The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate

The European Left is struggling to combat anti-Semitism in its midst. If history is any guide, it may be a long time before their solidarity extends to Jews and Israelis.

Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, resigned on February 17, citing widespread anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews among its members. His statement and a subsequent press release by the Oxford University Jewish Society make for sobering reading, not least because this is not an isolated case. In early March, the British Labour Party was forced to explain why it allowed Gerry Downing, who had written about the need to “address the Jewish Question,” and Vicki Kirbyi, who once tweeted that Adolf Hitler might be the “Zionist God,” to be readmitted to the party following their suspension for anti-Semitism. Kirby had been nothing less than a parliamentary candidate, and upon her return was appointed vice-chair of her local party executive committee.

Over the past few years, a palpable sense of alarm has been quietly growing amongst Jews on the European Left. At the heart of an often-fraught relationship lies the following dilemma: The vast majority of Jews are Zionist, and the vast majority of Left-wing opinion is not.
But the problem goes beyond the question of Israel itself. It also involves a general sense that the Left is unconcerned with Jewish interests and unwilling to take the matter of rising anti-Semitism seriously, preferring instead to dismiss it as a consequence of Israeli policies or a censorious attempt to close down discussion of the same. The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of anti-Semites was unworthy of their concern.

This is a complex subject, with roots that stretch back to the beginning of the last century. I have attempted to outline in necessarily broad fashion some of the trends of thought that have informed the relationship between Jews and the Left, as well as the shifting attitudes towards Israel in particular. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on their implications. The key question facing the European Left is whether or not it can change in such a way that Jews can once again feel part of the Left’s political family. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future the answer to that question appears to be no.

Jews and Europeans drew different lessons about nationalism from the experience of World War II. On a continent disfigured by the mayhem of conquest, occupation, collaboration, and genocide, Nazism and fascism were perceived to have been nationalism’s logical endgame. As chauvinism and self-glorification gave way to introspection and self-doubt, a new universalism and internationalism emerged from the rubble—the establishment of the United Nations, the adoption by its General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a rise in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist feeling that eventually led Western democracies to dismantle their empires.

But for European Jews, nationalism, in this case Zionism, was now a matter of liberation and a guarantor of survival. So they moved in the opposite direction. Before the war, the Zionist question had been controversial. Disproportionately radical, many Jews preferred to commit themselves to the international struggle for world socialism. Many more preferred to assimilate as loyal members of their societies. The war changed all that. Jewish communists had already been betrayed by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which created the temporary alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The pact required bewildered communists to defend an agreement with genocidal anti-Semites. Neutral countries blocked Jewish immigration and turned away refugees. Neither the capitalist West nor the Soviet Union took steps to target the infrastructure of the Final Solution once word of it reached them. And when the war ended, the proletariat failed to rise up and Sovietize Western Europe as Stalin had foretold. Instead, a wave of pogroms swept the occupied East. Concluding that neither Western assimilation nor Soviet utopianism offered much in the way of security or salvation, Europe’s forsaken threw in their lot with Zionism.

In spite of the horrors of the Shoah, the Zionist question divided the post-war British Left. Unlike the Nazi-occupied countries on the European continent, Britain did not have a legacy of collaboration to contend with. As the ruler of Mandatory Palestine, however, Britain was responsible for the 1939 White Paper that restricted Jewish immigration at the behest of the Arab nationalist leadership, thus consigning countless Jews to deaths they might otherwise have escaped. The leadership of the post-war Labour government—prime minister Clement Attlee and foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, in particular—were unenthused by the prospect of a Jewish state in Palestine. Bevin went so far as to deport Jewish immigrants from Palestine, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, and sought to sabotage the creation of a Jewish state at the UN. But in response to public and party pressure and the escalating violence in Palestine, the government finally opted to turn the mess over to the UN.

