The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate
The European Left is struggling to combat anti-Semitism in its midst.
April 20, 2016
Jamie Palmer
Reprinted from TheTower.org.
Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, resigned on February 17, citing widespread anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews among its members. His statement and a subsequent press release by the Oxford University Jewish Society make for
sobering reading, not least because this is not an isolated case.
In early March, the British Labour Party was forced to explain why it allowed
Gerry Downing, who had written about the need to “address the Jewish Question,” and
Vicki Kirbyi, who once tweeted that Adolf Hitler might be the “Zionist God,” to be readmitted to the party following their suspension for anti-Semitism. Kirby had been nothing less than a parliamentary candidate, and upon her return was appointed vice-chair of her local party executive committee.
Over the past few years, a palpable sense of alarm has been quietly growing amongst Jews on the European Left. At the heart of an often-fraught relationship lies the following dilemma: The vast majority of Jews are Zionist, and the vast majority of Left-wing opinion is not.
But the problem goes beyond the question of Israel itself. It also involves a general sense that the Left is unconcerned with Jewish interests and unwilling to take the matter of rising anti-Semitism seriously, preferring instead to dismiss it as a consequence of Israeli policies or a censorious attempt to close down discussion of the same. The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of anti-Semites was unworthy of their concern.
This is a complex subject, with roots that stretch back to the beginning of the last century. I have attempted to outline in necessarily broad fashion some of the trends of thought that have informed the relationship between Jews and the Left, as well as the shifting attitudes towards Israel in particular. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on their implications.
The key question facing the European Left is whether or not it can change in such a way that Jews can once again feel part of the Left’s political family. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future the answer to that question appears to be no.
Jews and Europeans drew different lessons about nationalism from the experience of World War II. On a continent disfigured by the mayhem of conquest, occupation, collaboration, and genocide, Nazism and fascism were perceived to have been nationalism’s logical endgame. As chauvinism and self-glorification gave way to introspection and self-doubt, a new universalism and internationalism emerged from the rubble—the establishment of the United Nations, the adoption by its General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a rise in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist feeling that eventually led Western democracies to dismantle their empires.
...
Stalin’s death in 1953 led to a brief respite, but his successors were scarcely better. A major Soviet campaign from 1961-64 dedicated to rooting out “economic crimes” saw a disproportionate number of Jews executed, with all the usual anti-Semitic tropes present and correct in the press and accompanying cartoons. And in 1975, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be “a form of racism.” Whether or not this resolution was tabled at the behest of the Soviet Union, as some historians have alleged, the Soviets voted for it.
All of which would have been bad enough had it been confined to the Soviet sphere. But in the democratic West, Soviet anti-Semitism was diligently and uncritically reproduced in the communist press and thus made its way into the ideological bloodstream of the Left. Writers for
L’Humanité in France,
Ă–esterreichische Volkstimme in Austria,
Drapeau Rouge in Belgium,
Vorwärts in Switzerland,
L’Unità in Italy, and the
Daily Worker in Britain repeated sedition charges against Soviet Jews. Anyone on the Left who objected was attacked and defamed as a Zionist shill. And a series of claims about Zionism and the true nature of the State of Israel began their slow, patient journey from the radical fringe to the mainstream.
...
And before that, Stalin’s 1952 Doctors Plot, in which hundreds of Jewish doctors were accused of planning to murder top Soviet officials, forced previously ardent Stalinists to confront the painful fact that they had allowed themselves to be deceived into defending a murderous political pogrom.
But such moments are hard to come by these days. As the recent wave of stabbings and car-rammings have demonstrated, the Left is simply unmoved by Palestinian terror. Anti-Zionist Jews or (better still) those prepared to renounce every last vestige of their Jewish identity will of course continue to be warmly welcomed and invited to join the Left’s tireless struggle against the baleful power of the Zionist entity and Jewish capital. For anyone and everyone else, unconditional support for the Palestinians and hostility to the State of Israel—not just for what it does, but for what it
is—are now the
sine qua non of authentic European Leftism. These are positions informed by convictions so fundamental to the idea of what it means to be Left-wing that they are adopted with hardly a second thought. For this to change will require a stark reappraisal of what the Left values as well as what it despises, and the courage to interrogate some of its most sacred articles of faith. Regrettably, at present the appetite for this kind of painful self-criticism remains negligible.
The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate
a couple of days early. ...... 
