Since the year 2000, there has been an
increasing convergence between those who belong to the radical left and
those who promote Islamism in the West. One of the key areas in
cementing their rapprochement has been the Palestinian question. The new
“alliance” was further reinforced during the past decade by the Iraq
war, the Second Lebanon War, and the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2009.
Despite its current marginality, Palestine
still remains the paradigmatic case of oppression for most left-wing
militants today. Israelis, on the other hand, are not only the bad guys
in this conflict; they are seen as the embodiment of
capitalist-imperialist evil. Amazingly, this negative imagery has not
been much affected by the Arab revolutions of 2011, despite their
revelation of the cruelty, corruption, and utter cynicism of Arab
regimes, highlighted by the ethnic cleansing and genocidal assault of
the Assad regime on its own population in Syria.
Broadly speaking, Israel is still perceived by
much of the Western left and by the Islamists as being “white,”
Western, and alien to the Middle East. In other words, Israelis are seen
as brutal colonialist invaders. The whole story of the Zionist project
is disconnected from Jewish history and the centuries’-old link between
the people of Israel and its historic homeland. The Palestinians (with
only the feeblest of Israeli hasbara responses) have, by contrast, been
successfully cast in the role of “Jews,” downtrodden and ruthlessly
abused by Nazi-like Israelis. A key part of this campaign has been the
corrosive depiction of Israel as an “apartheid state.” This libel is
endlessly repeated throughout North America and Western Europe — in
Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, as well as France, Germany and
Great Britain. As a consequence, the anti-Israeli obsession has steadily
seeped into the European chattering classes, the free professions, the
churches, and nongovernmental organizations. It is especially virulent
in academia and very much in tune with the postcolonial zeitgeist.
Another weapon in this global anti-Zionist
transformation is the growing effort to “Nazify” Israel and thereby
invert the Holocaust. The abuse of Holocaust memory as a political
weapon against the Jewish state has indeed become increasingly rampant
in recent years along with the popularity of antisemitic conspiracy
theories. The soft version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which
evokes the all-powerful “Zionist Lobby” and the alleged hidden control
of “Jewish moneybags,” is in fact far more common than many people
realize.
Inverting
the Holocaust. A placard depicting Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert and Ehud
Barak as Nazis at an anti-Israel rally in Boston, 2009 (photo credit: CC
BY dvanhorn, Flickr)
Anti-Semitism has been further stimulated by
the growing worldwide influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as
the racist anti-Jewish material that is funded by Saudi Arabia and
openly preached in the Middle Eastern, European and American mosques or
is on sale in Islamist bookshops. The “decadent” Western culture that
radical Muslims endlessly execrate is seen by jihadists as being
controlled and dominated by Jews. This adds a particularly inflammatory
dimension to Muslim anti-Semitism, which on this point has many
affinities with the Neo-Nazi right. The message of the jihadists is
indeed explicitly genocidal, but it is left-wing anti-Israeli rhetoric
that gives it intellectual cover and respectability.
In the midst of the London Olympics, it was
rather sobering to recall that a country like Great Britain remains
today the world center of the academic boycott and also of trade union
efforts to economically sanction Israel. Millions of trade unionists at
least nominally support an economic boycott of Israel. For the moment it
may be confined to produce coming from the West Bank, but the aim goes
far beyond that. In recent years, the British TUC (Trades Union
Congress) has acted as if it had been hijacked by the anti-Zionist
Palestine Solidarity Committee. British academic unions have also passed
resolutions that consistently denounce Israel as an “apartheid state.”
If it were not for a legal opinion that pronounced such measures to be
discriminatory, the effects would already have been far more severe.
Among Western democracies, only in Britain has the boycott thus far
achieved such a level of resonance — even though most Britons, if asked,
would almost certainly reject it, and bilateral relations between the
UK and Israel still remain fairly cordial.
The relations between France and Israel are also largely positive, but that did not prevent the lethal jihadi assault in Toulouse
several months ago in which three Jewish children and a young rabbi
were ruthlessly murdered in cold blood. In the two months that followed,
aggressive anti-Semitic attacks in France by Muslims against Jewish
adolescents surged dramatically. To even point to such naked violence in
the current toxic atmosphere is to risk being labeled a “Zionist
lackey,” an Islamophobe, or a racist, especially in bien-pensant leftist
or liberal circles.
It should be recalled that Mohammed Merah’s
brutal slaughter of innocent Jewish children in France was carried out
in the name of the global jihad and “avenging Palestine.” The muted
response to such atrocities in liberal “progressive” Western opinion is a
badge of shame for those whose self-proclaimed banner is that of human
rights.
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