How the Left turned on Israel

Colin Shindler
The Jewish Chronicle
23 December 09

Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, an important feature in the debate on the Israel-Palestine imbroglio has been a questioning of the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state by sections of the political Left and the liberal and cultural intelligentsia in Britain.

Such opinion has moved from passionately supporting the right of the Jews to self-determination in 1948 (by figures such as Aneurin Bevan, Bertrand Russell and Tony Benn) to questioning that right over 60 years later.

Today, Israel is often seen as troublesome on a good day and illegitimate on a bad one. Like many Israelis, many wish to roll the borders back to the 1967 boundaries, but there is also a growing number who wish to return to 1948.

This disillusionment with Israel began before the conquests of the Six-Day War and the settlement drive on the West Bank.

Whereas the Old Left had fought Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the East End with the Jews, and lived through the Holocaust and the rise of Israel, the New Left came of age during the era of decolonisation in the 1960s. While Jews disproportionately participated in those anti-colonial struggles, the Shoah and the rise of Israel was not simply another historical event. Even for those born long after the war, it was understood that all Jews are survivors. This level of consciousness separates a majority of the Jewish Left from the broader British Left.

In 2009, a state with a Jewish majority in the Middle East does not sit easily with Marxist doctrine, post-colonial theory and Islamist belief. It is this inability to define Zionism and to classify the Jews which has brought together liberals, social democrats, Trotskyists, Stalinists and the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood front organisations.

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This article was based on Colin Shindler’s inaugural lecture at SOAS as the UK’s first Professor of Israeli Studies. His ‘The Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right’ has just been published in paperback by IB Tauris
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