Shoshana Bryen
Talking about National Socialists and Communists is complicated. But sometimes it must be done – this is one of those times.
Have you wondered how the intersectional masses organized anti-Israel demonstrations so quickly after the 10/7 massacres and kidnappings perpetrated against Israel by Hamas? On northeastern American college campuses and in large Eastern cities, in London and Paris — tens of thousands in full-throated rage at ISRAEL even BEFORE retaliation began.
They have been working on it for a while.
One explanation lies in the slim book, “The Israel Test” by George Gilder. Written in 2009, Gilder explained the “intersectional” movements (he didn’t call them that at the time) that thread together – feminist and gender/sexuality radicals, black radicals, white radicals and Muslim radicals are all grounded in the ideology of Communists and Nazis, both radical and both socialist by definition.
Obsessed with societal “gaps” between groups — gaps of income, power, achievement and status — and considering the impoverished Palestinian society, both anti-capitalists and antisemites find it easy to see Israel not as a free country and creator of wealth, but a perpetrator of gaps.
As is the United States.
Gilder, an ardent capitalist, starts there.
Capitalism succeeds by growing resources and allowing those resources and their offshoots to spread through the population. Governments don’t grow resources; they collect them in the form of taxes and then redistribute them. “If governments were superior investors, the Soviet bloc would have been an economic triumph rather than an economic and environmental catastrophe. China would have thrived under Mao,” says Gilder.
Jews are the avatar of what Gilder calls the “fondest dream of the twentieth century Left, to reconcile democracy and socialism, to imagine democracy without economic freedom or a system of law and property rights that transcend the vicissitudes of elections.”
Stalinists and Nazis vs. capitalist entrepreneurs. Radical Arabs, feminists, black and Latino activists, eco-warriors, “gap-ologists,” and other unhappy people on one side. Jews on the other. To get their supporters out in the street, the left only had to message its fellow-travelers to stand with the Hamas-supporters. Fast.
Side Question: What caused the formerly pro-Israel left to become radically anti-Israel and people previously friendly to Jews to become overtly antisemitic? Same answer.
Israel’s transformation from European socialism to high-tech prosperity was driven by capitalist entrepreneurs shored up by tens of thousands of Russian emigres determined to do in Israel what they couldn’t do in communist Russia — build, create, sell. As Israel became less the socialist dream, and Jews who survived the Holocaust became more politically and economically powerful, Israel lost its claim to the sympathy of the Left.
The space was quickly filled by Palestinians, despite the fact that their poverty is not ascribable to Israel (see the difference in Palestinian poverty figures outside Israel and the situation of Arab Israeli citizens). And although much of leftist ideology is anathema to Palestinian radicals and much of Palestinian law (in the West Bank and Gaza) would be anathema to leftists if they knew about it.
For the Left, the old antisemitic tropes were reawakened — Jews were stealing from the poor Arabs; “Israel Apartheid.” There was no other explanation needed. And that, according to Gilder, was a “license to dispossess and kill their oppressors and to disrupt capitalist economies… (And) no capitalist system can sustain prosperity amid constant violence.” There, both Hamas (and others) and Western leftists find justification for suicide bombings, indiscriminate rockets, massacres, and kidnappings. “Israel brought it on itself.”
And Nazis? Collaboration between Arabs and Nazis is an old story. And when Israel raided Yasser Arafat’s camps in Lebanon in 2006, there was an abundant supply of Hitler’s Mein Kampf written in Arabic. Hitler’s antisemitism was an amalgam of his belief in Jewish racial inferiority and Masonic intrigues, melded with his fundamental belief in the value of land and blood over creative capitalist endeavors.
Referring to Zionism, Hitler wrote, “They have not the slightest intention of building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating.”
Jews again as avatars. Gilder:
(Jews) who gain power by prevailing in economic rivalry and groups that gain power by blood sacrifice is the perennial and always ultimately violent struggle for survival. It is the division between those who imagine that humans can manipulate nature and create new things under conditions of peace and those who believe that the greatest attainments come from solidarity and sacrifice in war… Hitler wrote, “He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.”
The ”permanent struggle” for Palestinian leadership groups, is to keep alive the dream of violently erasing Israel. For their leftist “intersectional” allies, it is the struggle to erase capitalism.
This is Gilder’s “test.”
Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial. Are you for civilization or barbarianism, life or death, wealth, or envy? Are you an exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of troglodytic frenzy and hatred?”
Now you know.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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