The Western Left Killed the Israeli Left

There is much discussion, particularly within the western left, about Israel's continued slide politically right-ward. Anti-Zionists and Israel-Haters generally attribute this move to the right on the part of Israelis as a reflection of the inherent nefarious nature of Zionists, if not Jews. On the left, in the United States and Europe, Jews who care about the Jewish state are sometimes tolerated, and sometimes not, but always subject to charges of racism by the element on the left that hates Jews and Israel and Zionists and AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League and all other Jewish organizations that are not either anti-Zionist or contemptuous toward the Jewish state.

J Street is usually acceptable, but this is because it remains entirely unclear whether J Street is a pro-Israel organization.  As discussed elsewhere, there is much evidence to suggest that J Street is, in fact, an anti-Israel organization.

Leftists, however, who do not share the anti-Zionist contempt for Jews, and who know a thing or two about the Arab-Israel conflict, will usually acknowledge that the failure of the Oslo process and Arafat's unleashing of the Second Intifada played a big role in moving Israel toward the political right.  Anyone who understands the history of the conflict knows that during the 1990s, when Arafat and Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton were sitting around the big table, there was considerable optimism within Israel that they would be able to broker a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians and thus bring peace to the region.

It all seemed so rational and sensible, after all.  The notion of land for peace seemed like it should work.  Give the Palestinians 100 percent of Gaza, nearly 100 percent of the West Bank in a contiguous area with land swaps, and the Arab sections of eastern Jerusalem as a capital.  When Arafat tragically, and unconscionably, rejected this offer, refused to make a counter offer, and unleashed the equivalent of 9/11 every two weeks for over three years upon the Jews of the Middle East, those Jews became demoralized with the peace process and thus began to move toward the right.

Would anyone expect anything else?  It is just soooo easy to sit in our comfortable offices, houses, and apartments in the United States, almost completely safe within one of the largest and most powerful countries on the planet, and lecture those Jews, in that tiny beleaguered nation, on morality and politics.  The Second Intifada destroyed the Israeli left because the Oslo peace process was the baby of the Israeli left and it led to nothing but violence and death.  Between 2000 and 2004, the Palestinians launched a civil war against the Jews, featuring suicide bombings.

Thus it was that Israel turned away from Meretz and Labor and began to look more and more toward Likud and Kadima.  What virtually no one acknowledges, however, is that a major part of the reason that Israelis rejected the left is because it was during the height of the Second Intifada, the height of the Palestinian orgy of violence and killing of Jews in the Middle East, that the left's hatred for Israel reached toward hysteria. As Jews were being slaughtered in pizzerias by fools who wanted to die for their religion, western leftists were jumping up and down, pointing the finger at those Jews, and telling them that IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT!

Israelis, for the most part, are not stupid people.  They know who their friends are and they know who their friends are not.  When the western left turned against Israel and laid the entire blame for the conflict on the Jews of the Middle East, even as those Jews were being slaughtered in a frenzy of Palestinian violence, Israelis came to understand the international left was, if anything, their enemy.  It came to look more and more like the western left was simply siding with the Arabs in their ongoing war against the Jews.

So, naturally Israelis moved to the right.

By essentially siding with suicide bombers and Jihadis and Hamas, the western left killed the Israeli left.

Sad, but true.

Daily Kos Anti-Zionists

Anti-Zionists on Daily Kos, one of the largest liberal blogs in the United States, tend to have problems with history. That is, there are historical facts that are acceptable to them and historical facts that must be swept under the rug for ideological reasons. Among these latter is that the Arabs of the British mandate held some degree of moral responsibility for the Holocaust.

This truth is entirely unacceptable to these hard-left anti-Jewish ideologues who, much like the original Nazis, are calling for a boycott of Jewish institutions, businesses, and academics, if they come out of Israel.

Omar Barghouti, one of the leaders of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), has a recent book out explaining just why it is necessary to target and undermine and harm the Jewish people in the Middle East. (Boycott, Désinvestissement, Sanctions; BDS contre l’apartheid et l’occupation de la Palestine)

As Joel Fishman notes in his review of Barghouti's book:

Barghouti’s assertion that “the Palestinians - and the Arabs in general - do not have the least responsibility for the Nazi genocide, committed in Europe against essentially European populations, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others,” is not supported by verifiable historical facts.

