The Israel Boycott, Anti-Judaism, and the Giant Shrug
January 7, 2014 by Jackson Doughart
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Ive long tried to understand the contemporary Lefts obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and its tunnel-visioned view of the matter, which categorizes all Israeli actions as evil and all Arab ones as an admirable fight against oppression. One should aim to find an explanation that does not rest on a fundamental hostility toward Jews; after all, the unfounded and premature attribution of bigotry to ones political opponents is normally the sign of a weak argument.
The best such explanation that I can come up with rests on the radical Lefts predilection for anti-Americanism, which resembles far more a political position than a form of bigotry. The problem, in their eyes, is not Israel per se but the fact that it is an ally of the Great Satan. There is some empirical support for this: even figures such as Noam Chomsky were not hostile to Israel in its early existence. The country was, as one recalls, founded primarily on the principles of democratic socialism and owed to Jewish Leftists for its establishment. Chomsky even lived in Israel on a kibbutz for a time. It was only when Israel aligned itself with the United States that it became complicit, in their view, with American imperialism, and hence dismissible on principle. The Lefts anti-Israelism could thus be chalked up to the decayed ideology of anti-colonialism, which has for decades been focuses squarely on American foreign policy.