Sectors of the global left have, in recent decades, added to the list of sources responsible for spreading virulent and undisguised anti-Semitism, contaminating, for example, party, university or intellectual environments. An irony of history, leftist books, over time, sought to describe themselves as “humanist and progressive”, but ended up reverberating prejudices and views with an unequivocal anti-Semitic bias.
Anti-Semitism in universes dominated by leftism is not exactly new, despite the preaching of a supposed position against racism. During the times of the Soviet Union, for example, the Stalinist regime carried out several episodes of explicit persecution, such as the infamous Doctors' Plot, between 1951 and 1953, when professionals in the Kremlin's health sector, most of whom were Jews, became targets of false accusations. of an attempt to poison Josef Stalin. They ended up shot or arrested.
Other countries in the Soviet sphere, such as Czechoslovakia or Poland, also became the stage for anti-Jewish episodes. The “Slansky trial” in 1952 consisted of a farce aimed at arresting and executing Jewish members of the communist party leadership. In the late 1960s, Polish Wladyslaw Gomulka led processes of expulsion of Jews from political and university structures, under pretexts such as “anti-Zionist campaign”.
For decades, so-called “anti-Zionism” has often become a smokescreen to try to mask anti-Jewish prejudice. Denying the Jewish People the right to self-determination, a pillar of “anti-Zionist” rhetoric, amounts to preventing them from exercising a basic right implemented by countless populations in different corners of the planet. “This denialist selectivity makes anti-Zionism a manifestation of anti-Semitism,” former Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Lafer wrote recently.
In yet another of history's paradoxes, Josef Stalin's USSR, despite its anti-Semitic actions and the intense domestic repression of Zionism, labeled as a “bourgeois nationalist movement”, voted in favor of UN resolution 181, the Partition of Palestine, and supported the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, with an eye on a possible alliance with the nascent country, then governed by David Ben-Gurion's socialists. The flirtation, however, fell apart in the 1950s, when the Kremlin preferred to bet on a partnership with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, a nationalist and socialist regime, rather than use the slogan of “throwing the Israelis overboard”.
The Six-Day War in 1967 represented a critical moment in relations between the so-called global left and Israel. Until then, Israeli socialist paths, for example, attracted thousands of young people, particularly from Europe, enthusiastic volunteers to work in kibbutzim and get to know a society committed to valuing democracy and individual freedoms, protecting minorities and strengthening the role of women in the country under construction.
The overwhelming Israeli victory in 1967 helped shape the next phase of the Cold War in the Middle East and dramatically changed the relationship between the Jewish State and leftist movements. The Kremlin, the main supplier of weapons and military assistance to the defeated Egypt and Syria, also interpreted the defeat as a humiliation of its military power, breaking diplomatic relations with Israel and consolidating the vision of acute rejection of the country built by the Zionist movement. At this moment, the USA decided to put aside suspicions regarding the socialism of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and began to build the strategic and deep alliance that exists to this day.
Guided by the deepening of Cold War Manichaeism in the Middle Eastern context, Moscow mobilized the KGB, a central character in the Soviet repression and propaganda apparatus, to implement a strategy of demonization and delegitimization of Israel. The strategic objective: attack Washington's main ally in the Middle East and sabotage North American influence in the region.
Inspired by anti-Semitic views inherited from tsarist times, responsible, for example, for the publication of the pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion At the beginning of the 20th century, the KGB, a symbol of the Soviet era, developed and implemented a strategy based on the narrative describing the Arab-Israeli conflict as “the most emblematic and most symbolic struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor”. This mythology became a dogma for sectors of the global left, fed and guided by intense political and propagandist action orchestrated from the Kremlin. Far-left terrorists, supported by Moscow, passed through Palestinian refugee camps, for example. Soviet propaganda and influence reached groups such as the Irish IRA, Italian Red Brigades, Basque ETA.
Two German terrorists, from the Revolutionary Cells group, participated in the hijacking of an Air France plane diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Three members of the Japanese Red Army killed 26 people in an attack at Lod airport in 1972.
The strategy, therefore, consisted, among other aspects, of transforming the arena of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a magnet for sectors of the global left, based on the machinations developed by the Soviet Union, which, paradoxically, had offered fundamental support in making the State of Israel, in 1948. The logic of Moscow's Cold War, obviously anti-American and also driven by anti-Semitism, spurred at that time a torrent of attacks on Jewish nationalism, describing it as “chauvinist and racist”. The Kremlin went so far as to announce the creation of “Zionology”, a Soviet pseudoscience to “study Israeli governments and their allies”.
The 180-degree change in attitude towards Israel, from support in 1948 to the post-1967 shock, also led the propaganda machine to rescue the thesis of Zionism as a “colonialist movement”, in a rhetoric that is still very much presented today in political and political debates. universities spread across the world.
The historical distortion seeks to describe the Zionist movement as a “European enterprise on Middle Eastern soil”. The smokescreen is not sustained by not being able to point out which colonial metropolis the Jews represented, and the fact that the Jewish population of Israel has been composed, for decades, mainly of descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, Ethiopia, Central Asia, and no longer of European origin, as in the beginnings of the Zionist enterprise.
Ignoring the role of the United Kingdom in the Middle East in the 20th century, with its classic divide and rule policy (sometimes supporting Jews, sometimes supporting Arabs and abstaining from voting on resolution 181 of the Partition of Palestine), sectors of the global left bought, uncritically, the narrative contrived to describe Zionism as “colonialism”. Another initiative of the Soviet strategy.
In 1991, the empire founded by Vladimir Lenin disintegrated with the 1917 revolution. The Soviet system failed. But it left a stubborn legacy in terms of the perception and reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by sectors of the global left, which does not show the same interest and mobilization when it comes to other conflicts reflected on the international scene.
The post-Cold War scenario meant the beginning of a period also described as that of North American unipolarity, when the USA emerged as the only global superpower, after the debacle of the USSR. At this moment, a disparate rapprochement is strengthening: that of sectors of the global left with Islamic fundamentalist groups.
The flirtation, previously unthinkable for many, is based on the proposal of the so-called “anti-imperialist struggle”. In other words, in order to stand up to the USA and its allies, sectors of the left begin, without ceremony, to act in alliance, for example, with the Iranian theocratic regime, responsible for stifling socialist or communist movements in their country.
In short, sectors of the global left still feed, on the issue of the Middle East, the manual and visions formulated by the Soviet Union in the Manichaeism era of the Cold War. And, instead of supporting a democratic country with respect for individual freedoms, they prefer to ally with Islamic fundamentalist groups and governments.
