Why the Left hate Israel

[DodgyAgent]

Whs, plus backward, introvert, paranoid and out of touch religious bullies.

another Nazi

[sasguru]

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.

Not only are you a cretin, you're a hackneyed, dull, cliched and unoriginal one.
What a waste of school fees.

[DodgyAgent]

Not only are you a cretin, you're a hackneyed, dull, cliched and unoriginal one.
What a waste of school fees.

Are you my mother?

[doodab]

And regarding your received opinion that it's somehow "totally surreal" that some people call on a western government to condemn Israel, because western governments have their own misadventures, I think you'll find that those calling for Israel to be condemned are usually a subset of those who are opposed to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. The people actually responsible for those wars generally back the Israelis. There is no hypocrisy or contradiction there, only a logical mistake in taking the actions of a government as representative of all of it citizens in one situation and not in the other.

[MicrosoftBob]

Quite topically it is Israeli Hate Crime Week

[Scruff]

From a young age I was led to believe that jewish people were good at making money, innovating and bettering themselves. If true, I haven't got a problem with that, but I can see why lefties would have.

Please don't make the same mistake that the BBC, and many others make? That mistake is to confuse Jews with Israelis.

There are millions of Jews who aren't Israelis and there are millions of Israelis who aren't Jews (there are approximately 1.4m Arab Israeli citizens).

[GB9]

another Nazi

I always viewed Nazis as right wing but the question was about the left wing.

Maybe everyone hates Israel? Maybe if they stopped acting like terrorists people might warm to them.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I always viewed Nazis as right wing but the question was about the left wing.

Maybe everyone hates Israel? Maybe if they stopped acting like terrorists people might warm to them.

National socialism, so you can pick whichever side you like. Left/right paradigm people insist on using is meaningless nonsense. Like the word 'extremist' etc.

[MicrosoftBob]

I always viewed Nazis as right wing but the question was about the left wing.

Maybe everyone hates Israel? Maybe if they stopped acting like terrorists people might warm to them.

Do you blame Israel for the six day war ?

[NotAllThere]

The first map is wrong. The area coloured green was all British Mandate -and extended way beyond the boundaries drawn. There was no Palestinian land. Of course, individuals living in those areas owned the land (which was under British rule), but mainly as Arabs or Jews- certainly not under any unified group known as "Palestinians".

The bottom half of the map, which the second map shows as a loss of Palestinians land upon partition was mostly empty - it was desert.

The partition plan was accepted by the Jews, but the Arabs rejected it. It was never put into action, because of Arab rejection.

The third map is also misleading, as it neglects to mention that the land that Israel took was in a defensive war, launched on them by the Arabs. While it is true that you're not supposed to conquer land you take in a defensive war, it does rather destroy the idea of an imperialistic Israel.

The Gaza strip at this time belonged to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. So it is incorrect to label it "Palestinian land".

Of course, during this time (and afterwards), Arabs own land in Israel. Arabs who stayed put when the 1947 war was launched by the surrounding nations, kept their land. The ones who lost it were those who legged it beforehand.

More land was taken over by Israel (from Syria and Egpyt and Jordan - not the Palestinians as such) when the surrounding nations attacked in 1967 and 1973, and were completely trounced.

Syria, Egpyt and Jordan when they held the land could have given the people living there some kind of autonomy, but had no desire to (rather persecuting Palestinian nationalists), until Israel took control. When suddenly they came over all solicitous of their former oppressed minority. The people living in refugee camps were forbidden to leave, even if they wanted to, by Syria, Egypt and Jordan. It was in these nations interests to have a bunch of impoverished people on their borders, for use as political ammunition against Israel.

So, while there are definitely issues with regards to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, this set of maps is extremely propagandist, and only loosely connected to the truth.

The reason such maps are widely circulated is entirely because it backs up the irrational and essentially anti-semitic hatred that some people have for Israel. Of course, it is then picked up by well-meaning, but uninformed folk - which is precisely the intention.