The Left’s Historical Obsession With Jews and Israel

by Paul Austin Murphy (November 2018)

Father and Child, Yosi Bergner, 1943

 

 

This is what I do believe:

 

Thus, anti-Zionism and the obsession with Israel are examples of Jew-hatred by proxy. So there are, indeed, very strong historical, theoretical, and political links (all contingent, sure) between anti-Zionism (or the criticism of Israel) and Jew-hatred. One of those links I will discuss here: the history of Far Left Jew-hatred.

 

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Sylvain Cypel, who went on to establish the Workers’ League.

 

Far Left/Marxist Jew-hatred continued with the Bolsheviks. (This is ironic because Nazis made—and still make—much of the Bolsheviks who were Jews.) Then we had Soviet “Zionology” and Stalin’s Doctors’ plot. After that, the “ultra-Leftist” Holocaust-denying tradition of the 1960s/70s (e.g., Pierre Guillaume). And today we have the Far Left boycott-Israel movement and the Corbyn Cult.

 

As for the last link in that chain: what would you expect from the contemporary Far Left? After all, Israel is both “a state for Jews” and what Marxists call (in scare quotes) a “capitalist democracy!” (Incidentally, David Duke thinks that Israel is a “Stalinist state” and many Leftists think that Israel is “Nazi state.”)

 

Gilad Atzmon has been explicit about)—save their blood (e.g., Marx, Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Tony Cliff, Shlomo Sand, Norman Finkelstein, etc.).

 

Why then are both International Socialism and National Socialism the locus of Jew-hatred?

 

On the Jewish Question in 1844:

 

What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the world cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money . . . It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.

 

For example, a Marxist professor by the name of Robert Fine, wanted to “explode the myth” of Marx’s antisemitism. He said that the believers in this “myth” have an “inability” to comprehend Marx’s “ironic style” of writing.

 

had this to say:

 

Yet Marxists, evidently, apply everything else Marx wrote to virtually all contemporary political and social situations. Such Far Leftists also fail to recognise the fact that Marx began a Far Left tradition of Jew-hatred which has continued unbroken until this very day.

 

Ruth Fischer, writing the following:

 

Whoever cries out against Jewish capitalists is already a class warrior . . . Kick down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lampposts, and stamp upon them.

 

Twenty-Five Point Programme of 1924 and their socialist policies after gaining power.)

 

Of course some Jews are Marxists. Some Jews are anti-Marxists. Some Jews are Zionists. Some Jews are anti-Zionists. Come to think of it, some Jews are businessmen, too. Others are artists, philosophers, scientists, actors, market tradesmen, physicists . . .

 

Despite all the above, International Socialists and National Socialists fuse on far more than Jews. They also fuse on:

1. totalitarianism
2. collectivism
3. a reliance on conspiracy theories (often the very same ones!)
4. a reliance on the strong belief that all political enemies have false consciousness and are victims of the “Zionist” (or “Jewish”) Mainstream Media
5. Manichean world-views in which the Good (Nazis/Leftists) battle against Evil (Jews, capitalists, neo-cons, the Rich, etc.)
6. simple and crude black-and-white theories and analyses which are of necessity simple and crude in order to inspire rage and action
7. street violence followed (after the revolution) by state violence
8. a strong belief in the need for all-encompassing change (i.e., Year Zero)
9. sect/cult-like organisations
10. charismatic and sainted leaders
11. socialism (national and international)

. . . and so on.

 

 

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