WhatsappFar-leftists don’t care when “people of color” kill other people of color.
While Middle East history in this century is drenched in blood, dominated by tyranny and scarred by the murder of millions of innocents, the causes of this massive injustice and inhumanity have failed to energize the American political left. Tragic, brutally violent conflicts in Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Yemen in the last 26 years have inspired no tent-cities, screaming protests, indignant op-eds or new categories of revolutionary study to university curricula.
Only one conflict has animated and energized the radical left as no other—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally, and specifically, the Gaza war that Hamas started on Oct. 7, 2023. Ironically, the actual human and territorial impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dwarfed by the massive killing, destruction and savage cruelty caused by the region’s other conflicts.
By most any measure of historical impact, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would only rate a footnote. Why then has this conflict generated more attention among the political left—as well as its handmaiden, the mainstream media—than all the region’s other conflicts combined?
Examining Israel’s uniqueness in the Middle East, the reasons for its outsized attraction to the Western public, media, academics and radical-left activists seem obvious. Likewise, the reason that Israel has become a lightning rod for outraged criticism, condemnation and hate from the left is also explicable, given the left’s revolutionary ideological roots.
As the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, Israel certainly deserves attention from the West. Israel is also distinguished as the geographical and spiritual origin point of Christianity—and, of course, Israel hosts significant religious sites for both Christians and Muslims. Furthermore, there’s no ignoring that Israel is America’s undisputed strongest ally in the region and among its most stalwart allies globally.
Finally, and above all, when assessing the disproportionate hostility toward Israel by the political left, we must note that Israel is the only non-Muslim country in the entire region—a tiny outpost of just 10 million people on territory the size of New Jersey, dominated by a vast sea of half a billion Muslims, who occupy territory 550 times greater than the Jewish state.
Ironically, Israel’s geographic and demographic underdog status buys it nothing from the ultraleft, which dogmatically categorizes the Jewish state’s indigenous people as colonizing invaders and oppressors. Indeed, it is precisely the contrast between Israel’s Jewish and Zionist values that makes it an enemy of today’s neo-Marxists, who are increasingly poisoning American politics.
Ultra-leftists ignore Middle East conflicts
More than 20 wars and high-intensity conflicts have roiled the Middle East in the last 26 years, all of which resulted in many more deaths than the Gaza war. These include wars in Iraq (500,000-plus dead), Syria (500,000-plus dead), Yemen (377,000 dead) and Sudan (600,000 dead). Aside from Iraq, in which U.S. and other Western forces were heavily and directly involved, all of these conflicts were civil wars that merited little-to-no mobilization from America’s radical left.
However, the war in Gaza—which claimed 77,000 fatalities, half of them fighters—drew massive attention from American ultra-leftists. Researchers at Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), which records U.S. protest actions, describe the Gaza protests as the largest and most sustained U.S. protest wave sparked by a foreign event in CCC’s tracking since 2017.
How the left makes war in Gaza fit its false narrative.
What makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Gaza war different from other horrific conflicts in the Middle East? First, this isn’t a Muslim-on-Muslim struggle, but rather Muslims on Jews. Ultra-leftists don’t care when “people of color” kill other people of color, as occurred in all other Middle East conflicts.
Thus, the radicals falsely cast Jews as white Westerners colonizing “Palestine,” whose relative-newcomer Arabs first called themselves “indigenous Palestinians” in 1967. Radical activists reverse reality to fit their rigid neo-Marxist ideology, which requires a conquering white interloper who subjugates native people. In fact, Jews, with their 3,000-year history in the land of Israel, are its indigenous people, still fighting off Arab colonizers.
Jewish values represent the struggle of freedom over tyranny.
Israel represents the triumph of Jewish self-determination in the form of Zionism. According to author Dara Horn, Jewish values are fundamentally anti-tyrannical, anti-hierarchical and nonconformist. This has put Israel and Zionism at odds with authoritarian powers—from the Romans and Babylonians to the Muslims, Ottomans and the British Mandate.
In Europe, Jewish individualism and particularity frustrated all manner of authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany, for centuries. The collectively minded Soviet Union, especially, resented Jewish nationalism as an unacceptable form of particularism, against which it trumped up condemnations of Zionism as racist, colonialist and genocidal.
Jewish individualism and self-determination are anathema to the ultra-left.
Jewish tradition places strong emphasis on individual moral agency, free will, rigorous debate and the right to national identity. No wonder today’s radical left, which prioritizes collectivism, universalism and conformity with politically correct dogma, finds free-minded Jews, especially Zionists, anathema.
Moreover, neo-Marxist “classism” divides people into acceptable and unacceptable identities—favoring people of color and non-binary genders, while rejecting meritocracy, individualism and the traditional family. The ultraleft therefore specifically condemns American Jewish social and economic success as “unfair”—rejecting individual Jews unless they agree to conform to leftist ideology, such as abandoning Zionism and Jewish particularity. For similar reasons, these neo-Marxists also condemn the leading successes of Western civilization—the United States and Israel—for their emphasis on individualism, nationalism and capitalism.
The ultra-left doesn’t just hate Israel, but also America and common values.
Read the manifestos and demands of today’s Democratic Socialists of America. They are anti-Israel and antisemitic, to be sure, but they also oppose core American values—advocating the abolition of the U.S. Constitution, police, our judicial system, freedom of speech, meritocracy and our capitalist economy. Israel is indeed the canary in the coal mine: first, they come for the Jews; then they come for the remainder of loyal Americans.
Ultra-left opposition to Israel is tied directly to the stubborn independence of the Jews—their insistence on freedom from tyranny, fair treatment as a unique people, and the right to a national homeland. Remember, too, that those who oppose Israel also oppose the United States and its protection of Western civilization’s most cherished values.