While the Labour Party sought to separate anti-Semitism from the question of Palestine for reasons of politics, European communist parties did the same for reasons of ideology, despite anguished protests from their Jewish members. In April 1947, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s theorist Rajani Palme Dutt published a statement entitled Declaration on Palestine in which he wrote,

"We warn all Jewish people that Zionism, which seeks to make Palestine or part of Palestine a Jewish state as an ally of the imperialist powers and their base in the Middle East, diverts Jewish people from the real solution of the problem of anti-Semitism, which is along the lines of democratic development and full equality of rights within the countries where they live."

In response to sentiments such as these, Moshe Sneh, a member of the Knesset from the Israeli Communist Party, later reflected,

"Every Jew who remained alive knows and feels that he is alive only by chance – either because he was outside the Third Reich or because there wasn’t enough time to put him into a gas chamber and furnace.…To come to this people now and advise them: “Assimilate please, forget that you are Jews, free yourself from your Jewishness so that you will be free”—can anything more cynical and cruel be imagined?"

For many on the Left today, the Holocaust is a curiously uncomfortable topic. At the far-Left fringes, one can find serious attempts at Holocaust denial. But in polite and acceptable Left-wing opinion, it is not uncommon to hear well-meaning people demand to know why Israelis insist on persecuting others just as they were once persecuted. The analogizing of Israel to Nazi Germany is sometimes referred to as either a form of Holocaust denial (the claim that the Nazis were no worse than the Israelis) or a blood libel (the claim that the Israelis are no better than the Nazis), but it is rarely intended as either. The intention is to refashion the Jews’ own history of persecution into an instrument of shame. Every Holocaust Memorial Day, indignant voices are raised on the Left out of ostensible concern for the plight of the Palestinians, but which pointedly refuse to acknowledge anti-Semitism or the extermination of European Jewry at all. The late political theorist Norman Geras argued that this was like telling a woman who has just smacked her child on the legs that she is no better than the father who repeatedly beat and raped her.

In a recent interview with Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute, the Israeli-Arab diplomat George Deek posited an explanation for the peculiar cruelty and vindictiveness with which the Holocaust is used to attack Israel. The problem, he argued, is that Israel’s existence is widely misunderstood. It is seen not as the realization of a stateless people’s national rights, but as a project of European atonement, magnanimity, and compassion. And because the creation of Israel is perceived as a consequence of European generosity, Israel’s legitimacy will always be conditional on European approval. He summarized the prevailing attitude:

"Just like I showed compassion to you, you have to show compassion towards others. And if you fail to show compassion—or what I perceive to be compassion—towards others, then I will not be obliged to show any more compassion towards you and then your right to be there or to behave in a certain way is taken away from you."

There was one major exception to the far-Left’s historical opposition to Zionism: The Soviet vote in favor of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. On November 26, 1947, Andrei Gromyko, Stalin’s representative on the UN Security Council, explained this by noting the deteriorating situation in Palestine and the absence of a practical alternative before adding,

"[This decision] is in keeping with the principle of the national self-determination of people…[and] will meet the legitimate demands of the Jewish people, hundreds of thousands of whom, as you know, are still without a country, without homes, having found temporary shelter only in special camps in some Western European countries."

This was all news to European communists like Dutt, who had spent the post-war years obediently attacking such claims. But Stalin’s capricious reversal of Soviet policy had nothing whatever to do with communist ideology or concern for Jewish welfare. It was pure realpolitik, expressing Stalin’s desire to eject the British from the Middle East and, if possible, keep the Americans out as well, thus enhancing Soviet power and influence. To this end, he supplied Israel with Messerschmitt planes and other materiel, in defiance of a British-American embargo, as the newborn Jewish state fought for its life against invading Arab armies. This experiment in philo-Semitism did not last. Instead of gratefully surrendering itself to Soviet control, Israel opted for a cautious policy of non-alignment. More importantly, Stalin failed to anticipate the electrifying effect that Israel’s victory in its War of Independence would have on Soviet Jewry. When Israel’s ambassador Golda Meir visited the USSR in late 1948, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews thronged the streets of Moscow. “They had come,” Meir later wrote, “those good, brave Jews—in order to demonstrate their sense of kinship and to celebrate the establishment of the State of Israel.”

