The European Left: It's Not Good For the Jews

The New York Times, as ever ahead of the curve, notices a startling development: The European Left is pervasively anti-Semitic! But wait, there’s more: The Times sees evidence of “a much broader political shift by European Jews--away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.”

As it turns out, tolerance for Jews, opposition to terrorism, and support for Israel are commodities in such short supply on the precincts of the European Left that even the Times feels compelled to take notice. But while the paper is to be commended for remarking on this development, I would be remiss if I didn’t take issue with two of the details presented in the story. First, the Times explains that:

Much of European Jewry considered the left its natural home in the 19th century and the early 20th century. The left supported Jewish emancipation and more liberal immigration policies in Western Europe, and Social Democrats and Communists opposed Russia's czars, who sponsored anti-Semitic pogroms, and Hitler.

There’s no gainsaying that European Jews, by and large, had felt more at home in the left. That said, the notion that anti-Jewish pogroms were sponsored solely by the Russian tsars in the face of opposition by a Jewish-friendly left fails the test of historical accuracy. To take just one instance, in the 1880s, leftwing populist movements, whose ranks included both socialists and communists, played no small role in inciting riots against “Jewish parasites” on the belief that the militant fervor generated by these attacks would swell into a revolutionary tide that would sweep the tsars, the landed gentry and the capitalists in general from power. If a few Jews had to be sacrificed for the revolutionary cause, so be it. And this to say nothing of the Bolshevik revolution, hardly a right-wing achievement, but for which untold thousands of Jews paid with their lives. In view of his background, it is puzzling that the Times should trace the left’s hostility to Jews and Israel to the 50s and 60s:

From the 1960's onward, the left in Europe increasingly portrayed Israel not as a land of collective farmers making the desert bloom but as an occupying power. So the disenchantment accelerated, especially in the last few years. "Arafat became the leftist pinup boy following Che Guevara," said Barry Kosmin, head of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.

Kosmin has it right, but the Times' timeline is faulty. The left’s disenchantment with Israel antedated by several decades the founding of the Jewish state. After all, prominent among the early opponents of Zionism were European (as well as American) liberals. Ensorcelled by utopianism of the internationalist stamp , they declared against the creation of a Jewish homeland, contending that the only cure for the Jews’ historical miseries was to cease being Jews—that is, to assimilate fully. Of course, next to Marxists’ contempt for the plight of what their prophet dismissed as the “lousy little peoples,” much of the left’s anti-Zionism was practically an endorsement of the Jewish State.

Where liberals and radicals found common ground was in the shared conviction that a Jewish homeland was a hopeless anachronism, thoroughly out of step with the supranational fashions of the age. It took the Holocaust to intrude on these fantasies. And even then, the support for Israel proved short lived. No sooner had the fledgling Jewish state fended of invading Arab armies than the European left decided that the "dispossessed" Palestinian Arabs were the real victims.

No prize to Moonbat Central readers for guessing why the Times favors historical revisionism that flatters its liberal pieties.