The Left Turned Me Into A Zionist
I Thought Jews Didn't Need A Homeland, Now It's Clear They Have No Real Allies
It’s Eurovision time.
For those who don’t know, it’s sort of like a European version of American Idol. Each country submits an original song performed by a national artist to compete in a continent-wide competition.
The contest this year is marred in controversy due to the inclusion of Israel. Despite having been part of the contest since 1973,1Israel’s inclusion triggered protests and calls for their banning from the event. Protestors gathered this week outside the hotel room of the Israeli contestant Eden Golan, heckling her and requiring her to remain secluded in the room and followed around by security. Golan was booed at her performance this week and the backlash has been so potent that Finland’s 2023 contestant Käärijä was forced to apologize after a video of him dancing with Golan went viral on social media. Several contestants even threatened to quit.
The response to Golan’s inclusion in the contest is the latest in what seems to be a plague of anti-semism sweeping across the globe in the wake of Israel’s response to the October 7th attack by Hamas. It comes after weeks of campus unrest at colleges in the United States and Europe that have led to thousands of complaints from Jewish students and staff about antisemitic attacks, both verbal and physical. The wave of anti-semitism is being justified as being about Zionism – the support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state – and not about Judaism, but some of the protestors seem to have trouble differentiating between the two.
I myself was verbally berated on a Brooklyn street in January when a protestor mistook me for being Jewish. When I informed her I wasn’t Jewish, she kept oscillating between Zionism and Judaism in some weird incoherent rant where she invoked Biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael that had nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict2. This only reinforced in me the idea that there was significant hatred of Jews that goes well beyond the current conflict.
These experiences and observations have made me rethink my earlier belief that Jewish people are safe in most of the Western World and that the need for the creation of a Jewish homeland, the core belief of Zionism, is moot.
Just before the 10/7 attacks, I suggested to a Jewish friend that if Israel would cease to exist, there would still be countries in the West where Jewish people would still be generally treated well, the United States included. He responded:
“So you’re ok with Jewish people so long as we remain a minority everywhere we live.”
I couldn’t come up with a coherent response to that. Antisemitic crimes are indeed prosecuted vigorously here, and Jews are generally treated well compared to elsewhere in the world and in history, but since Trump’s election in 2016 and his response to Charlottesville, the Tree Of Life shooting and the response from many groups on the Left even before this war, I am not sure that matters.
Progressives were irate when President Joe Biden suggested that Israel needs to exist to ensure Jewish people have a state that would protect them because it isn’t guaranteed anywhere else. The suggestion is that Biden is unable to ensure the protection of Jewish people in the United States, which offended many on the Left. This came across as a “hit dog hollering” situation. Back when I still identified as a social justice warrior, I accepted that in America no minority is truly safe. Unless you’re white, Christian heterosexual and preferably male, you are always at risk of some level of oppression.
Jews only have Israel. Otherwise, they have to put their faith in the majority population who have never missed a chance to oppress them when it serves their interests to do so.
The progressive in me says Biden is correct. Even as he channels the full force of the federal government to fight antisemitism, he isn’t going to be president forever, and he can’t guarantee anyone’s safety in 2025 or beyond. He also can’t guarantee what happens on the local level. Biden's standing against antisemitism didn’t stop Jewish students from being harassed on college campuses, or antisemitic graffiti from being sprayed on synagogues and public parks. Antisemitism is a wound that is festering on both ends of the political spectrum and in places where you wouldn’t expect it. The last seven months have only validated the concept of Zionism. Progressives will say it's because of Zionism, but why would Jews take that risk and abandon Zionism, the only thing ensuring safety from this type of treatment, on the promise they won’t continue to be treated badly as they have been throughout history? Who would trust that?
I always knew there was some level of anti-elitism on the right and among anarchists who sometimes find themselves aligned with the Left, but I did not realize, because perhaps it wasn’t as prominent until recently, how much of it existed in the mainstream Left. It should’ve been more obvious. The Women’s March, a left-of-center movement that erupted after Trump’s 2016 election, unraveled when one of its organizers, Tamika Mallory, praised a Louis Farrakhan speech where he made extremely vile anti-Jewish statements. In recent years, I’ve had several younger real estate clients in New York City ask me if I knew if the landlord of the apartment I was showing them was Jewish, including one who had left-leaning flair on a satchel she was carrying.
“Is the landlord Jewish?” said a 25-year-old Cornell grad with a Pride flag and a peace symbol button on her bag. “I’m not anti-Jewish, I just know how bad they are as landlords.”
I just figured it was a fringe thing., but I question that now. The risk is real because Jewish people, even if they do have some power and allies in the United States, are still a minority. There is no guarantee an antisemitic government won’t take power in the future, here or elsewhere. While Christians and Muslims have multiple countries where they make up the majority, and even Hindus have India and Buddhists have countries like Thailand and Vietnam, Jews only have Israel. Otherwise, they have to put their faith in the majority population who have never missed a chance to oppress them when it serves their interests to do so.
Progressives are further hurting themselves by prefacing their support for Jewish people on where they stand on Zionism. This is a set standard progressivism does not apply to any other minority group. The same progressives who argue Jews must be anti-Zionist to be accepted did not say the same thing about black people who voted for Proposition 8 in California in 2008, or make that case against anti-choice Latinas. They are quick to say that we shouldn’t point out the way Arab voters in Dearborn voted on Michigan’s pro-choice referendum (against by a fairly wide margin) or how they aligned with anti-trans figures like Chris Rufo in the moral panic about LGBTQ children, but Jews are expected to oppose and apologize for Zionism, which itself began as a social justice cause.
How are marginalized groups supposed to trust that progressives won’t turn on them if they do achieve a form of justice the way they have on Jews? One of the most common criticisms of progressive social justice warriors is that they have an oppression fetish: Minority and marginalized communities are useful to them as long as they continue to be oppressed or subjugated, but once they begin to claw out of their oppressions through means Progressive do not approve of, as Jewish people (and other groups like Asian-Americans) have, they become pariahs. The creation of Israel is one of the biggest coups toward justice by a marginalized group. For centuries, Jews were the most oppressed group on the planet, exiled from their homeland and scattered around the world, always at risk of being persecuted, exiled, or even exterminated at the whims of whoever was in power. The creation of a Jewish homeland was a major step toward justice for Jewish people, and yes, it came at a price for Palestinians. The pursuit of justice will always come at a price for those who benefit from the injustice, even if they aren’t the ones who caused it. This is a fact many progressives are too deluded and naive to understand and confirmed by the fact that “justice” for Palestinians, according to the Left, will come at the cost of Jews, whom they see as having benefitted from the injustice. Who is to say that if another marginalized group actually manages to right an injustice, progressives won’t just throw their lot in with the people who used to oppress them because they’re the oppressed ones now?
Israel is included because the country is located in the European Broadcast Zone, along with other non-European countries like Morocco and Azerbaijan
As the story goes, Abraham, unable to conceive a son with his legal wife Sarah, had an illegitimate child, Ishmael, with Sarah’s slave handmaid, Hagar, but then banished them once he was able to have a son, Isaac, with Sarah. Ishmael’s descendants are the Arabs, who believe Jews look down on them as inferior for having descended from Abraham’s bastard child.
The Cornel grad drank the wrong Kool Aid.
Thank you for being an ally and introducing me to the “hit dog hollering” concept as well as the negative stereotype regarding Jewish landlords. I think I’ll stick with “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (if I’m understanding the dog thing correctly). My most outstanding landlord was not only Jewish but a cantor!