Why Left-Wing Antisemitism Worries Me More Than the Right’s

Left wing antisemitism redefines hatred towards Jews as a moral, anti-racist position.

Protestors at Columbia University. Image via Heather Chen / Columbia Daily Spectator

By Ben Cohen

The left’s response to Hamas atrocities on October 7th took many Jews by surprise. Instead of an outpouring of sympathy, many liberals took to social media to declare the murder of almost 1,200 innocent Israelis an act of anti-colonial heroism.

Professors at prominent US colleges praised Hamas for the mass murder on October 7th, students celebrated the massacre, lauding the organization’s “creativity”. In my own circle of liberal friends, this Malcolm X quote appeared on my timeline just hours after the massacre:

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

While cloaked in the language of activism, the message wasn’t hard to decipher: the Jews had got what they deserved.

The immediate rush to blame Israel for the mass murder of civilians in some ways reminded me of my own reaction to September 11th back in 2001. As a radical teenager heading to the University of Sussex, my Noam Chomsky influenced contention was that America only had itself to blame for the attack. I was sorry about the civilians, but I reasoned that the interfering American empire was experiencing some predictable “blowback”.

Over the years I moved away from the binary morality of left-wing activism. America did bad things, but so did other countries. The deliberate targeting of innocent civilians was not ethically comparable to the rules based warfare of the West, and narratives about colonialism and imperialism were far too simplistic. More than anything, innocent victims of terrorism deserve sympathy no matter the circumstance.

I consider myself an opponent of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and an ardent critic of Benjamin Netanyahu – particularly his prosecution of the war in Gaza. But the language used to describe Israel as a “European colonizer” state coupled with their celebration of October 7th has led me to question the left’s motives. The anti-Israel fervor spreading through college campuses goes much further than the anti-US activism I was once familiar with, and I now worry about how far it is willing to go.

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The white oppressors

In modern leftist circles, the notion that Jews are white is now sacrosanct. In leftist lore, Jews “became white folk” and assimilated into post World War II American society. They then benefited from everything that whiteness entails, or as activist Nylah Burton writes, “white passing” Jews can “live in white neighborhoods, have the safety of whiteness, go to white schools, marry white people, and have the economic privilege of whiteness.”

In this paradigm, people of color live under the constant threat of whiteness — thus creating an “oppressor” class based entirely on skin color. If Jews are white, then they too have become “the oppressor”, and if Israel is the Jewish state, then by default, Israel is an “oppressor state”. Andrew Sullivan describes the logic:

“As Jews became “white,” “white” also came to include Jewishness. The evolving left discourse on Israel makes this explicit: Israel is a “white” colonial enterprise persecuting the “non-white” Palestinians, and so is treated as a white supremacist, apartheid state.”

The fact that most Israelis are not white, and Ashkenazi Jews are genetically Middle Eastern is not deemed relevant in leftist circles, because Jews are, as author David Baddiel writes: “Schrödinger’s whites: white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer”.

To be against “whiteness” has become a moral position to take. When Hamas kills 1,200 white colonialists on non-white land, it is an accomplishment to be celebrated. As Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee declares: “Zionism is Racism, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, Apartheid.”

Who could possibly be for that?

Myths about Zionism

Equating Zionism with racism and white supremacy is, to anyone familiar with the actual history of the late 19th century philosophy, absurd. The movement arose as a response to white supremacism, specifically the racial purity philosophies taking off in Austria where Theodor Herzl lived at the time. Zionism was about the need for Jews to have a homeland in historic Israel so they could escape the persecution they faced in Europe. But to the far left, to be a Zionist is to quite literally be a Nazi.

The concept of Israel as a colonial, white supremacist regime is not a new one, and neither is the idea that Zionism is an equivalent to Nazism.

Soviet propaganda in the 1970’s and 80’s sought to tie Zionism with Nazism as part of an effort to ostracize Jews and delegitimize Israel. The Soviet Union engaged in virulent antisemitic campaigns through a number of mediums. As the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research reports:

During the years when this propaganda line was most prominent – disseminated via films, political cartoons, academic output, and the dissemination of antisemitic literature and more – it was nearly as common for Jews to be accosted in the streets with cries of "fascist” as with the classic antisemitic slurs. Internally, this propaganda was used to scapegoat Jews as allegedly advancing a capitalist-fascist plot to undermine the USSR and subvert its progressive value. As a matter of foreign propaganda, this line was useful in branding Israel as toxic and delegitimized its very existence.

It is notable that the Soviet Union spent considerable resources building relationships with the Palestinian Liberation Organization during that period and also funded the education of many Palestinian activists, including current President Mahmoud Abbas.

The language employed by Soviet propagandists in the 70’s has now been fully adopted by modern left-wing activists who view the plight of the Palestinians as central to their battle against colonialism. Rather than a bitter fight between Arabs and Jews over land partitioned by the United Nations, Israel is instead an extension of European colonialism — and even Nazism.

Anti-Zionism vs antisemitism

Critics of identity politics like Andrew Sullivan believe modern left-wing antisemitism is anti-whiteness that has blurred “over time, into the same thing”. Jews are not being singled out by the social justice left, but are unfortunate collateral in a wider war against “whiteness”. Similarly, Pamela Paresky argues that current left-wing ideology can appear antisemitic because it uses similar stereotypes:

Because current social justice ideology (“critical social justice”) is heavily influenced by critical theory of various kinds, including critical race theory (CRT). Despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

This was a position I took for some time, but the fervor displayed by the far left after October 7th and the ensuing campus protests has caused me to reevaluate this theory.

While activists loudly proclaim they are not engaging in antisemitism, they routinely propagate conspiracy theories that most certainly are. The pro-Palestinian left is now rife with Holocaust denialism, and after the atrocities on October 7th, rape denialism:

This kind of dehumanization is familiar theme of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Jews are not only responsible for their own suffering, but they don’t really suffer either.

It is certainly possible to be a critic of Israel and the excesses of Zionism, but the left’s myopic focus on the Jewish state is, at least to many Jews, deeply suspicious. As Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi argues that the anti-Israeli left’s obsession with antiracism is really just traditional antisemitism in disguise:

Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew — that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities...

For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism.

Or as historian Jacob Talmon once put it: “The state of the Jews has become the Jew of the states.”

Anti-racism has in many ways become a vehicle for antisemitism. It is an ideology that inverts racial hierarchies and puts Jews at the very top. Jews don’t just have white privilege, they Jewish privilege too and can then be reviled with impunity. The anti-Israel, anti-Zionist fervor ripping through college campuses is an extension of this logic.

This is why I believe left-wing antisemitism now presents a graver threat to Jews than right-wing antisemitism. Right-wing antisemitism has no real intellectual basis, and the dark conspiratorial delusions about Jewish racial inferiority and aren’t taken seriously outside of disempowered working class communities. Jews are also used to confronting this kind of overt hatred. It is easier to define, and more importantly easier to confine.

Left-wing antisemitism is far more insidious because it redefines antisemitism as a moral anti-racist position. This is not a fringe intellectual theory either — it is now part of mainstream academia and is enthusiastically distributed by members of an educated and privileged elite.

Stripped of their minority status, Jews are now turning to the only source of security they know: Israel.

As a teenager, I remember lecturing my father on why the state of Israel should never have been created. Instead of arguing with me, he showed me a letter he had received from a local Jewish group warning of rising antisemitic crimes in the area.

“You think you are British,” he told me. “You are. But some British people don’t think you are. When they look at you they see not a Brit but a Jew. You’ll understand that at some point.”

Unfortunately now I do.

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