To illustrate my point in another thread about the self loathing left
Anorak | The Left wing hates Israel because it despises the Western way of life
But those are only peripheral reasons. There is a bigger, key reason, I think, for the left’s change – which is that the left has stopped believing in modernity and progress, and it sees Israel as the embodiment of those things. Its vitriolic hatred for Israel is really an expression of disdain and disgust for what we might call the Western project, the Western way of life, the old ideals of nationhood, sovereignty, economic growth, human expansion, social experimentation. Israel is seen as being at the sharp edge of all those once-positive but now hated values, and thus it is intensively loathed. The left, having lost faith in modernity, has turned Israel into a kind of punchbag against which it can express its own anti-modern, anti-progress, shallowly anti-Western feelings.
In essence, Israel is very much a zeitgeist issue, where your attitudes towards it tend to reveal more about you and your worldview than they do anything about the reality of Israel. And the contemporary left’s attitudes to Israel reveal a lot about where it stands on the modern world itself. Israel is treated as a symbol of all the things that Western leftists and others once held dear, from self-possession to progressive intent, but which we now hold in trendy, postmodern disdain. This is where I think we can see that there is a very thin line, I’m afraid to say, between today’s fashionable anti-Zionism and old-style anti-Semitism.
Anorak | The Left wing hates Israel because it despises the Western way of life
But those are only peripheral reasons. There is a bigger, key reason, I think, for the left’s change – which is that the left has stopped believing in modernity and progress, and it sees Israel as the embodiment of those things. Its vitriolic hatred for Israel is really an expression of disdain and disgust for what we might call the Western project, the Western way of life, the old ideals of nationhood, sovereignty, economic growth, human expansion, social experimentation. Israel is seen as being at the sharp edge of all those once-positive but now hated values, and thus it is intensively loathed. The left, having lost faith in modernity, has turned Israel into a kind of punchbag against which it can express its own anti-modern, anti-progress, shallowly anti-Western feelings.
In essence, Israel is very much a zeitgeist issue, where your attitudes towards it tend to reveal more about you and your worldview than they do anything about the reality of Israel. And the contemporary left’s attitudes to Israel reveal a lot about where it stands on the modern world itself. Israel is treated as a symbol of all the things that Western leftists and others once held dear, from self-possession to progressive intent, but which we now hold in trendy, postmodern disdain. This is where I think we can see that there is a very thin line, I’m afraid to say, between today’s fashionable anti-Zionism and old-style anti-Semitism.
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