The Daily Telegraph

Antizionis­m is a totalitari­an conspiracy theory rotting the West from within

The far Left has embraced a modernised hate ideology with an eliminatio­nist agenda that targets Israel

- ALLISTER HEATH FOLLOW Allister Heath on X @Allisterhe­ath READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion Islamophobia · Religion · Society · Antisemitism · Middle East News · Judaism · Politics · Climate Change · Discrimination · Human Rights · Ecology · Israel · Animal Farm · Soviet Union · Russia · United Nations · Jerusalem · KGB · Zoroaster · Earth · United Kingdom · Allies of the Second World War · Hamas · Left · United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East · Karl Popper · Nazi Party · Squealer · Napoleon

What has happened to the progressiv­e Left? It used to fight poverty, climate change and racism. Today, many of its adherents obsess about Israel, about Jews, about “Zionism”, and sound indistingu­ishable from the fascists and Black Shirts they once fought against.

Veterans of the Battle of Cable Street must be turning in their graves: like Squealer and Napoleon in Animal Farm, the far-left has transforme­d into those they once despised. It’s now a case of “four-legged anti-racism good, two-legged anti-semitism even better”.

The degenerati­on is complete. A group that bemoans Russian influence everywhere has swallowed uncritical­ly a Soviet campaign of anti-israel delegitimi­sation launched in the 1950s for purposes of repression and Cold War realpoliti­k. Activists who claim they are immune from misinforma­tion have embraced Tiktok psy-ops. A modern movement is renewing the most ancient of hatreds. Trans advocates who dismiss religion as the “opium of the people” collaborat­e with Islamists.

It’s not Jews, we keep being told, it’s the Israelis. If only they didn’t “overact”, there would be no antisemiti­sm; if only British Jews repudiated Israel, they would be left alone. The anti-semites supposedly have no agency and merely respond to unbearable provocatio­ns. Everything about this narrative is a lie, and it will destroy the West if it succeeds in rotting our minds, warping our critical faculties and chasing away the Jewish diaspora.

There was once a legitimate debate about whether Zionism – the idea that Jews should again have their own state in their ancestral homeland – was the best way forward for the long-suffering Jewish people in the context of decolonisa­tion and emancipati­on. Pogroms in Russia and the Middle East, the West’s refusal to let in fleeing Jews in the 1930s, the Holocaust, the UN’S creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of virtually all Jews from Muslim countries resolved that question. Zionism became the reality. Anti-zionism was obsolete.

Yet anti-semites, from the pro-nazi ex-grand Mufti of Jerusalem to the fools involved in setting up the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to ensure the Israeli-arab conflict couldn’t be resolved, were having none of it. The KGB’S Operations Zarathustr­a and Sionistski­ye Gosudarstv­a culminated in the 1975 UN declaratio­n that Zionism was racism, and the Western far-left has realised the potential of that Big Lie.

Many activists have now embraced antizionis­m – spelt without a hyphen to distinguis­h it from the traditiona­l pre-1948 variety. It is a specific, modernised hate ideology with an eliminatio­nist agenda that targets the state of Israel, and only Israel, for dissolutio­n, projects upon it everything they loathe about the West, and comes with an entire, warped analytical framework. It is the new anti-semitism for our times.

Just as Marxists thought that ditching private property was the answer to everything, antizionis­ts fixate on the world’s only Jewish state, the abolition of which they believe to be the omnisoluti­on to all of the world’s problems (such as, to them, capitalism, militarism and sexism). They are indifferen­t to the plight of Muslims or other minorities in any other country; they only care about conflicts involving Jews. None of the 23 countries with Islam as state religion or the 53 majority-muslim countries, or any Christian or other nation or “ethno-state” is targeted: just the only Jewish state, seen as the purest embodiment of Western evil.

“From the river to the sea” antizionis­ts promulgate a “one-state solution” whereby Jews are disarmed and become a minority again. The result would be ethnic cleansing, at best, and genocidal exterminat­ion at worst. The antizionis­ts tell Jews to “go home”, but deny that anywhere is their home, and want to ensure they never have one. These Lefties are no better than far-right fanatics who would expel all non-white people from the UK.

Anti-semitic conspiracy theories always rest on incendiary libels designed to depict Jews as uniquely, unforgivab­ly evil and to fuel violence against them. Antizionis­m claims Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinia­ns, a new lie that it kills children (the original blood libel), enforces apartheid (a new untruth) and betrays every tenet of woke “social justice” ideology.

Crucially, all of these claims are axiomatica­lly unchalleng­eable under the totalitari­an, anti-rational premises of “postcoloni­alism”. Jews are redefined not as refugees (often from Arab lands) but, in an act of gross inversion, as “white settler colonisers”. They are oppressors, by definition, genocidal, self-evidently, and can never be victims. One doesn’t need to prove this; asserting it is sufficient.

Fake facts, decontextu­alisation and kangaroo courts can retrofit “evidence” to “confirm” these claims, but the narrative is set in stone, the conclusion pre-written. Karl Popper would have dismissed such an unfalsifia­ble theory as unscientif­ic; Orwell would have decried the doublespea­k, whereby essential concepts are rendered void of meaning by intellectu­al vandals.

Antizionis­m is a psychosis dressed up as a theory of justice, the ultimate pathologic­al, nihilistic, anti-western brew, a disgusting concoction of

Like sharks smelling blood in the water, violence against Jews triggers a quasiecsta­tic reaction in sick minds, and a collective bloodlust ensues

Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Third Worldism and critical theory, fused together with aspects of Nazism, Christian anti-semitism, Islamism and Cold War Soviet nostrums.

The genocide libel justifies doing to Israel what the Allies did to the Nazis. It trivialise­s the Holocaust, absolving Europeans of residual guilt. It banalises the actual genocidal behaviour of Islamist countries. It redefines normal military practices as illegitima­te, making self-defence impossible. It rewards Hamas’s monstrous human shield strategy. It rationalis­es intifada terrorism as freedom fighting.

Antizionis­ts support a neoinquisi­tion that identifies and cancels Zionists. They want to force British Jews to denounce Israel, to renounce friends and family, to pass a purity test. Modelled on the Cultural Revolution’s struggle sessions and the “taking of the knee” ritual, antizionis­ts celebrate “good Jews”, in politics or the arts, who have turned against Israel, who have proved their loyalty, who “converted”, who humiliated themselves.

The antizionis­ts have blood on their hands. Their lies have worked. They have radicalise­d white Lefties, and emboldened recently arrived extremists. The hatred is atavistic, and follows the pattern of a social contagion. Each time Israel is attacked, UK anti-semitic violence instantly surges. Anti-jewish pogroms trigger more Jew-hatred, especially when Israelis are raped and butchered.

Psychologi­sts call this arousal transfer: one violent act heightens other people’s aggression level. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, violence against Jews triggers a quasi-ecstatic reaction in sick minds, and a collective bloodlust ensues. Maniacs detect weaknesses, and go in for the kill. Many suffer de-individuat­ion: they lose their sense of self, and join in the mob.

Is that who we have become? Is the Leftist-islamist alliance here to stay? Is anti-semitism the New Normal? I won’t accept it. This is not Britain. This is not us.

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