In our last post, we discussed how Jews had helped found the European socialist movement to then become excommunicated by that very movement.
After Israel’s overwhelming military victory against the united Arab world in the 1967 Six-Day War, the political left immediately started questioning the continuous inclusion of Jews and their nation-state, Israel, in the international socialistic brotherhood. Indeed, the left increasingly rejected the concept of the Jewish “victim,” and replaced him with a brand-new victim – the “Palestinian”-Arab. This concept had never even existed before 1967.
With Israel’s occupation of the West Bank after the Six-Day War, what was previously seen as an integral part of the country of Jordan was now suddenly under Israeli occupation in a successful defensive war. In the blink of an eye, that land turned into the national homeland for a previously non-existent Palestinian people. For the international left, this meant that the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict had turned “the Jew” and his Jewish homeland into “oppressors,” who were denying an indigent people their national rights of self-determination.
The Socialist Jew has since been devoured by the same social revolutionary movement that this Jew had helped to create by co-founding socialism in Europe, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Indeed, “la révolution dévour ses enfants!”
Two historically important developments further enhanced this historical revisionism of the international left: The first was the remarkable economic recovery of Jews all over the Western world. They went from almost complete physical and economic oblivion by Nazi-Germany to the almost miraculous economic success of tiny pluralistic and democratic Israel, devoid of natural resources in an almost barren desert strip on the Mediterranean Sea, and surrounded by a world of failed Arab states in chaos.
The second important historical development was the progressive resurgence of academic anti-Semitism, which had been integral to socialism in Europe since its inception (at times even including Jewish voices). Not long after World War II, Antisemitism began to lift its ugly head in the Soviet Union, Gomulka’s Poland and other Communist countries, post-Apartheid South Africa or even in the Afro-centric pastoral post-Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.. We saw this in such important figures as President Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, CNBC’s Rev. Al Sharpton and, of course, The Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, all three being well-known for their anti-Semitic vitriol.