Foreseeing a new left

Editorial

The problem with trying to pin the tail on the anti-Israel activists is that they are not monolithic. There are anti-Zionists who are well informed on chapter and verse of the conflict, from the First Aliyah to the Second Intifada. Then there are know-nothings, among whose number Vancouver-East MP Libby Davies recently outed herself, whose anti-Zionism is apparently based on nothing but gut feeling and knee-jerk ideology. In between, there is every permutation of reasonable and unreasonable, wise and foolish, fair-minded and fanatical. Not unlike the Zionist movement. There is a core, existential difference between Zionists and anti-Zionists, though. Zionism is a constructive, positive force; anti-Zionism is a negative, destructive movement.

Some time ago, we stopped using the term “pro-Palestinian” to describe anti-Zionists. Those who have set themselves up against Israel – Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, European socialists and North American “progressives” – have done little to nothing to aid Palestinians. Inarguably, they have prolonged the conflict and made life worse for Palestinians. With their marches in world capitals and intellectual justifications of violence, anti-Zionists have emboldened Palestinian extremists to believe that terror and violence will be greeted with global approval and to accept nothing short of complete victory over the “Zionist entity.”

Ten years ago, the global left sped into this death curve. When Palestinians upended the negotiating table and returned to violence, the world’s left cheered them on. People who were, almost concurrently, behaving like pacifists in the advent of war in Iraq exhibited an extraordinary lack of pacifism in their justification for and support of terror against Israel. Ten years later, when the Palestinians almost certainly would have had an independent state, those in Gaza are worse off than ever. And the left, which calls for patience and negotiation with Iran, the Taliban and North Korea, seeks boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

Despite all the ideological compromises necessary for extreme leftists to make common cause with the Israel-hating Islamists, there is one thing that unites them: a nihilism that seeks the destruction of everything – capitalism, globalism, Israel, America – in the hope that something better will emerge from the devastation. While Islamists at least seek global Shariah, the nihilist left has no constructive program at all. They do not seek to recreate the world in a new and better form, merely to destroy what exists now.

Worse, far worse, are the crimes of omission perpetrated by anti-Zionists. Swathed in the Palestinian flag, the left has cried “genocide” every time an Israeli army vehicle starts its engines, while ignoring actual genocides. They have yelled about Israeli human rights violations every time Israel takes action to defend itself from attack, while remaining unconscionably silent while human rights abuses of the worst order – and orders of magnitude worse than anything Israel has done in the name of self-defence – occur in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and, yes, under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, from partisan gangland-style assassinations to “honor” killings and the extrajudicial murder of “collaborators.” Yet, of all the countries in the Middle East and elsewhere worthy of attention from “social justice” advocates, the only one Davies and her ilk can get animated about is the Jewish one.

In 1992, then-leader of the Reform party Preston Manning began a purge of extremists in his party, from Heritage Front members to North Vancouver’s notorious antisemite, misogynist and homophobe Doug Collins, who had won a party nomination to run for Parliament. For his party to go on to become part of the united right that now governs this country, Manning’s forward-thinking (and morally correct) purge was absolutely necessary.

Canada’s left now faces the same choice. There has been talk of a merger or some form of coalition between the Liberal party and the New Democrats. Any hope of such an entity governing Canada is dependent on the sidelining of those whose views are inconsistent with Canadian values. Downplaying terrorism against Israel as justifiable homicide, which is the position taken by many voices and organs of the left in Canada, is no less repugnant to decent Canadians than the presence of neo-Nazis was in the Reform party.

While distressing, the Davies debacle may have a silver lining. There are other shoes waiting to drop, given that a large proportion of NDP rank-and-filers agree more with Davies than with the party’s relatively balanced official policy. If this incident and its repercussions separate the genuinely progressive wheat from the nihilist chaff, a new centre-left movement may once again claim the moral right to govern Canada. But first, decent people in the NDP must separate themselves from those among them who hate Israel, America and capitalism more than they love negotiated peace, democracy, pluralism and human rights for all.

^TOP