Anti Fascism

Left anti-semitism

There’s a retrospective on Engage’s successful campaign against the proposed AUT boycott of Israel by David Hirsh in this quarter’s Dissent:

Palestinians have come to symbolize the global struggle against imperialism while Jews have come to symbolize the veiled imperialist forces behind the fiction of “democratic values.” Jews are Nazi-Zionists, Jews are rich capitalists, Jews are scheming communists, Jews are the shady neocons pulling the strings of American imperialism in the interest of Israel. All this is the expression of a false and racist radicalism. The left has to reeducate itself to recognize anti-Semitism when it sees it.

The boycotters learned nothing from their defeat. They reacted with a new barrage of anti-Semitic rhetoric, insisting that they were defeated by a well-funded global Zionist lobby that pressured the AUT.

See, also, this position piece by the Alliance for Workers Liberty:

The general antidote to this anti-imperialism of fools is the propagation of rational democratic and socialist politics. Such politics focus on a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They measure and criticise Israel — and the Arab states — according to their stand in relation to that just solution — the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

There is an immediate “antidote” to left-wing anti-semitism too, and it is a very important task for Marxist socialists like those who publish Solidarity: relentless exposure and criticism of their politics and antics — without fear of isolation, ridicule, or the venomous hostility of the vocal and self-righteous left-wing anti-semites.