (Of course, enforcement remains a problem.) But treaties are only binding on those signatories, not on others. Anything else is mere custom and convention, uncodified and unenforceable.
Anyone who claims to be invoking “international law”, unless he can cite a specific, relevant treaty, is either ignorant or lying.
I know Taylor – unfortunately at this point it (the hypocrisy) just goes without saying…
Darin, that is also the usual criticism I encounter, but only from the right-wing circles in the US – the criticisms usually coming from the Left are of a rather different nature in both formulation and meaning.
More to the point, if one actually looks slightly deeper into that chart on Wikipedia, one notices that the economic component of the US aid to Israel is actually the lowest among the countries on that chart, while the military component is indeed the highest. Problem with that one though, is that calling it aid is somewhat misleading: what it is in reality is rather complex for my own thorough understanding, let alone for a singe comment here – but I do know that the whole scheme should be more properly described as a combination of business cooperation* between the US weapons industry and its Israeli equivalent, and military cooperation* between the two governments.
*With the term cooperation being used by me here rather loosely, if you catch my drift.
To all:
I can only speak for myself of course, but
“Wiki” is NOT to be deemed an “authoritative source” for ANYTHING even remotely controversial. It has PROVED to be “suspect”, at best, since it’s inception, ’til…yesterday.
Bear this in mind when seeking “citations”.
Double checking any “references cited” in support of the primary body of entries at Wiki MAY be valuable.
CaptDMO, that (also) should go without saying, as it is true of any source, to obviously varying extents – I simply addressed Darin’s comment on its own terms.
Oh, and the edit function still does work for me.
The communal living experiments in Israel mostly went bankrupt in the 1970s – one of the reasons the left fell out of love with Israel. And they never amounted to more than 5% of the Jewish population anyway.
As for Islam – there are good Muslims, many good Muslims. But Mohammed did what he did and taught what he taught -and that still matters.
One can not hold as “perfect model of conduct” someone who slaughtered Jews (after making promises of peace and friendship) without it mattering.
This is the difference between the West and Islam.
Not conduct of people (although the myth of tolerant Islam is just that – a myth) but the nature of the philosophy.
Christians have murdered vast numbers of Jews – but no where in the Christian scriptures does it say to do that, and no Christian believes that Jesus killed any Jews.
Many Muslims may be the sweetest and kindest people in the universe – but the Koran and the Hadiths are full of stories of Mohammed and his companions betraying Jews and then murdering or enslaving them, and this is presented as a good thing.
This matters – if Mohammed is the “perfect model of conduct”.
It means that a peace treaty signed with the forces of Islam is worthless – because Mohammed himself broke such treaties (and launched surprise attacks) and he is the perfect model of conduct.
By the way – for all the talk of “tolerance for the people of the Book” from apologists for Islam, the real Islamic attitude towards Christians (the one that Mohammed himself clearly held) is the same as that towards Jews.
Gladstone and Winston Churchill knew about the Islamic attitude towards Christians – it used to be common knowledge.
But in modern times it may soon be a crime to even mention this truth.
14 centuries of fighting have not been a mistake or a misunderstanding – whatever the BBC (and the rest of the left) may say.
The animosity toward Israel is not that it is capitalist, but that it is “white”. It is, arguably, the latest European “settler colony” in the Third World. The general attitude of the Left is that all such colonies were created by injustice against the indigenous people.
Some of these colonizations are irrevocable, though that does not stop leftists from attacking the legitimacy of Australia or New Zealand. There’s a lot of white-guilt-mongering in the U.S. and Canada. There is a token “Native Hawaiian” independence movement. In much of Latin America, leftist political fashion favors the Indio over the criollo.
White South Africa was forced to surrender to the natives (justly, IMO).
Then there is Israel – established only 70 years ago, over the resistance of relatively numerous and advanced natives, who had and have the support of adjacent nation-states. Israel has become the scapegoat for all the sins of imperialism, for Cortez and Andrew Jackson and Cecil Rhodes.
However, I disagree that this sentiment has metastasized into general anti-semitism of the old stripe. In particular, I would note a dog that has not barked. I have not seen any rhetoric blaming “The Jews” for the Crash of 2008, despite the prominence of Jews in the events leading up to it. (E.g. Greenspan and Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairmen for the previous 20 years; Goldman Sachs; the Sandlers of Golden West Financial; IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn; John Lipsky, Strauss-Kahn’s deputy and interim successor; ex-World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz; Larry Summers, ex-US Treasury Secretary.)
Please note I do not allege any such collective wrongdoing. I only note that if anyone wanted to do so, the material for it is ready to hand – yet no one has.
@Rich Rostrum,
Although Jews were heavily involved, I doubt it was really their fault. The real blame, I feel, lies with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which supported insane loans in the name of diversity and affirmative action, and had bi-partisan support in the US.
If the Jews were to blame for anything, it would be on how smart they were to get out of the mess and stick the bill on the US taxpayer. Many of them supported Obama; in return he covered for them and shielded them from prosecution. All the regulations in the world won’t work if they are not enforced. It doesn’t help that bankers and the regulators are an inbred tribe – they went to the same schools, had similar experiences, they are friends and mix in the same circles!
Just so happens a significant portion of these people are Jews due to their higher IQ.
Rich Rostrom:
http://archive.adl.org/main_anti_semitism_international/blaming_jews_financial.html
http://archive.adl.org/nr/exeres/86ad2ff6-2600-484c-a489-eed337e3eb20,db7611a2-02cd-43af-8147-649e26813571,frameless.html
http://southasiainvestor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/are-jews-responsible-for-financial.html
There were lots of loony anti-Semitic theories in the aftermath of 2008.
Paul,
read much John Buchan? Highly antisemitic and highly nice to Islam. It is a sort of “noble savage” thing. Then consider TE Lawrence. Much the same. I think we are seeing a sort of resurgance of such toxic tripe. This is not the left of “A tanner on the pay and an hour off the day”. It is not pragmatic and deeply Romantic when stripped of it’s pseudo-scientific jargon.
Much more to say along these lines but it must wait.
“If the Jews were to blame for anything…”
There is no such thing as “the Jews”, any more than “the Christians” or “the Atheists”, and so “the Jews” cannot be blamed for anything, even hypothetically.
Exactly. Hence the fact some of these people are Jews is as significant as the notion some of these people probably also play chess.