Why Israel Is Target #1 of the Global Left
The attack on Israel’s legitimacy is part of a larger assault by the global left and global capital on the democratic nation-state
Antisemitism has evolved through a breathtaking dialectical leap: It is now conveyed through the lingo of human rights. This is how a host of liberals and progressives—many of them Jews—have been seduced into supporting NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact promoting a racist view of the Jewish people. They do so by singling out the Jews as the one people not partaking in the universal right to self-determination, and Israel alone among the nations as the one state which has no right to exist. Singling out the Jews for special hostile treatment is, of course, the very definition of antisemitism.
How has this old-new antisemitism become a legitimate, even respectable position once again? And how did the idea of human rights, which purports to serve as a universal standard, get distorted so badly as to yield an argument for the targeting and exclusion of Jews?
One part of the answer is that academia and the media have created an Industry of Lies, as the title of Israeli leftist journalist Ben-Dror Yemini’s book accurately called it. By using gross double standards, this industry portrays Israel as a uniquely monstrous violator of human rights. The world’s actual egregious violators of human rights—such as China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and most of Israel’s neighbors—don’t receive a fraction of the moralizing attention that Israel gets.
But that is not the whole story. Another part of the answer lies in the way the human rights agenda has been channeled globally into undermining national democracies in general. This trend usually presents itself as a critique of nationalism, understood by the global left as proto-fascism permanently poised to break into actual fascism at any moment. The argument is admittedly catchy: If nationalism is particularistic and exclusive, then human rights, which are universal, are the answer. Catchy, that is, only if you conceive of nationalism as a “negation of others,” as opposed to the particular manifestation of a universal right to national self-determination.
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