Why "Leftists" Should Be "Pro-Israel"?

"The persecution of the Jewish race," said Disraeli, had deprived society "of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally." In Marx, according to Sir Isaiah Berlin, "it is the centuries-long oppression of a people of pariahs, not of a recently risen class, that seems to be speaking."

Well, "Leftists" did found the State of Israel: anti-British Marxist terrorists of quite exceptional viciousness, whose legacy of bitterness and hostility towards this country is incomparable to almost, if almost, anything in the Commonwealth, although similar views are widely held in the United States.

They were given victory over Britain by the ultimate globalist institution, and they then proceeded to displace people who had lived there for many centuries, in order to bring in immigrants from the ends of the earth who had little or no common culture, a practice which has become more and more absurd as Jews in general and secular Ashkenazi nationalists in particular stubbornly refuse to procreate in Israel, or else will do anything for Israel except live there, increasingly even when they and their parents were born there.

But in the first generation of Israel's life, a social democracy was built there, and that within Israel's internationally recognised borders. The Labour Movement was a friend of Israel, and Israel was a friend of the Labour Movement. All of that, however, came to an end a long time ago. Before John Howard, before the Reagan Democrats, before Thatcherism, before anything else of that kind, there was the rise of Likud. It is the original and the archetypal neoconservative electoral force, complete with having been founded and led by old Marxists (in this case, by old Marxist anti-British terrorists) who had changed their views only insofar as they believed the bourgeoisie to have defeated the proletariat.

Today, not only is that party in government, as it usually has been during the last two generations. But it is in government, both with Shas - which, to be fair, is not without both a social conscience and quite a flexible approach to land issues, but which is still a party the presence of which around the Cabinet table raises very serious questions about the notion that Israel is an outpost of the West - but also, and much more disturbingly, with Avigdor Lieberman's lot.

"Leftists" may be able to support the Netanyahu-Lieberman Coalition, or to think much of the State that can produce it. In so doing, they call to mind the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the support for Imperial Japan by Marxist intellectuals and by Subhas Chandra Bose, the cheering on of George Bush by Christopher Hitchens, the present alliance between Trotskyists and Islamists in parts of urban Britain, the warm welcome being accorded to various defectors (Communist, SWP, Welsh separatist and Welsh-language supremacist, communalist of various kinds) by veterans of the 1980s Radical Right, the universally applauded carve-up between Sinn Féin and the DUP, and the relationship between the Euston Manifesto Group and the Henry Jackson Society. But we who, being Labourites, are without a party this side of electoral reform, cannot possibly do so.