Griping about "the left" and Israel
This requires some careful attention - if you actually want to be careful on this
Heather "Digby" Parton back in the aughts popularized the concept of "hippie-bashing." The term is a way of mocking the stock Republican talking points that became widespread during the Nixon era, badmouthing long-haired antiwar protesters and grumbling about supposedly privileged, spoiled college kids who think they're entitled to criticize the gubment. Git a job, hippies!! And we heard this stuff all the time around the Iraq War.
This post is about the current hippie-bashing around the Israel-Gaza war.
The latest Israel-Gaza conflict gives conservatives in the US and elsewhere new opportunities to trash two of their perennial targets: “the left” and them thar college campuses where people go to learn fancy-pants idees that have no relation to the Real World (as imagined by rightwingers).
The Biden Administration is promoting this idea.1
To understand the general conservative perspective on this, we can turn to Sinclair Lewis.
In his 1943 novel Gideon Planish2, he writes about a rightwing preacher who he uses to illustrate "Research." The example, set in the late 1930s, is the Rev. Ezekiel Bittery. Apparently, he had some problems with his formal credentials, because the narrator refers to him as the "ex-Reverend."
The first step in Research is to gather a bunch of stories from newspapers about Brother Bittery and then write him to get some of his pamphlets. Then you have a few people go listen to his speeches live. With this procedure, it becomes well established that:
... Brother Bittery is a flannel-mouthed rabble-rouser who used to be charged not only with stealing the contents of the church poor-box, but of taking the box itself home to keep radishes in, and who at present if he isn't on the pay-roll of all the Fascists, is a bad collector.
After considering the matter for a couple of years, a Congressional committee proceeds to investigation, establishing for the record that "Mr. Bittery used to be a hell-fire preacher and is now a hell-fire Fascist."
More Research ensues, with scholars applying themselves to the phenomenon, which reveals "that Mr. Bittery used to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynching socialists."
And during all this time, the Reverend Ezekiel himself will, as publicly as possible, to as many persons as he can persuade to attend his meetings, have admitted, insisted, bellowed, that he has always been a Ku Kluxer and a Fascist, that he has always hated Jews, colleges and good manners, and that the only thing he has ever disliked about Hitler is that he once tried to paint barns instead of leaving the barns the way God made them. [my emphasis]
The spirit of Rev. Bittery lives on long after his own fictional career.
Bashing “The Left”
Trashing “the left” is a favorite political pastime. So popular that people who consider themselves Left engage in it enthusiastically. Polemics - sometimes called “ideological struggle” - are part of left politics, even the left-liberal version. One reason is that you can’t have politics without differences.
And any political group of any size has to have some kind of rewards to hand out, on a spectrum ranging from the satisfaction of being around like-minded people to paying positions, offices, prestige, and fame, the latter set of rewards more often found in parties or long-standing non-profit groups or NGOs.
Ironically, small groups with a niche ideology may be more susceptible to bitter controversies and splits than larger ones, simply because they generally have less rewards to hand out than larger and better-funded ones.
And, of course, rival groups and government agencies try hard to weaken opposing groups by encouraging splits and controversies among them. One of the most consequential of such efforts has been Israel’s long-standing policy, pursued with enthusiasm by Bibi Netanyahu, of promoting Hamas, which rejects the idea of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, in order to reduce the influence of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has open to the two-state concept.
Left-right controversies over Israel are far from new. In 1948, Cold War liberals were on the same page as the Communists and the Soviet Union when it came to Israel’s independence:
Establishment of the state of Israel on 14 May [1948] was internationally an important achievement for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and its satellites supported the Jews in every way throughout the war in Palestine. The military aid which the Soviet bloc extended to Israel, declared Professor Yaacov Ro'i, was a major factor in enabling the Jews to gain important military victories; it was also a significant factor in promoting Soviet political and strategic ambitions in the Arab world. To quote him, 'The desire that the British be expelled from Palestine and their position in the entire region weakened, justified the unusual step of exceeding the bounds of purely political backing in the international arena as well as the political risks involved in strengthening Israel's fighting potential both with personnel and arms supplies'.3 [my emphasis]
Say what? Establishment of the state of Israel ... was internationally an important achievement for the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies?
Well, yes. It was. Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists but was then part of the Soviet bloc, was the chief supplier of weapons to the Zionist independence fighters. “In 1968, David Ben-Gurion said: ‘Czechoslovak arms saved the State of Israel, really and absolutely. Without these weapons, we wouldn’t have survived’.”4
The Zionist Labor movement (Mapai was the labor party), which played a leading role in the years leading up to independence and just after, practiced a form of militant social democracy. The kibbutz movement was an idealist effort to establish a fundamental basis for a socialist society in Israel.
When Harry Truman decided to back the Zionist independence fight in 1948, it was considered a bold and unconventional decision. It put the US on the other side of its recent wartime ally Britain, and on the side of another recent wartime ally, the USSR, even though the Cold War polarization was already taking place.