That was Stalin’s impression as well, only he was altogether less thrilled. He saw this spontaneous expression of joy and pride as the disloyalty of “bourgeois nationalists” whom he believed to be agents of an imperialist fifth column. In fact, Stalin’s turn against the Jews had already begun. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, had been murdered by the Soviet secret police in Minsk. Following Meir’s Moscow trip, a paranoid anti-Semitic state terror began in earnest.

Thousands of Jews had fought for the Russian motherland and the Soviet government in World War II. But now, the regime under which they lived turned against them. In November 1948, the surviving members of the JAFC were arrested for supposedly conspiring with American intelligence to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea. In January of the following year, the Soviet state media began a major campaign against the supposed threat of Jewish “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Yiddish theaters, schools, libraries, and printing presses were shut down, and large numbers of Jews were arrested and tortured before being shot or carted off to the gulags. Viktor Komarov, described by Simon Sebag Montefiore as “a diabolical sadist” and “a vicious anti-Semitic psychopath,” supervised the brutal interrogations. “Defendants trembled before me,” he was pleased to report in a letter to Stalin. “I especially hated and was pitiless towards Jewish nationalists whom I saw as the most dangerous and evil enemies.” State-controlled media in Eastern European countries, which during the war had been swamped by Nazi anti-Semitism, was now swamped by its Soviet equivalent.

This was the case even though anti-Semitism was, theoretically, contrary to Soviet internationalist doctrine. In 1931, Stalin himself had referred to it as “the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism” and “Under USSR law active antisemites are liable to the death penalty.” This contradiction was addressed by simply conflating Jews and Zionists. In 1952, Stalin declared, “Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service.”bThat same year saw further persecutions, such as the Night of the Murdered Poets, the Slansky Trial in Czechoslovakia, and the Doctors Plot—show trials in which the vast majority of defendants were allegedly treasonous Jews. The historian Colin Shindler has written that, “In terms of overt anti-Semitism, the Slansky Trial far exceeded the show trials of the 1930s. Even non-Jews were being accused of ‘Jewishness,’ since they were entrapped, according to investigators, through their Jewish wives.…They were accused of ‘Zionism,’ of being in contact with the Israeli embassy, causing harm to the state, and being part of a worldwide conspiratorial network.”



http://www.thetower.org/article/the-holocaust-the-left-and-the-return-of-hate/#








More to read on the link, but he is spot on.
It appalls me that some people who clearly have no understanding of Nazism or history even claim to compare the two.
Israel by the Oslo accords signed by the PLO and Israel makes the presence of Israel legal to maintain the security of area C of the West Bank.
Of course as the Palestinian leadership has spurned every chance to agree to a last peace with Israel and it was they that started this conflict back in 1947 denying the right of self determination of the Jewish people in  the British Mandate. Then during the 1948 Israeli Arab war, the Jordanians and Egyptians conquered and occupied former parts of the British mandate. What we know as the West bank and Gaza. There was at no time from 1948 to 1967 during this occupation by Jordan and Egypt a national resistance movement against this real occupation. And when the PLO formed in 1964 its charter never claimed these areas were under occupation, even when they were. They claimed all of Israel was occupied, based off a religious view based on an absurd claim to the lands being Arab and Muslim. When they conquered the area as colonialists.
The Arabs genesis was born within the Arabian peninsular, not the Holy lands. So if based on the claim by the Palestinians over this lands, is based on a view of might and conquer. Then they render their own claim redundant, to the next conqueror of any lands within the region.
What in fact Arab Muslims are claiming, is that land once conquered by colonialist Arabs, has been deem theirs for all time by Allah. They then argue off claims to actual ownership within Israel of small properties by some Palestinians. Neglecting the fact, that they would still be there, if not for the Palestinians instigating a civil war with the Jews in the British mandate.

What many of the left fail to also mention, is that many fled the conflict by their own accord.
So the Palestinian aggression, caused a conflict and caused many Palestinians to flee and some removed and Israel is blamed for this.

How exactly?

