The End of a Strange Alliance

Progressive rejection of the Jewish state was long delayed but inevitable.

Progressive sympathy for Jews has always been an anomaly. Religion, tradition and attachment to a particular place – bêtes noires of progressive thought – are distinctive features of Judaism. The French revolutionaries who granted full citizenship rights to Jews would have displayed greater intellectual consistency if they had meted out the same persecution to them as to Roman Catholics.

The disparate treatment of two groups with equal non-progressive characteristics was no puzzle. Jews had been victims of the Ancien Régime that the Revolution swept away; Catholics had been one of its pillars. Besides, there were only about 40,000 Jews in France out of a population of 28 million; one in 700 wasn’t much to worry about.

Even if they hadn’t had reasons for gratitude to the Left, Jews long had reasons for hostility to the Right, where antisemitism flourished until very recent times. On the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my ally, Jews mostly backed causes ranging from liberal to far left. The Left accepted Jewish campaign contributions and votes, proffering sympathetic noises in return. Nonetheless, the essential incongruity of the alliance remained. Over the past half century or so, three developments have undermined it.

First, the Jewish homeland of Israel gave the Likud Party a Knesset majority in 1977, ending three decades of socialist domination. Until then, Israel had never had a prime minister from the Right. Since then, PM’s from the Right have held office for 39 out of 47 years. In that time, Israel has become distinctively more Jewish in its culture, bringing to light the facets of Judaism that are most repellent to progressive ideology.

Second, Israel is no longer the enemy of the progressives’ enemy. Rather, it has become the ally of the contemporary Left’s stand-in for the Ancien Régime, namely, the United States of America.

Third and perhaps most important, progressives have found a new and different object for their sympathies: militant Islam, an infatuation even stranger than the French revolutionaries’ pro-Jewish sentiments. French Jews merely wanted relief from legal disabilities. Islamofascists are actively hostile toward many of the other “identities” favored by progressives and (leaving aside Marxists-in-Moslem-garb) don’t show much enthusiasm for “intersectional” unity. They also really, really dislike Jews. There is no tent, however big, into which they and the “Zionists” can fit.

The European Union’s faux-parliament illustrates the consequences of these changes. The European Coalition for Israel has analyzed European Parliament votes on Israel-related questions from 2019 through 2024. The results were striking:

(The EU parliament has nearly 200 political parties, which have formed seven “groups” (some of which amalgamate sub-groups), conventionally arrayed thus from Right to Left: Identity and Democracy (“ID”), European Conservatives and Reformists (“ECR”), European People’s Party (“EPP”), Renew Europe (“Renew”), Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (“S&D”), Greens-European Free Alliance (“Greens”), and The Left. A few parties belong to no group (non-inscrits), some by choice, some because nobody else wants to associate with them. Full results of the study for all parties are here.)

Looked at another way, 27 of the 28 parties in the two “right-wing” coalitions (ID and ECR) score above 80 percent on the pro-Israel scale, compared to four of the 82 “centrist” (EPP and Renew) parties and zero of the 70 “left-wing” (S&D, Greens and The Left) parties. Lowering the bar to 60 percent makes the centrists look better; 48 of their parties (42 of 45 EPP, six of 37 Renew) exceed that mark.

On the other end of the spectrum, all 18 parties of The Left are below 20 percent, while 18 of the 19 Green parties, 25 of the 33 S&D parties and four of the six non-inscrit left-wing parties are below 40 percent (as is one of the four non-inscrit right-wing parties, a reminder that right-wing antisemitism isn’t extinct).

The (tentative) good news is that the “New EU Parliament could become more pro-Israel”. European voters were favorable to the Jewish state in the June 21st EU elections. According to as yet provisional results, the decisively Israel-backing ECR and ID expanded from 118 to 141 seats (out of 720) and the generally sympathetic EPP from 176 to 189. Wishy-washy Renew fell from 102 to 74 and the three left-wing groups from 247 to 226. There are also at this point 45 non-inscrits and 45 newly elected members whose group affiliations are unknown, which is why the good news is only tentative.

Good news may, in any event, lead to nothing. The EPP, the parliament’s largest group, follows a policy of pas d’amis à droite – “no friends to the Right”. It is expected eke out a majority coalition in conjunction with Renew and S&D. One likely price of those groups’ support will be the reappointment of Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, a harsh critic of Israel, as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

A few years ago, Walter Russell Mead acutely summarized the sources of the anti-Jewish mania of the British Labour Party’s then-leader, Jeremy Corbyn:

It is Zionism that drives Mr. Corbyn’s anti-Jewish passion. He is not anti-Israel because some or even many of Israel’s policies are wrong. He is existentially anti-Zionist. He does not believe that the Jewish people are a nation. From this point of view, the notorious U.N. Resolution 3379 of 1975 got it exactly right: Zionism is racism, and the Jewish state is racist to the core.

What elevates the Jewish state from an irritation to an obsession in the Corbynite world is Israel’s relationship with the U.S. The U.S. is the center of international capitalism. Destroying American capitalism and the imperialist system it imposes on the world is the overarching goal of the Marxist zealotry that drives Mr. Corbyn’s worldview and justifies his sympathy for otherwise dubious regimes. The Iranian mullahs may hang homosexuals and stone the occasional adulteress, but in the all-important struggle against American imperialism and its Zionist sidekick, they are a natural and necessary part of the Resistance.

When Jews reestablished a state in Israel after a two-millennium hiatus, they received strong support from the Left, but that support was doomed to fade. The Jewish state did not become a progressive outpost in the Middle East. It grew into a nation with its own character, a character repugnant to the progressive mind, aggravated by progressives’ antipathy to the United States and their discovery of a new ally in the Jew-hating Islamofascist movement. The old alliance was, in truth, internally contradictory from the start. It was only a question of when circumstances would bring it an end.