When Israel teamed up with Britain and France in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt, the Republican President Eisenhower pressured them to withdraw.5
In the following decade, support for Israel was more associated with Democrats than Republicans but not a central issue until the six-day 1967 war. That conflict and Israel’s quick seizure of the West Bank and Gaza areas that set the stage for decades of new conflict won Israel admiration across the political spectrum in the US. It also inspired the spread of the fundamentalist Christian Zionist outlook that today is a major influence in the Republican Party. Both Democrats and Republicans express “support for Israel,” though the apocalyptic justification of the Christian Zionists has essentially no significance for Democrats.
In the present, Luke Winkie writes that Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has "confounded supporters" by a statement he made on the Israel-Gaza conflict: "Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire. We must support Israel in efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children. … We can talk about a ceasefire after Hamas is neutralized."6
But this is the Biden Administration's position and the general Democratic position. I think calling for a ceasefire would be a good policy for the US. But how that would much surprise progressives is a bit hard to see.
After all, during his Senate race, Fetterman affirmed his support of U.S. military facilitation in Israel “without any additional conditions” to Jewish Insider. Pressed further, Fetterman distanced himself from those in Congress who are more-full-throated critics of the country’s international affairs—the same ones who are currently calling for a cease-fire.
“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he said in April 2022. “There is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.”
The rightwing obsession with them thar universities
The Trumpista right is on the same wavelength with the fictional Rev. Bittery when it comes to seeing colleges and universities as sources of commie subversion and moral decadence. It’s even an organized effort on the right.
David Horowitz was part of the New Left in his younger days. But he did a classic left-to-right conversion act and became what the SPLC calls “a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black movements.” His Center for the Study of Popular Culture group, later renamed the David Horwitz Freedom Center, became “known for compiling McCarthyite lists of students, professors, and administrators and plastering campuses with posters accusing them of being subversive.”7 He was focused on presenting campuses as being heavily influenced by Islamists, Israel-haters, and terrorist sympathizers.
Bari Weiss is the former New York Times columnist who popularized the phrase “Intellectual Dark Web” to describe cranky rightwingers like Jordan Peterson whom she admired. One of her favorite themes has been alleged intolerance against conservative free speech that she claimed was rampant on American college campuses.8 So this whining about colleges being enemies of all that the US radical right holds dear - including the rightwing Netanyahu government in Israel, is nothing new.
How should we screen complaints about “the left” and Israel?
This is pretty basic but worth being explicit about:
What is the source? Is it from a solid journalistic source? Is it from some other institutional source that you know to be trustworthy? Is it from a source you’ve found to be trustworthy?
What kind of report is it? Is it a news report, an opinion piece, an analytical evaluation, a government position, a position of a political party or group?
How specific is it? Does it identify individual groups or individuals when it talks about “the left”? Is it based on professional reporting? Is it specific enough about events, positions, and political actors that they can be cross-checked?
Does it make sense? Or is it more some kind of gut reaction or routine sloganeering?
I’ll give two examples here.
Example 1: Leftists are bad, whoever the heck they actually are, how would I know?
Noah Smith is a respected economics commentator and someone whose analysis I have found worthwhile. But not his post of October 10, “Western leftists have lost the plot.”9 It features a photo taken from X/Twitter from someone named Stuart Meissner, which the rightwing tabloid New York Post put on its cover, featuring a dark-skinned woman holding up a photo of a swastika on her phone, that Meissner identifies as “Palestinian protestors here in Times Square NYC displaying Swastika showing true colors.”10 Both Smith and the New York Post story online used the story to trash the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) group.
In this case, the source for the photo is sketchy, at best. The body of Smith’s post is ranting about the inhumanity of Hamas in the October 7 attack. And on specificity and making sense, it’s lacking on both counts. The New York rally was the day after the attack and it was a public rally where presumably anyone could show up. The organizers of such an event can control who they invite to speak, but not who shows up. Smith even notes explicitly - in the 12th paragraph - “as far as I know, all of this bloodthirst and support for ethnic cleansing, 100% of it, is coming from the grassroots rather than from socialist politicians or progressive leaders.” (emphasis in original) So why use that photo and the article to smear the DSA as fans of Islamic terrorism and swastikas?
In an October 26 post11, though, he admits to being a little uncertain who “leftists” are, but he knows he doesn’t like ‘em.
[My Oct. 8 column] left some people confused. Who are “leftists”? The DSA, certainly, but what about BLM? Or Bernie Sanders or AOC? Is Biden a “leftist”? Who exactly was I condemning, when so many prominent Democratic and progressive leaders had stepped forward to condemn Hamas?
He says, “It’s “a fair question. ... If you’re going to complain about a whole group of people, it’s important to be clear about who’s in that group.”
And then he proceeds not to answer it. The next sentence is, “In fact, there’s no official definition of who’s a ‘leftist’ — they certainly don’t use that term for themselves.“ Actually, some do. But the real point is that Smith is complaining about a group of people he can only vaguely define himself.
If you don’t have actual hippies to punch, just make some up!
Example 2:
The second example is a long column by May Tevet Dayan, an Israeli-Canadian poet teaching this semester at San Diego State University.12
She cites a number of examples in her experience in San Diego since October 7 of seeming hostility to Israel and to Jews in general. She mentions various unnamed people she met in Hollywood who have kooky ideas like, “I meet environmental activists for whom Hamas is a partner in the steadfast war against the windmills of the West and global warming.”
