Socialists in the west have been parroting Soviet dogma for years. Jeremy Corbyn is just a well indoctrinated product of the Soviet hatred for Israel.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Jeremy Corbyn antisemitism affair is that people — especially Jews — have been startled to discover that the socialist Corbyn holds common socialist views about Israel and enjoys meeting with and cozying up to Arab terrorists. The latter, after all, have been hailed by socialist and communist leaders as ‘freedom fighters’ since these terrorists first emerged on the scene.
Corbyn has done things such as calling terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah “friends” in 2009; he has sat on a conference panel with several Hamas terrorists sentenced for murder, such as Hamas head Khaled Mashaal, in 2012 and put a wreath on the grave of an Arab terrorist mastermind in 2014, among other things. He has also accused Israel of war crimes, declared his complete solidarity with the Arabs of Gaza and the PA and has called to cancel the EU trade agreement with Israel. None of these things, however, should really be that shocking to anyone who is familiar with socialist dogma on the issue of Israel.
This is, after all, the socialist approach to Israel and her enemies. It has a long history, which began in earnest when the Soviet Union unleashed a campaign to delegitimize Israel and Zionism, a campaign which continues to produce anti-Jewish hatred until this day. The campaign was launched primarily in order to rectify the damage to the Soviet Union’s prestige after Israel defeated its Arab allies in the Six-day war.
After 1967, the USSR began to flood the world with a constant flow of anti-Zionist propaganda. It was the Soviets who introduced the catalogue of anti-Israeli invective into public international discourse – still very much in use today – with epithets such as “practitioners of genocide”, “racists”, “concentration camps”, and “Herrenvolk.” Another tactic was constantly to draw comparisons in the Soviet media between Israel and South Africa (this is the origin of the canard of “Israeli apartheid”).
As early as 1965, however, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination’ was finally passed.
The Western Left ate up the Soviet propaganda raw. That would include Jeremy Corbyn, who is a prime example of an indoctrinated Western socialist.
However, the difference between Corbyn’s approach to Israel and Zionism and that of the mainstream Western establishment politicians is not as big as it might appear. Part of the Soviet tactics in isolating Israel was making the PLO look “respectable” and they succeeded beyond all expectations. World leaders of all stripes – not just the hard left – queued to meet with the late arch terrorist Arafat, who even won the Nobel peace prize. What is the moral difference between praising the arch terrorist Arafat and calling Hamas and Hezbollah your “friends”?
When Corbyn talks and openly meets with Hamas terrorists, he might be showing his anti-establishment nature and his utter lack of diplomatic finesse, but the terrorists Corbyn meets with want exactly the same thing as Arafat did and that the Holocaust-denying terrorist Mahmoud Abbas still does. In fact, when the more polished Western leaders not only met with, but politically and financially supported Arafat’s and later Abbas’ regime they were contributing on a huge scale to anti-Jewish hatred and the loss of innocent Jewish lives – far more than any impact Corbyn could ever fantasize about.
The difference between Corbyn, should he become prime minister of the UK, and any other more traditional political leader would be that under Corbyn the polite masks would come off entirely and his ideological hostility towards Israel would be on full display.
____________________
Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst and a fellow with the Haym Salomon Center
[To receive updates on more in depth articles on Israel and the Middle East, join us on Facebook or Twitter ]
