Israel’s Cause is That of All the West

There are a number of important features about Israel’s actions in Gaza against Hamas which have not been made in public commentary but need to be pointed out. If one thinks that Israel’s drastic actions against Hamas in response to the horrifying atrocities of October 7 are unjustified, consider this: if the Cuban government launched thousands of rockets and missiles at targets in Florida, and then followed this up by landing hundreds of trained terrorists in the United States, where they murdered 240 Americans at a music festival, and then invaded a nearby American town, where they killed or kidnapped everyone there, beheading American babies or burning them alive, what do you think the reaction of the president of the United States would be—any president, from either party? The response is not hard to predict: within a week or so, Havana would be a heap of smoking rubble, resembling Berlin or Dresden in 1945, destruction enthusiastically supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. The response of the Israeli government, supported by the vast majority of its citizens, is hardly surprising.

Another notable facet of the Gaza conflict is that, as I write this, no Arab or Islamic state, even the most extreme, has given more than lip-service support to Hamas, if that. Indeed, Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s neighbours and military opponents in the 1967 and 1973 wars, have not lifted a finger to help Hamas or any other extremist Islamic group.

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However, arguably the most important feature of this conflict and the support and hostility it has engendered is also very clear, but seldom commented on directly. Almost without exception, Israel’s supporters have been conservatives and those on the political Right, its opponents left-wingers and radicals (apart, of course, from Western Muslims, the largest local bloc opposed to Israel’s actions). Moderate centre-Left elements, such as President Biden and most of America’s Democratic Party, have also been strong supporters of Israel—at least so far. But those clearly on the political Left have been, to a man or woman, strongly hostile to Israel, regularly whitewashing the barbaric attacks against Israelis—in Israel itself, not in Gaza—carried out by Hamas terrorists, and totally hostile to Israel’s military response.

In the historical context of attitudes towards Jews during the past 150 years or so, this represents a near-total reversal of support for and antipathy to the Jews, and it is important to analyse the reasons for this reversal. In my opinion, perhaps the most important factor in this great shift has been the existence of the State of Israel, especially the nationalistic, tradition-minded and militarily powerful and successful nation it has become, its military prowess a necessary response to the deadly antipathy of its enemies since its establishment in 1948. The strategies and values embodied by Israel have almost entirely negated the bases of pre-1945 anti-Semitism, in which hostility towards the Jews was largely based in the fact that, almost uniquely, they were an ethno-religious group without either a state or a contiguous and distinct area of residence, but were, to their enemies, always outsiders, regardless of where they lived, and moreover, were seen as continuously engaged in a vast international conspiracy of evil.

This perception of the Jews was the basis of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and that of most other notable Jew-haters in the world before 1945. Before 1945, most extreme anti-Semites viewed the Jews as being the driving force for both finance capitalism, based in the City of London and Wall Street, and also of Bolshevism, based in Moscow. To them, Jews resident in America or Britain were more loyal to Jews in Russia than to their non-Jewish neighbours down the street, and the fact that their belief systems and ideologies were diametrically opposed was only a smokescreen to disguise the vast conspiracy they headed. Ultimately this was founded in the fact that the Jews had no state or unique areas of residence, but were “rootless cosmopolitans”.

It is important to note that most of this indict­ment of the Jews as both capitalists and extreme radicals is rooted in fiction. Jews played no significant role in any of the main radical or revolutionary movements before about 1880. They were entirely absent from any significant role in the American or French revolutions, from the movement for British parliamentary reform, or from the struggle to abolish slavery. In America, the Abolitionist movement was led mainly by Evangelical Protestant radicals. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, the anthem of America’s Abolitionists, is specifically a Protestant call to action against slavery. (“As He [Jesus] died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.”)

Before about 1880, the few Jews, or those of Jewish background, who participated in political life were often not radicals but conservatives, probably the best-known of whom was Benjamin Disraeli, who was among the main founders of the British Conservative Party. (Another of a similar stance was Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish-born Secretary of State of the Confederacy, that is, of the slave-owning states of the South which attempted to secede from the United States in 1860-61.)