Now, I know Hollywood has lots of people that New York Times reporters don’t encounter when they venture out to a diner in some small city to check out what the local white folks think about Donald Trump. But Hamas as a partner in the “steadfast war against the windmills of the West”? Was she talking to random stoners on the street? To an actor auditioning for a Don Quixote play?
But then at the end, she talks about how kind and comforting her students were to her concerns about the conflict that started October 7.
Here the source is clear in that Dayan is talking about her own impressions and feelings. It’s very much a personal account. But the specifics are vague.
This news report describes an October 9 march sympathetic to Israel on the San Diego State Campus:
Hundreds of people gathered at the San Diego State University campus on Monday afternoon to march in support of Israel after the attacks by Hamas over the weekend.
The group marched with Israeli flags and wore T-shirts that read “Fighting with Love” and “#EndJewHatred.” The peaceful walk started and ended at the Hillel of San Diego at SDSU, but not before the group marched around campus. …
The organizers did have security on site as they marched through campus, but everything was peaceful from beginning to end.13
Dayan’s column refers to events this week:
Just this week, a huge conference was held in the central auditorium where hundreds of students representing all kinds of departments heard – in a liberal way – why Israel is guilty of war crimes and creates fake news, and why Hamas is an organization of freedom fighters. Anyone who tried to influence the nature of the event was told it’s impossible to prevent freedom of speech.
A second conference, at which I was invited to participate, presented different aspects about what is happening right now. At the university’s behest, for security reasons it was not actually held on campus: It felt as if, in view of the threats against Israelis, the university cannot guarantee the full security of supporters of Israel. [my emphasis]
But did she just have a creepy feeling? Or did the administration actually say that they couldn’t “guarantee the full security of supporters of Israel“? I’m not sure what “full security” means in this context, but that’s a nit.
Having worked on a university campus with a large number of students - SDSU has around 32 thousand - I know that scheduling classrooms and meeting rooms can be a very complicated process. Especially on short notice.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a “pro-Palestinian” demonstration downtown this past weekend:
Hundreds of people took to the streets in downtown San Diego Saturday afternoon in a show of support for Palestinians amid the growing violence in Israel and Gaza where casualties continue to mount.
Chanting “Long live Palestine” as they marched up Broadway, signs held aloft while waving the tri-color flag of Palestine, the marchers were part of a protest aimed at persuading elected leaders to press for a ceasefire and an end to what they called the Israeli occupation, said Sarah Farouq, community organizer with the San Diego for Palestine Coalition. …
The peaceful protest, which San Diego police said drew about 1,200 people, is not the first one in San Diego that the local Palestinian groups have organized. Two others have been held in the last 10 days, Farouq said, in addition to a vigil held Wednesday at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to mourn the hundreds killed in the blast earlier this week at a Gaza hospital.14
The local NBC News outlet also reported on the march.15
There is no mention of violence or threats against Jewish people in those reports. That doesn’t mean such things aren’t happening. And it doesn’t invalidate Dayan’s own impressions as she expressed them. But the reports don’t necessarily boost the impression some readers would surely get from her article that “the university cannot guarantee the full security of supporters of Israel.”
The point is, read and listen to these reports carefully and try to distinguish between factual information presented and subjective impressions. In other words, be critical-minded consumers of news.
Magid, Jacob & JTA (2023): White House pans ‘grotesque’ college campus antisemitism in support of Hamas attacks. Times of Israel 10/27/2023. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/white-house-pans-grotesque-college-campus-antisemitism-in-support-of-hamas-attacks/> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Lewis, Sinclair (1943): Gideon Planish (eBook). Project Gutenberg of Australia, Nov. 2002. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200941h.html> (Accessed: 27-10-2023).
Ginat, Rami (1996): Soviet Policy towards the Arab World, 1945-48. Middle Eastern Studies 32:4, 321-335. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4283830> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Zbavitelová, Gita (2020): The Czech arms that saved Israel. Jerusalem Post 11/30/2020. <https://www.jpost.com/international/the-czech-arms-that-saved-israel-650710> (Accessed: 28-10-2023).
See also: Dayan, Aryeh (2006): The Communists Who Saved the Jewish State. Haaretz 05/09/2006. <https://www.haaretz.com/2006-05-09/ty-article/the-communists-who-saved-the-jewish-state/0000017f-e58d-dc7e-adff-f5ad44b90000> (Accessed: 28-10-2023).
Editors (2023): Suez Crisis: Middle East [1956]. Britannica Online 09/05/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Suez-Crisis> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Winkie, Luke (2023): What’s Going On With John Fetterman’s Surprising View on Israel? Slate 10/25/2023. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/john-fetterman-israel-position-explained.html> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
David Horowitz. SPLC Extremist Info, n/d. <https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-horowitz>(Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Pierce, Charles (2018): Requiem for The New York Times Opinion Page. Esquire 03/08/2018. <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19177772/bari-weiss-campus-free-speech-new-york-times/> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Smith, Noah, (2023): