The Jews and the Left

Depending on your levels of privilege, The Left is either an empowering revolutionary forum of ideologies, an idealistic security blanket for naive university students, or something along the Stalinist spectrum. While I’m sure anyone could poke holes in this definition, for the sake of this thesis: “The Left” as both a social consciousness and an economic belief system strives to align itself with the systematically oppressed in order to equalise global power structures (and it’s also flipping awesome). However when the power dynamics of a group rapidly changes, the Leftist attitude becomes tumultuous; confused and sometimes contradictory. In the case of Israel and modern Jewry, I can’t help perceiving current Leftist ideology as uninformed, and kinda flawed.

Throughout human history, Jews have been a pretty trampled group, constantly deprived of security, respect, and self determination. And in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Leftist moral alliance with the Jews became mainstream, funding a Jewish State and revising history textbooks acknowledging the previously silenced Jewish struggles, for example the hushed-up Russian pogroms and exile from England. As a rule, the early State of Israel was widely supported by the Western Left, but the Zionist’s position as the darling of the Left was short lived. Nowadays, universities are plastered with pro-Palestinian posters and calls to action, and claiming to be a Zionist will gather dirty looks in feminist circles. And in many ways, this attitude has an extremely valid background.

In my opinion, the 1900’s saw an unwillingness to criticise Israel, and for many decades the State has been afforded far too much official blind-eye in its military aggression and treatment of the Palestinians. I definitely maintain that Israel committed war crimes in the 1982 Lebanon Invasion and the Devil Reincarnate AKA Ariel Sharon unfairly avoided apt punishment. I also view the settler movement in the Occupied Territories as amoral and illegal, and am not entirely opposed to critiques of Israel as an Apartheid State. These violations of human rights and international laws went by almost unnoticed for half a century, and it is definitely within the “role” of the Left to bring the previously overlooked oppression of the Palestinians to the fore of social issues. However the tried and tested “us vs them” approach to supporting minorities against their oppressors has villainised Israel, and by extension the Jews. This is… problematic.

Intersectional feminist discussions around conflict between ethnic and racial groups equate Whiteness with oppression to accurately create the historical context of power dynamics, which is important when society refuses to hold White people accountable for their actions. But in relation to the Conflict, I have noticed an implicit feminist view that the reciprocal is equally valid - that oppression equals Whiteness. By this understanding, because Jews are the oppressors in this context, they therefore must be White. I don’t want this article to spend paragraphs explaining the existence of modern anti-Semitism - it should be enough to assert that Jews face very real discrimination and oppression in every corner of the world. But I do want to say that it is not anyone’s place to call Jews White.

The “white” status of Jews has been up in the air for decades; in the USA and the Anglo diaspora, many Jews have achieved total assimilation, and are sometimes an active part of their State’s establishment. Some individual Jews, often successful and non-religious (i.e. myself), validly call themselves white, but I think it is a gross misunderstanding of historical and modern Jewry to generally assert an inherent Jewish Whiteness. Firstly, Ashkenazi (European) Jews are not the extent of Abraham’s supposed descendants. Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews from the Middle East and Africa are People of Colour, and already deal with issues of erasure in the face of a Euro-centric view of Jewish history and culture. Even within the Asheknazi community, the Holocaust did a pretty good job of reminding Eastern and Central European Jews that they are not White, and with the recent rise of the alt-right in Hungary, Germany and France, that sentiment is clearly thriving. Essentially, there is a very significant population of Jews whose history, culture, decimated family trees and identity crises are flatly invalidated by the Leftist claim that Israel’s agenda is White Supremacist, and its implication of Jewish Whiteness.

Perhaps it is partially this attitude that has weakened the Jewish alliance with the Left, as there has been an undeniable shift of modern Jewry away from progressive connections. In America, Jews were historic democrats and had a strong alliance with Black communities especially in the Civil Rights Movement, but these connections have become weaker in recent years. This trend is likely also influenced by increasing acceptance into anglo middle classes and the conservatism that breeds from assimilated stability, but Left’s lack of nuanced understanding of Israel and its valid significance as a State for the Jews has only served to push them further away.

As someone who wishes to see a world run entirely on left wing politics (a socialist feminist benevolent dictator would be lovely too), I’m worried by any potential for the Left to lose its credibility - there are already too many bigots slamming it for unnecessary reasons, we don’t need valid reasons as well. Ultimately there needs to be a greater understanding in socialist and feminist circles about the uniqueness of the Conflict and the importance of recognising that broad social narratives of the world simply cannot reasonably apply in this area. Criticism of Israel and support of the Palestinians is necessary, but doing so at the expense of a multilayered understanding of a very complex political situation and a very vulnerable people is just unhelpful.

Hannah