Barghouti omits Nazi support of the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936 and the Arab role in securing the White Paper in 1939 which blocked an important escape route for European Jewry during the Holocaust. He makes no mention of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who lived well in Berlin during the Second World War and collaborated with Nazi Germany. For example, the protocol of the conversation between Hitler and the Mufti which took place on November 28, 1941 documented the Mufti’s appeal to Hitler for an open declaration of German support for the elimination of the national Jewish homeland (and everything this implied).[10] Moreover, Husseini aggressively endeavored to block the escape routes for Jews from countries under Nazi domination, such as Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Italy, which still retained a measure of independence. Bernard Lewis wrote that “in May and June 1943, the mufti sent letters to all four governments demanding that they withdraw their authorization for Jewish emigration and urging them instead to send their Jews to Poland ‘where they are under active control.’”[11]

Barghouti omits the central role of the Mufti in the Nazi propaganda broadcasts of Radio Zeesen to the Arab world, calling for a Holy War, a jihad, against the Allies and the Jews.[12] One of the Mufti’s remarkable contributions was his address on Balfour Day, November 2, 1943, which described the close affinity of Nazis and Moslems. On this festive occasion, he declared, “….that which brings the Germans closer to us and brings us to their side is the fact that Germany has never invaded any Arab or Islamic land, and its long-standing policy of friendship for the Moslems is known. Germany is also fighting against the common enemy which oppressed the Arabs and Moslems in their different lands. It [Germany] recognized the Jews exactly and decided to find a final solution to the danger that came from them [the Jews], which will end their mischief in this world.”[13]...

In addition, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cueppers published an extensive article describing the plans of Nazi Germany to carry out genocide in Palestine making use of Palestinian Arab collaborators in the actual murder of the Jews of the Yishuv.[15]

The Arabs of the Mandate actively supported the Nazis during World War II and sought to bring about the Final Solution to "the Jewish Question" in Palestine with a Germany victory over the Allies in the Middle East.

As Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers note in “Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942 (pdf):

In March 1937, Walter Doehle, the German consul general in Jerusalem, wrote a position statement on the future aims of German policy in Palestine in which he commented on the enthusiasm for Nazism among Palestinians:

Palestinian Arabs in all social strata have great sympathies for the new Germany and its Führer. These are sympathies that should be deemed even more valuable since they are on a purely abstract level.… If a person identified himself as a German when faced with threats from an Arab crowd, this alone generally allowed him to pass freely. But when some identified themselves by making the “Heil Hitler” salute, in most cases the Arabs’ attitude became expressions of open enthusiasm, and the German gave ovations, to which the Arabs responded loudly. Enthusiasm for our Führer and the new Germany is probably so widespread because the Palestinian Arabs, in their struggle for existence, long for an Arab “Führer.” And because in their fight against the Jews, they sense that they share a common single front with the Germans.

And the truth is that from that day to this they have yet to stop fighting, which is precisely why they have brought so much misery upon themselves.  The Germans got beat by the Allies and stopped fighting.  The Arabs got beat by the Jews of the Yishuv (including Jewish women and Holocaust survivors) in 1948 and never stopped fighting.  The reason for that is because the Allies constituted enough people, enough power, to decisively beat Nazi Germany, but the Jews were far too small in number to do anything but hold off the Jihadis who sought to murder them and continue to do so.

Omar Barghouti, and his BDS buddies on Daily Kos, are not seeking justice for the Palestinian people, but continuing the war against the Jews of the Middle East that is ongoing since the 1920s. They are not seeking to end the "occupation" because the occupation can stop anytime the Palestinians agree to a state for themselves and to end the violence against the Jews.  One of the differences between this day and the earlier period of the conflict is that during the 1930s and the 1940s virtually no liberal would fight on the side of the Nazis, whereas today fighting on the side of anti-Jewish / anti-Israel fascists is considered de rigueur.

It's a "forbidden thrill" on the left to harass the Jews, which one can do so long as it gets couched, and shrouded, in the deceptive language of anti-Zionism.

For the west, World War II ended in 1945, however for the Jews of the Middle East World War II represented one particularly ugly phase in an ongoing war that the Arabs launched in the 1920s and which has yet to end.  Meanwhile, there is now a malicious element on the western left that feels it has a moral obligation to join with the Arabs in their efforts against the Jews because they misconceive the conflict as one between an allegedly noble "indigenous" population versus the "racist, colonialist, militarist" Israelis.  This despite the fact that the Jews have been an oppressed minority in the Middle East for centuries, have had a continuous presence on that land for about 3,500 years, maintain a liberal democracy which respects women's rights and gay rights, and are outnumbered there by a factor of about 50 to 1.

This is why so many "progressives" cheered on the violent Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara who told the IDF to "go back to Auschwitz."

Sad, but true.