The Left’s Rage Against Israel

There’s something very ugly in this rage against Israel, argues/notes/reveals/ explains Brendan O’Neil on Spiked! A very large portion of Western liberals sit quietly by when almost any country in the world does something against its neighbors but come unglued when Israel acts against the Palestinians. It would express a double-standard even if one didn’t think Israel had some reason to defend itself from someone crazy enough to fire missiles into the country.

“How has this happened?” O’Neil asks. He offers pretty much the same answer as does David P. Goldman, quoted this morning.

How has opposing Israeli militarism gone from being one facet of a broader anti­imperialist position, as it was in the 1980s, to being the main, and sometimes only, focus of those who claim to be anti­war? Why does being opposed to Israel so often and so casually tip over into expressions of disgust with the Israeli people and with the Jews more broadly?

It’s because, today, rage with Israel is not actually a considered political position. It is not a thought ­through take on a conflict zone in the Middle East and how that conflict zone might relate to realpolitik or global shifts in power. Rather, it has become an outlet for the expression of a general feeling of fury and exhaustion with everything ­ with Western society, modernity, nationalism, militarism, humanity.

Israel has been turned into a conduit for the expression of Western self­-loathing, Western colonial guilt, Western self­-doubt. It has been elevated into the most explicit expression of what are now considered to be the outdated Western values of militaristic self-­preservation and progressive nationhood, and it is railed against and beaten down for embodying those values. It is held responsible, not simply for repressing the Palestinian desire for statehood, but for continuing to pursue virtues that we sensible folk in the rest of the West have apparently outgrown and for consequently being the source of war and terrorism not only in the Middle East but pretty much everywhere.