The political profile of the Jews did change dramatically after about 1880, almost wholly as a result of Jews in Tsarist Russia regularly embracing radical political ideologies and movements, a reaction to the immense anti-Semitic discrimination, often violent, they faced in Russia. Eastern European Jews were indeed a major component of Marxist and other radical movements, and helped to foment communism in Russia and elsewhere. Jews did indeed play a disproportionate role in the early Bolshevik movement and leadership of the new Soviet Union, most famously Leon Trotsky, but many of the early Soviet leaders were not Jewish, among them Lenin, Stalin, Bukharin and Molotov, and Jews were notoriously squeezed out of the Soviet leadership, and then subject to overt anti-Semitism under Stalin and his successors. At least until recently, Jews have been widely perceived as a “people of the Left”, especially in the United States, where a majority of Jews vote for the Democratic Party, despite their often high socio-economic profile. This fact is not, however, inconsistent with Jews also comprising a notable segment of the neo-conservative movement or of their support for the nationalist agenda of the State of Israel.

Much the same is true among wealthy and powerful capitalists. Jews played a significant role among bankers and financiers in Britain, Germany and other parts of central Europe, most famously the Rothschilds. But Jews played almost no role whatever in the British Industrial Revolution of factory capitalism, mining and related fields, and only a limited role in America’s emergence as an economic superpower. Nearly all of the famous multi-millionaires of the “Gilded Age” of American capitalism were Protestants of British or northern European background—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Harriman, Ford et al—some of whom, like Henry Ford, were overt anti-Semites. Similarly, most if not all of Australia’s pre-1960 “captains of industry” were of Anglo-Celtic back­grounds.

Jews were also blamed by anti-Semites for supporting new, disturbing and allegedly destructive modernist trends in a range of intellectual and cultural movements, with Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein often being singled out. Again, although there is some truth to these claims, it ignores the dozens of non-Jewish cultural modernists at the time, for instance—to name the first three who come to mind—Picasso, Stravinsky and T.S. Eliot (who has been accused of being anti-Semitic).

Centrally, the main claim made by pre-1945 anti-Semites about the Jews was that they had no loyalty to their country of residence, but only to other Jews. This claim is also entirely false, as seen, for instance, in the vast number of Jews who served in the armies of the nations engaged in the First World War, and who died for their country. For instance, an estimated 100,000 Jews served in the German military in the war, of whom 12,000 were killed and 18,000 were awarded the Iron Cross. Australia’s most famous military leader in that war, Sir John Monash, was Jewish, but regarded himself as an Australian and a citizen of the British Empire. Monash showed no hesitation in fighting and killing German soldiers on the Western Front, regardless of sharing the same religion and of German background.

Viewing the Jews as engaged in a vast international conspiracy, with Jewish millionaires and Jewish communists linked together in their efforts at subversion, is obviously paranoid, and, as the basis of Hitler’s Nazism, spawned genocide. What allowed this version of reality to flourish for so long was the fact that until 1948 Jews everywhere appeared to be aliens and strangers; it is also easy to see why Jews might appear to care more about the welfare of (often persecuted) Jews in foreign countries than about the welfare of their non-Jewish fellow citizens. Since 1948, however, to a very great extent this highly negative but pervasive former view of the Jews held by their enemies has vanished but been replaced by an equally negative view of the world’s only Jewish state emanating not from the extreme Right but from the extreme Left (as well as from Islamic sources, often closely allied with the Western Left). This hostility grew as a result of the 1967 and 1973 wars fought by Israel against the Arabs, but has become fully developed only in recent decades.

