Since the Hamas attack on Israel in October of last year, Fox News and other media outlets on the establishment right have been insisting that Israelis and their supporters have fallen victim to traditional anti-Semitism. Apparently, the fierce war that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is waging against Hamas in Gaza is really being fought for “the West.” In a sense, both statements are true but they are not true in the sense in which they are meant by those who are making them.

It is important to understand that the anti-white left views the struggle of Hamas as a continuation of the war against Western colonialism. In that context, the students at the “historically black” Morehouse College who turned their backs on President Biden for giving at least intermittent military support to the Israelis were being consistent with their anticolonial beliefs.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether postcolonial governments have been far more brutal and repressive than the Western-run governments they replaced. And here we are dealing with an axiomatic truth. The regimes set up by Western colonizers and colonialists have usually been followed by unstable, vicious, and materially destructive postcolonial, anti-Western governments. A vast literature exists (the late Peter Bauer was among the best writing on this subject) showing how economically and socially ruinous most postcolonial rule in Africa and the Near East has been.

The Israeli government seems to be a progressive version of a Western regime operating in a Third World environment. Israelis allow gays and feminists to have their say and to wield influence unmolested; moreover, the Israeli government is based on a multiparty parliamentary system. But the left views Israelis as foreign to the region they inhabit; and therefore, most of the Western left denounce them as racist and exploitative. Please note that those who level such attacks are not particularly concerned with Western-type freedoms. Although colonial states, including the onetime “apartheid state” of South Africa and Ian Smith’s Southern Rhodesia, were oases of freedom compared to what replaced them, they too were targets of the anticolonial left.

So it is that many of those now defending Israel as a Western -type government, were delighted to savage European colonial regimes. In 1990, neocon zealot Joshua Muravchik, who is also a fan of the Israeli right, published a tribute to Nelson Mandela as a fellow-warrior against antiblack racism. One need only note the mass murders and property confiscations resulting from the rule of Mandela’s African National Congress to recognize the silliness of this praise.

Neoconservative journalists may also be barking up the wrong tree when they enthuse about how welcoming to gays and supportive of gender equality the Israelis have been. The rioters don’t care. The Israelis, from their point of view, are Jewish stand-ins for the traditional white Christians whom the left hates and whose influence here and elsewhere they are working to remove.  This enemy hates Western civilization, and not only in its latest antiseptically woke phase. The cultural left hates what the West was in its pre-woke past, as a civilization and political force.   

There are clear reasons why the left is going after Jews. This is not happening because “everyone has always singled out the Jews” or, to offer the ADL’s standby explanation, because traditional Christians are by nature anti-Semitic. Many traditional Christians have been the most ardent Zionists in the United States, and there is no way that a sane person (as opposed to an anti-Christian monomaniac) could lay blame for recent anti-Semitic outburst on anyone but hardcore leftists.

This all follows a now familiar leftist pattern. Jews as a group have done quite well financially and professionally, whereas blacks, who are disproportionately present among the pro-Hamas demonstrators, have been far less successful in moving up the socio-economic ladder. This disparity may explain at least in part why groups like BLM express anti-Jewish views. They are appealing to social envy, as Biden did even more perniciously in his anti-white rant at Morehouse College.

Perhaps even more importantly, Jews have made themselves an easy mark by placing themselves in the vanguard of the woke left and by joining black activists in slamming white people. Even now there are Jews participating in pro-Hamas demonstrations and, like the Soros family, supporting violent demonstrations that target normal people. It is hard to think of a more suicidal move, except perhaps for Germans filling their country with hostile Muslims and then punishing political leaders who dare mention the fact that Afghan migrants are collectively raping German women.

But I doubt the Jewish left is masochistic in the same way. It simply confuses friends and enemies and is now suffering the consequences of its stupid, hardly well-meaning decisions. No, I don’t think Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, Jamie Raskin, Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis, and other Jewish leftist politicians are idealists when they excuse leftist rioters. From what I can tell, such apologists for leftist riots don’t like normal white Christians or those Jews who side with them. One shouldn’t therefore be surprised that they excuse leftist rioters, push gender-affirming surgery for minors, and call for establishing open borders and emptying prisons of violent criminals.

What we’re seeing now is the anti-Western left simply turning on the Jews, a group whose support they have taken for granted. Yet, even now, the Jewish left expresses disappointment that their make-believe allies are turning against them. The Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer called attention to this obstinate denial of reality among Jewish revolutionaries in Eastern Europe. They rejoiced that the local peasants committed pogroms because such violence directed at less fortunate Jews revealed the peasants’ revolutionary temperament.

These same types later apologized for Stalin’s crimes, which took the life of Singer’s younger brother. Like these ridiculous people, their modern counterparts keep picking the wrong friends. But that may not matter for those Jews living in a Manhattan penthouse or a villa in Silicon Valley. Someone else will suffer for their morally righteous politics, streaked with malice and lamentably poor judgment.