Analysis
The far left is not interested in Palestinians
Its patronising attitude serves only to provide a psychological boost to white radicals in the West, writes David Swift
December 9, 2019 16:06
3 min read
Its patronising attitude serves only to provide a psychological boost to white radicals in the West, writes David Swift
December 9, 2019 16:06Most analyses of the ugly surge in left-wing antisemitism over the past few years assumes a connection with support for the Palestinian cause, yet in reality there is plenty of evidence to suggest that these people are not really concerned with the Palestinians but are merely using them for their own selfish interests.
The sociologist David Hirsh has argued that pro-Palestinianism is a cipher for others to project their identity onto; there is an ‘intense personal payoff’ from self-conscious anti-Zionism, which produces a ‘feeling of inner cleanliness’.
For Dr Hirsh, support for the Palestinians is an attempt to appropriate some of the suffering of an exoticised people without making any compromises in their own lives.
This is part of a broader trend: for many on the left, their politics are more a part of their identity than a programme for improving the world.
It is not so much what they believe in, but rather who they are, and causes such as anti-Zionism are analogous to a favoured sports team or brand of clothing.
This is why anti-Zionism in particular is so attractive — it is entirely cost free. For well-educated, middle-class professionals, opposition to Israel holds no jeopardy: they will not need to pay any more tax or suffer discrimination in access to jobs or education.
Social media is awash with examples of this kind of identitarian anti-Zionism. In 2016, a young woman posted on Twitter that she “went out to dinner with my family tonight wearing a Hezbollah T-shirt”, accompanied by a photograph of herself in said garment.
Plenty of people quickly pointed out that Hezbollah killed innocent people, including children, and were thoroughly antisemitic, misogynist and homophobic, but none of these responses impacted on the original tweeter.
This is understandable, for they entirely missed the point: the Hezbollah T-shirt was a cultural, rather than a political statement. In the same way that the punks of the 1970s were not trying to support the safety pin industry or promote testing for sputum-borne Hepatitis, but rather trying to piss off their parents and demarcate their own identity, the same is true for much of left-wing anti-Zionism.
Back in 2013 the Labour peer Lord Ahmed was sent to prison for his involvement in a fatal car crash, which he blamed on “Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels”.
After the journalist Danny Finkelstein took to Twitter to ask what possible interest Jews could have in staging this crash, the Guardian journalist Michael White replied: “Danny, you’re a good chap…I agree it’s a stinker and typical of double standards. Pity about the illegal settlements though”.
What is the connection here? Because it is not just a “pity” about the settlements: they are a very serious issue that has led to deaths on all sides and are one of the main impediments to peace. What do settlements have to do with a car crash involving a British Lord?
In this case their function was to allow someone with tremendous privilege — a 60-something, white, male, Guardian columnist — to glibly associate himself with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Similarly, the use of “Apartheid” to describe Israel carries a identitarian function. Along with other words and phrases increasing central to the nomenclature of the left, it is a lazy shorthand that quickly demarcates the politics identity and righteousness of the speaker.
The academic David Rich argues that “for individual anti-Israel activists, imagining themselves to be heroically tearing down a new Israeli apartheid allows them to bask in the reflected glory of their illustrious forebears”.
In other words it allows privileged white people in Britain and America to pretend they are Oliver Tambo or Nelson Mandela, without actually putting themselves at risk or effecting any benefit to Palestinians.
In addition to using the conflict to demarcate their own identity, many Western anti-Zionists also object when actual Palestinians present their stories in a way that conflicts with their depiction of Palestine.
When the Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar — who attacks ‘honour killings’ in his songs — performed at Colombia University, he was criticised by some students for highlighting this issue, as they felt it should either be ignored, or blamed on Israeli oppression.
This patronising attitude does nothing to improve the lives of Palestinians and serves only to provide a psychological boost to white radicals in the West.
David Swift is the author of ‘A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism’ (Zero Books, £14.99)
