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Notes -
Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?
I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:
This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.
The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.
Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.
With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.
It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.
Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?
ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.
I don't think what most anti-Zionists want is for Israeli Jews to be massacred. The more moderate wing presumably wants a single state with equal rights and no privileged status for Jews (i.e. no right of return, citizenship based on presence on the land, etc) while the more extreme wing wants to send Israeli Jews packing; there are of course people who want Israeli Jews to die as an end goal, but despite some high-profile demonstrations I believe those people are the minority.
I rarely speak up on the Israel-Palestine issue here or in person because it never changes, and will never change, and yet is totally radioactive, so it's almost useless to express an individual opinion. But I personally don't really like anyone involved in the conflict; as far as I'm concerned there are no winners, there are only losers. I can absolutely see the left's point that Zionism was rather colonialist -- the Jews who moved to Israel during the Zionist migration hadn't been in the region for many generations, and thereafter took over governance direct from the British -- as well as essentially religious: the claim of sovereignty over the territory was based, however many epicycles of irony and rabbinical reinterpretation Zionists wanted to invoke, essentially on the belief that God had promised the region to Jews in perpetuity. And so it's really easy for me to see why progressives, who loathe colonialism and hate religion, would see this as fundamentally incompatible with the "rules based international order" that predominated after WWII, and therefore perceive Israel/Palestine as an active non-self-governing territory.
Given that a few generations of Israeli Jews have made their lives there, it certainly seems like ethnic cleansing to say they have to leave now, and I think people who directly call for that are triggering people's Holocaust detectors for good reason. At the same time, I also just don't particularly like that the West straight-up endorsed the foundation of an ethnostate in the 1940s on territory that had just been involved in an active ethnic civil war. There were a lot of good reasons many Jews felt the foundation of a Jewish state was a moral imperative, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely to me that Jews would live in greater peace and security, and lost fewer lives, had European Jewry stuck around in Western Europe, or fled to America. The Israelis can do whatever they want, but I'm just not at all convinced that the ethnoreligious passion of Zionism could ever justify the immense suffering that civil war has brought to both Jews and Palestinians in the region.
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