The left's moral bankruptcy fully on display as it abandons the Jews

The left has become a movement based on resentment, and nothing triggers more resentment than the Jewish state.

How do you speak about the unspeakable? That is the question I have been asking myself this week, ever since we have borne collective witness to history’s first live-streamed pogrom. 

Contemporary left-wing ideology is dependent on the existence of oppressed victims, real or imagined. The left’s historical success with labour movements gaining worker’s rights, deprived them of their original underdog, the working class. Without an assigned class of victims, they lose their raison d’être. In my lifetime, the left has become a movement fundamentally based on resentment, on leveraging the clout of victimhood and powerlessness, in order to gain or maintain power, prestige and control.

Nothing in recent memory repudiates victimhood and powerlessness more than Israel and the Jews. They had the temerity to transform themselves from the ultimate stateless wretches to a rich, vibrant people deeply tied to their nationhood - another thing that the liberal-left is deeply suspicious of. 

Image copyright Vector Stock

Of course, anti-semitism has for a hundred years been commonly associated with right wing and/or conservative elements— although its most vicious manifestation under Hitler grew out of the most cosmopolitan, advanced and liberal society in 19th and early 20th century Europe, which was Germany. In 2023, however, the terms liberal, left-wing and right-wing no correctly fit these categories and therefore are no longer fit for purpose. I focus on the resulting degradation of the contemporary liberal-left because that is the world I grew up in. 

Israel is the lynchpin of the crisis of the liberal-left in the West today. It shows up all the flaws in their assumptions. Israel’s existence is a result of the muscular success of the Israeli people and their masterful use of realpolitik to their advantage. And as such, it is in some ways a rebuke to internationalist urbane Enlightenment values, at the very same moment that those values grew more decrepit and hollow, as our safety and comfort grew. The barbaric invasion of southern Israel last weekend by Hamas was made possible by the fundamental failure of modern notions like self-actualisation, human rights and identity to incorporate the idea of authoritative strength— as it always used to be understood. Israel, being the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and with a youth culture similar to ours, is itself riven by this contradiction.  Liberals have no moral framework that can adequately integrate darker elements like retribution and violence with peace and prosperity. 

Because of my tendency to listen to a wide variety of sources, I am aware of the narrative that says Israel is a shadowy spy state with its tentacles in all manner of nefarious globalist enterprises. Nothing produces an outbreak of ‘whataboutery’ like Israel. Until now, being anti-Israel, the state, did not for me immediately disqualify all other opinions a person might hold. I am not an expert. I allow people their own trajectories. I recognise the limits of my understanding.

But I do not claim neutrality on this issue. I do not, and never will, agree with anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist — no matter its sins, real or embellished. To me the internecine geopolitical manoeuvring of the world’s only Jewish state matters less — far less — that the profoundly moral fact that Jews have a right to that state, and to the stalwart military defence of it. For non-Jews like me, spectators watching from afar, this is not a time to argue over this policy versus that policy. It is a time for soul searching and checking in with your moral foundation.

We live in the dim half-light of competing realities. On the blasted landscape of this information war battlefield, the best we can do is to grope around, carefully picking up sources and checking to see if they are real, or if they are planted by the enemy. Of course, if you have a moral centre, you will understand that there is only one reality, with competing interpretations. The sheer power of human denial enables us to use facts to construct towers of lies in which we live, and then we call them home truths. 

Over the course of this week, it’s become clear that what happened on Saturday in Israel was more than a terrorist attack, it was an invasion carried out by air and land, followed by a pogrom in the Cossack style. However, the videos that have been widely circulated and the sinister cinematic quality to it all does have the same effect on the media-consuming public as a terrorist attack like 9/11.

On the day of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, I was living in Brooklyn and working at the New York Times Metro section. The panic and fear of that morning was something I am lucky enough to have experienced only that day. When the second tower fell, I was about half way across the East River on the Manhattan Bridge, running into the city to get to work in the newsroom. Watching the tower turn to dust, I screamed, I began to cry, and then the thought appeared fully formed in my mind, ‘the chickens have come home to roost.”

I was not thinking, at that moment, of the thousands of people who had just died violently. My brain was simply not able to entertain that reality. Instead, from my place in the cultural and societal left, my brain went directly to the thought that years of bad US foreign policy had produced countless powerless victims who then brought their rage to American shores — a rage that was, at that precise moment, scaring the wits out of me. I rationalised what I was watching to give myself the illusion of control. 

I’m not interested in debating American foreign policy, or any other policy for that matter, in this essay. The only reason I bring that anecdote up is because I feel a flash of recognition — and flush of shame — when I see similar responses all over social media in response to the murderous attacks of last weekend. While a rational, political argument could be made that my reaction to 9/11 was correct, that would miss bigger point to terrorism, overall. The point of terrorism is to instigate a series of emotions that ultimately alienate a person from what is universally recognised as good. 

