Progressives the new face of anti-Semitism

Palestinians protest in front of the German representation in the city of Ramallah, against Germany’s support of Israel in the ongoing war.

A friend of mine works at the pointy end of medicine, treating people who are severely ill and in great distress. She saves lives for a living. What little spare time she has is devoted to charity work. In short, she is everything the progressive left purports to be.

She’s also Jewish. When we spoke just before Christmas, one of her nephews, a reservist in the IDF, had been called up and was fighting in Gaza. Another close relative had been killed in Hamas’s appalling attack on October 7 in Sderot, just four kilometres from the border crossing between Israel and Gaza known as Checkpoint Erez.

She is no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu or his cobbled together coalition, featuring minor parties on the extreme right wing end of the spectrum, like the Religious Zionist Party and Noam.

This woman, a doctor, had much to dwell on. She dreaded late night calls bringing more strife.

At the time, she came across social media acquaintances – friends in the superficial world of the internet and fellow ideological travellers who she had engaged with on all manner of political topics.

Protesters in Tel Aviv hold signs and photos of hostages, calling for a hostage deal.

But these people are no longer of like mind politically. They had dismissed the October 7 attacks, regarding the estimated 1200 deaths of Israeli civilians, and the taking of more than 200 hostages as mere collateral damage.

She took the time to tell her own story, the grief she was experiencing and her fears for her nephew in Gaza. She expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause and hopes for a two state solution.

For her trouble, she was called a genocidist and a promoter of infanticide. One of her social media ‘friends’ asked her, “How many dead babies are enough?”

What were Hamas’s objectives on October 7? Overtly, it ticked all the boxes of any definition of a terrorist attack. Beyond that, the leadership of Hamas must have understood the extent of Israel’s military response. They knew the air strikes would come with IDF boots on the ground not far behind. One does not commit an act of mass murder and terrorism without reprisal.

It is obvious even to the most casual observer that Hamas is engaging in a propaganda war and it is almost as certain that it is a war they are winning.

The Hard Left and the Hard Right have always been anti-Semitic. What is surprising this time, is the extent to which the progressive Left has fallen in behind Hamas.

Anti-Semitism has always been the bedrock at the extreme ends of the spectrum. The Hard Left tends to conceal its hatred in a veiled support for Palestinians. The Hard Right is more explicit in its despicable views on Jews.

More recently, the freedom movements that grew out of government excesses in pandemic management have shown themselves to be anti-Semitic at their core. Scrape away their cult-like irrational babble about the New World Order and globalisation and there it is: a view of a world controlled by Jews.

Palestinians inspect the area after their homes were destroyed by Israeli strikes.

It can be seen in the tired old conspiracies about the Rothschilds, a latter day expression of the virulent anti-Semitism that Hitler used to rise to power in Germany, or in more contemporary mouthings of support for Putin and his absurd justification for the invasion of Ukraine, that Russian troops would deNazify a country whose President is a popularly elected Jew.

The rise of anti-Semitism among the progressive Left has been a long time coming. It found expression in Europe with veiled anti-Semitism rationalised in pro-Palestinian activism, the moral certainty that Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank are viciously oppressed rather than the architects of their own misfortune.

What is odd, what is impossible to reconcile is that the progressive Left who have always paid lip service to the rule of law and participatory democracy, now endorse an administration in Gaza that by any reckoning is at the extreme end of autocracy, openly barracking for it while shouting down a working democracy in Israel.

The situation has become even more bizarre with the Left’s growing support for Yemen’s Houthi rebels – a violent and unhinged Shia extremist group that quietly endorses slavery and more openly oppresses women.

It’s bizarre that many of the leading feminist voices in Australia take up the cudgels of any perceived gender slight in the West but fall silent at the worst forms of repression in the Islamic world.

The progressive Left’s blind spot has always been found in anti-US sentiment. That twisted logic has led, in some cases to the peculiar scenario of quietly cheering on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Houthi motto, taken straight from its managers, the Mullahs in Iran, is “Death to The US. Death to Israel.” While the progressive Left might not be so brazen as to vomit up the same mantra, some at least are thinking it.

In the grand sweep of geopolitics, the concerns of this Jewish doctor, born and raised in Sydney are of little moment.

But how does she go back to progressive politics when it is clear her non-Jewish progressive friends and acquaintances have parted political company? Here is a woman who merely sought to have others understand her experience, her grief and anxiety after Hamas’s attacks on October 7 and was called a genocidist for her trouble.

Her desultory experiences point to a troubling future for all Jews in the western world. It is not just that anti-Semitism is on the rise, though it most certainly is. What we are seeing is the normalisation of anti-Semitism increasingly across the political spectrum and driven on this occasion by progressive politics.