From Trotsky to Torah: The Left and Israel

Seventy-five years ago, the left was pro-Israel. There was a troubling history of antisemitism on the left, and responses to Israel’s founding ranged from enthusiastic to ambivalent; but when five Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948 with the expressed intention of wiping it out, the left mostly rallied to Israel’s side. Defending Israel’s existence in its early years was part of what it meant to be progressive. 

This was largely because the Soviet Union briefly yet forcefully supported Israel, but there’s a reason the Soviet Union’s stance resonated among communists and other leftists. The world had just witnessed the Holocaust, saw the traumatized Jews who made their way to Palestine. They observed the hundreds of thousands of Jews being driven out of the Middle East and North Africa. Whatever the real difficulties of founding a Jewish state alongside a prospective Palestinian one, Israel’s founding was widely seen by progressives as the way to ensure “Never Again.”

How did the word “Zionist” undergo such a dramatic transformation in meaning: from a term simply denoting someone who upholds the Jewish right to self-determination, to the preternaturally sinister embodiment of reaction, violence and racism? 

So why do self-described progressives today routinely describe Israel’s founders as settler-colonialist apartheid lovers? How did the word “Zionist” undergo such a dramatic transformation in meaning: from a term simply denoting someone who upholds the Jewish right to self-determination, to the preternaturally sinister embodiment of reaction, violence and racism? How did a tiny Jewish nation, after being attacked and invaded by its openly antisemitic Arab neighboring nations, become transformed in the leftist imagination from David to Goliath?

I know leftists genuinely view Israel and its defenders this way because as a Trotskyist for many years I did the same. Hissing about “Zionistsss” gave my comrades and me both a precious sense of solidarity and the pleasure of a sense of righteousness. As Marxists who recognized the principle of self-determination, we upheld—in theory—Israel’s right to exist. We challenged antisemitism when it was expressed in lurid claims about the Rothschilds. We proudly invoked our World War II heritage, the Jewish Trotskyists martyred by the Nazis. All this served mainly to assure us that there was not — could not possibly be — anything amiss in our claims about the reactionary “Zionistsss.” 

Leftists like my former comrades claim the progressive attitude toward Israel changed because of Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War. In this account, it was at that point that Zionism proved its reactionary nature, so the left’s increasingly vitriolic rhetoric was justified. This self-gratifying myth requires willfully ignoring and distorting key facts about that war. 

The agent for setting these mental gymnastics in motion was the Soviet Union, which by then supported the Arab nations against Israel and the West. In response to Israel’s crushing victory over its client states in 1967, the Soviet Union unleashed a tsunami of virulently antisemitic, anti-Zionist propaganda. Western leftists, in thrall to the Soviet Union’s “anti-imperialism,” snapped it up. A tenacious toxin was released. 

This isn’t to suggest that antisemitism wasn’t there before, or that the leftists who began howling about Zionism in 1967 lacked agency. The Soviet Union played a huge role in lighting the match, however, and the toxin has spewed ever since. The ubiquitous Jew-bashing symbols seen at today’s anti-Israel protests — like the Magen David twinned with the swastika to suggest moral equivalence — were originally Soviet imports. Decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, its legacy remains in Western leftist Jew-hatred, which has penetrated ever-wider sections of “respectable” society.

Antisemitism on the left isn’t a set of beliefs so much as it’s a feeling: a strangely intense fear, mingled with loathing, of “Zionists” that gets passed down among people who see themselves as virtuous. 

Antisemitism on the left isn’t a set of beliefs so much as it’s a feeling: a strangely intense fear, mingled with loathing, of “Zionists” that gets passed down among people who see themselves as virtuous. Because it isn’t a belief system in the intellectual sense, it evades scrutiny. For such leftists and mainstream liberals, it just “feels” true, in some timeless way, that Israel routinely murders Palestinian children. Try telling them this isn’t actually happening, that the situation is more complicated than they think, and that their sense of resonance might be connected to centuries of medieval blood libels, and they will be outraged at being unjustly — as they see it — accused. When they splutter back that they oppose antisemitism, they’re almost certainly being sincere: I was. Antisemitism is the most shapeshifting of hatreds. Try raising it to the light for examination and it will throw up camouflage (“anti-Zionism”) and slither away, only to come back stronger next time. 

Those who would deny the right of the Jewish state to exist would, whatever their intentions, deny the right of the Jewish people to exist. Don’t give an inch to people who demonize or try to delegitimize Israel. Criticize it by all means, but don’t ever forget what it is: a Jewish refuge won through unimaginable suffering, which defies the haters to affirm the Jews’ right to not only life, but autonomy and dignity. Nothing could be more legitimate, necessary and just.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”