If Israel is so bad, then there can be no compromise with it—and solutions that might aid Palestine are neglected in favor of the real focus: attacking Israel. An example from the United Kingdom this year exemplifies this.
The Labour Party Member of Parliament Rosena Allin-Khan, who worked as a medical doctor, visited some hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank in early and was shocked to see so many sick and dying children on their own, separated from their parents. One reason for this is the collapse of the Palestinian medical system under the pressure of Israeli sanctions and the extent to which it has become focused on dealing with trauma injuries, in response to urgent needs among Palestinian patients.
Palestinian hospitals are unable to deal with sick children, so they are often transferred to hospitals in Israel. However, Israeli policy then leads to the separation of children and parents, as the government choose to issue 7, travel permits for children from Gaza in but less than 2, for accompanying parents.
However, Allin-Khan made the mistake of trying to do something about the problem. She lobbied the British Conservative Party foreign secretary and spoke to the Israeli deputy ambassador to the U. This should be seen as a sensible humanitarian response to a cruelty created by state policy. The far-left only cares about the suffering of the Palestinians when Israel is to blame. They do not offer a critique of specific Israeli policies or seek a means to engage with Israel to mitigate harm in the short term—all the while insisting that they support the Palestinians above all else.
This is most visible in their enthusiasm for other killers of Muslims who voice the right platitudes on Israel. Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad is deemed to be anti-imperialist and opposed to Israel, so he is above criticism in the eyes of many often vocal self-declared pro-Palestinian voices such as the writer Max Blumenthal and the British Labour Party MP Chris Williamson.
Once Palestinians are oppressed by an actor other than Israel, the anti-imperialist left is no longer interested. Their supposed love for Palestinians is, in fact, cover for a bitterly anti-Semitic worldview. You will be notified in advance of any changes in rate or terms. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Skip to Main Content Skip to Search. News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services.
Dow Jones. Social democratic and socialist parties of the Left are not supposed to have antisemites in their ranks. The Right is where antisemitism flourished traditionally. It was they who denied Jews access to the Establishment and saw them as part of a Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy. But Labour and other centre-left parties in the West acted as heirs to the liberal tradition of equality of citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity and became the parties for which most Jews voted. It is a topsy-turvy world if Labour is the party with an antisemitism problem.
Should we be surprised by recent displacements in the political spectrum concerning antisemitism, given the historical record? Has antisemitism been on the Left all along? There are many instances where people on the Left were antisemitic. This was partly because of the peculiarities of the multi-national Monarchy. He was an ally in the late s of German nationalist students who pressured the Liberals to adopt both more pro-German and more progressive policies.
He and his allies championed the cause of the lower classes and proposed social welfare policies against liberal orthodoxies. Lenin was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, but Soviet policy reversed shortly after his death. Totalitarian states, with their inevitable economic failures, eventually need scapegoats.
Economic performance rarely matches the official promises, and the subsequent privations feed social resentment; one person gains only at the expense of another. The necessities of totalitarian government, in time, override whatever nonracist feelings might be held by the leaders, and create strong pressures for political support of racism.
Control over the press and rights of speech makes racist feeling relatively easy to whip up. Soviet anti-Semitism flourished after the Second World War, as the Communist leaders were unable to resist the target that had proven so successful for Hitler. Stalin died before a trial was called, but he had been planning to forcibly deport two million Jews to Siberia. The economic crimes executions of the early s were directed largely against Jews. Textbooks were rewritten either to remove the Jewish role in history, or to provide negative stereotypes of Jews.
The Russian pogroms were reinterpreted as justified retribution for the capitalistic excesses of the Jews. The Soviet government attacked all forms of religion, but Judaism most of all. Eastern Germany continued the earlier Nazi polemics against Jews, substituting the words Zionist or Israel for Jew, and referring to the salutary effects of progressive socialist forces, a scant difference from the earlier Nazi terminology of national socialism.
Many former Nazi journalists were hired to write these anti-Zionist polemics. Similar trends came to pass throughout eastern Europe. In the early s, thirteen leaders in the Czech Communist party ten were Jewish , were accused of being Zionists, and were hanged.
In the Polish media spent months debating the unmasking of Zionists in Poland, although Jews comprised less than one-fifteenth of one percent of the population. The anti-Zionist campaign was accompanied by demonstrations, arrests, surveillance, police persecution, and other typical methods of totalitarian oppression. The contrast with the more capitalistic United States is striking.
The United States started off with few Jews but attracted many Jewish immigrants with its relatively free economy and atmosphere of relative tolerance.
By the s, three of the four cities with the most Jews were located in the United States. New York had the largest number of Jews, and Chicago and Philadelphia were third and fourth Budapest was second. Today Jews account for only two percent of the American population, but they account for half of the billionaires. The history of the Jews provides a stark illustration of the differences between capitalism and socialism.
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