Israel has made concessions and made peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, whilst sacrificing land gained and won through defensive conflicts.
Of course the Palestinians have been offered in 1937, 1947 partition plans, which they refused.
This is what the problem is with the some of the left. They use the same tactics themselves to dehumanize Israeli's, where if we go off the fact no Palestinian civilians would have need to die in any conflicts, if not for the inability of Arab nationalities denying Israeli's self determination.
No Palestinians need have died in 2014, if Hamas had not continued to attack Israel preceding the conflict with 100's of rocket attacks. All indiscriminate attacks against civilian areas. Which is a war crime. The left expect Israel to render the safety of their own civilians whether Arab or Jewish Israeli, to that of the people of Gaza. Yet in spite of Israel having a right to defend itself to take out the military capabilities of Hamas. The IDF do more than any other army in the world to warn civilians of an attack. They do this by a variety of methods and by doing so, render the element of surprise redundant, meaning also Hamas armed Militia also can move out from the targeted area. Then on top of this, Hamas has not built any bomb shelters for its civilians, even though it continually attacks Israel. Thus then increasing the possibility of civilian casualties. They place offensive weapon abilities within the civilian areas, including schools and hospitals. Which fundamentally further increases the risk of many civilian casualties. To top this off, when Israel warns of an attack. You then have hamas order people to remain as human shields and play of the Islamic view of martyrdom. So people are then remaining in the area after being warned and when they do so, they place their children and families at massive risk, because if they refuse to leave, they become willing participants with the conflict.


PROTECTION OF THE CIVILIAN POPULATION
Article 51 [ Link ] -- Protection of the civilian population

1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.

Thus as there are clear military targets, because Hamas  men and weaponry is placed deliberately within civilian areas, thus ensuring a higher level of casualties. Which is what hamas wants to happen. They want children and women to die, to play off their deaths, yet they have been instrumental in making sure that many will end up dying. When they have started a conflict. Have no bomb shelters to protect the civilians and demand they become martyrs as human shields. Its then a case of whether israeli lives matter more, which of course they will matter more, as its a nations duty to protect them. But even then they often refrain from executing orders to strike an area. israel is fighting against a group that uses all gazan civilians as human shields


The ICRC has reminded parties to both international and non-international armed conflicts of the prohibition of using human shields.[15]
International human rights law does not prohibit the use of human shields as such, but this practice would constitute, among other things, a violation of the non-derogable right not to be arbitrarily deprived of the right to life (see commentary to Rule 89). The UN Human Rights Committee and regional human rights bodies have indicated that this right involves not only the right not to be killed, but also the duty of States to take measures to protect life.[16]  In Demiray v. Turkey, in which the applicant submitted that her husband had been used as a human shield, the European Court of Human Rights stated that “Article 2 may … imply in certain well-defined circumstances a positive obligation on the authorities to take preventive operational measures to protect an individual for which they are responsible”.


Also


Article 19 of the fourth Geneva convention states the following:

“The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.”[

So as seen hamas violates just about every human right to life and instead demands martyrdom of the people of Gaza.
What hamas knows is israel will protect her people by eliminating an offensive capabilities Hamas have, which can and do take Israeli lives. israel has thus a right to defend itself and take out such offensive facilities. If people remain after being warned, then they make themselves willing human shields, which would render their own rights to life redundant, as they then become willing participants in a conflict.

So the claims made against israel are shambolioc. it does far more than any nation to prevent loss of life. It has to fight an enemy that places its men and weapons within the civilian population. I mean the number of civilians counted against hamas fighters is often skewed as well.
No other nation is pulled up for the air strikes in conflicts, in fact in Syria, the UN have given them a free pass against any war crime inquiries on air strikes.








So even where hamas ensure many of the people of gaza die, some of the left make absurd comparisons to Nazism, based off civilian deaths in conflicts hamas starts and ensures civilians will die.
Clearly they must view the Allied strategic bombing campaign against the civilians of the German cities as on a par with Nazism in WW2?
It of course failed to cower the Germans into submission, but it created a huge tactical advantage over the battle fields.
Due to the onslaught of the bombing campaigns, Hitler withdrew vast amounts of front line fighters to protect the Reich. leaving his ground forces without any adequate protection.