Faced with a terrorist action that results in the brutal death of any innocent person, the viewer (for there is always a viewer, that’s the point of terrorism) begins a process of rationalisation that attempts to explain away the fundamental spiritual crime that has just occurred. Politics, a paltry excuse for a thought system, is these days the vehicle the human brain uses to carry the rationalisation. And in so doing, that person is diminished, separated from empathising with the victim through the process of justification. By forcing us to be spectators to acts of barbarism, terrorists also force many of us into positions of moral equivocation that detaches us little by little —before we have time to realise it — from our humanity, makes us part of the show. 

That being said, I cannot quite put into words the sense of doom I feel when I see footage of “pro-Palestinian” protests across the so-called civilised world after Saturday’s murder spree. Not because I hate Palestinians, or because I don’t recognise their right to exist, or care about their decades of suffering. I feel rage because there are so many people out there who are so full of dumb hubris and reflexive allegiance to the idea of an identity — of all ridiculous, ephemeral things — that they would unabashedly celebrate the murder of children half a world away. The Western left’s support of Hamas works directly against the safety of Palestinians by encouraging them to hold fast to the fundamentally anti-Semitic belief that Israel should not exist. 

I’m not a person who takes the gift of life lightly. I am a product of my safe, rich society, and therefore the thought that a person will die in order that I might live has never crossed my mind. But this stark calculus used to be a recognised reality. The loss of human life on the scale of Saturday’s attacks, and the civilian casualties which will inevitably follow in Gaza, are horrifying to contemplate. When I listened to Benjamin Netanyahu say “we will return fire of a magnitude that the enemy has not known. The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,” I felt an existential dread and a deep sorrow for every civilian on that patch of land, Arab and Jew. The silly, vapid, mollycoddled society in which we live will now witness the primal forces that we have been merrily pretending no longer exist. I, for one, do not want to watch.

I find myself surprisingly surprised that this fundamental moral principal of allowing the existence of a Jewish state is not recognised anymore on the left. The story of the Jewish struggle across two millennia is the story of human triumph over all manner of adversity. It is emblematic of all that humans are capable of. The phrase, “next year in Jerusalem” makes the hair on the back my neck stand up, such is its poignant power. The Jewish experience is of mythological importance. And I don’t mean myth in the sense of made up, I mean myth in its original sense, as expressing something universally meaningful. The Jews are part of the bedrock of our cultural foundation. 

While the dark agendas of regional power players could bring about further calamity, unceasing attacks on the Jews are a far more elemental threat than temporal geopolitical ambitions. Anti-semitism is “pervasive, persistent, pernicious and protean.”  Recall the old women murdered — one stabbed to death, the other thrown out of a window — by French Muslims. The attack on Jewish school children in 2012 in Toulouse. The London neighbourhood of Golders Green which always sees attacks after an an outbreak of violence in the Middle East. Western liberals expect Jews to negotiate with an adversary whose demands will only be met by the annihilation of their nation, the only place that has ever protected them. How can diplomatic protocol ever resolve this? 

Not that I needed any more convincing, but here is further proof of the total degradation of the western left. They are morally, politically, socially, intellectually, spiritually bankrupt. They have no purpose other than to sow chaos and division and to flatter and promote themselves by cosplaying the role of freedom fighter. One woman I know personally posted on her social media slick footage of Hamas breaching the wire border with Israel, celebrating it as though it were some kind of heroic moment. Also featured on her feed? Photos of her and female friends in tiny bikinis and effete topless men striking poses with hands on hips, basking under the Lebanese sun, because apparently that’s where the hipster left likes to summer. This woman is flirting with terrorism chic and I find my blood boiling at her stupidity and callowness. The most brutal groups to exist in my lifetime are mere lifestyle accessories that also allow her to pretend she has an edgy intellectual side. Western women lefties spend too much hanging out with soy boys and male feminists, and are clearly fetishising Islamic militants as a result. 

This deeply unserious posturing pales in comparison with the hot takes along the lines of:“This is what decolonisation looks like,” and American university students blaming Israel for the murders of its children. I suppose I should be glad that they have fully revealed their vengeful, murderous impulses.

If we cannot recognise the unique history of Jews in this world, then we may as well be chimps living in trees. The entire post-war civilisation project hinges, in very real ways, on the fate of Israel. If she falls, then so does the entire possibility that we can have the dream of pluralistic modernity after the nightmare of the very modern Holocaust. 

Support of the Jewish state is a moral issue, not a political one. Politics are just vile squabbles. Morality is our last chance at pulling back from the brink.