At present, the Western Left and its allies are as hostile to Israel as pre-1945 anti-Semites were to the Jews as a people, but for precisely opposite reasons. While Jews were formerly seen as the archetypal anti-patriotic and anti-nationalistic ethnic group, today Israel is seen as the embodiment of all right-wing values hated by the Left: successful militarism, super-patriotism, traditional religious practice, and a seemingly permanent fight for survival against its hostile neighbours, a fight supported by virtually everyone across the Israeli political spectrum. Israel’s enemies in the West today are thus the very opposite of those who were most hostile to the Jews before 1945: the far Left, who denounce the right-wing and conservative values represented by Israel. As with the former right-wing hostility to the Jews, there is a measure of truth in this critique. Israel is probably the only Western country where most of the population, from young to old, might well burst into patriotic songs without being embarrassed or a part of some right-wing rally. Israel is also probably the only Western country which retains universal military conscription (for both men and women, followed by many years of reserve duty) without widespread draft evasion and regarded by all as a national duty.

While yesterday’s anti-Semitism was based in large measure in demented paranoia, today’s left-wing anti-Zionism and hostility to Israel are founded in an even larger measure of double standards and hypocrisy. Leftists hostile to Israel wholly ignore the undemocratic nature of most of the Arab countries and other Third World states, bizarrely attacking the Middle East’s only democracy. They also ignore the central element of religion in the Arab world’s hostility to Israel. Few readers of this article are probably aware of the fact that every Middle Eastern state, with the exception of Lebanon, has established Islam in that state’s constitution as its official religion. Islam is also the established religion of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, which allows the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, to be practised there, but not, it seems, non-monotheistic religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. By definition, too, Hamas has an extreme form of Islam at its heart. The mistreatment of women throughout the Islamic world is notorious, and so-called honour killings occur in both Gaza and the West Bank. The Western Left turns a blind eye to all of this, but centrally singles out Israel for attack, while ignoring the dozens of dictatorships which exist throughout the world, from North Korea to Cuba.

There are, of course, many other reasons why Israel attracts the West’s hostility to the extent that it does. To them, Israel is on the cutting edge of the West’s supposed attack on the “global South”, a component of the great shift in the Left’s permanent war of destruction against Western democracy from class war to race war, and, in particular, against the white race, now seen not as the bearer of political, scientific and intellectual advancements, but as the instrument of destruction of the peaceful and advanced indigenous populations. This Orwellian nonsense is at the source of the Australian Left’s low abasement towards the Aborigines, “the world’s oldest continuous culture”. The overlap between the Left’s love of the Aborigines, absurdly endowing them with a wholly fictitious list of achievements, and the Left’s support for the Palestinians, whose triumphalist and intolerant ideology is rooted in the Dark Ages, is evident, and based in a common hatred for Western civilisation and Western democracy. More broadly, pre-1945 right-wing anti-Semitism and today’s left-wing anti-Zionism are in large measure mirror images of each other.

This raises an interesting question: if Israel had been established as an independent state in, say, 1880, with a distinct territorial base, and faced and responded to the same hostility from its neighbours as has been the case since 1948, necessarily becoming a significant military power, would right-wing hostility to the Jews have been very different? Right-wing perceptions of the Jews as a people without a state, components of a vast conspiracy, would in all likelihood have been quite different. Some possible evidence about this may exist in the attitude of pre-1945 anti-Semites towards Israel in the post-war period. Leon Rebatet was a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic French journalist and novelist who supported the Vichy regime until its very end. Rebatet accused the Jews of fomenting the Second World War and of being among the prime causes of France’s decline. In 1946 he was sentenced to death for treason. This was later commuted, and he served in prison until he was released in 1952. Rebatet totally changed his views about the Jews, because of what the State of Israel had become and represented. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, he wrote that “the cause of Israel over there is that of all Westerners. It would have surprised me if I had prophesied in 1939 that I would one day wish for the victory of a Zionist army. But that is the solution that I find reasonable today.” Two years later he wrote that he would “savour the historical paradox that led the Jews [in 1967–69] to defend all the patriotic, moral, and military values they most violently fought [against] during a century in their adopted country”. That “the cause of Israel is that of all Westerners” remains as true—or, indeed, more so—today as it did half a century ago.

William Rubinstein held Chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales. He is a frequent contributor to Quadrant.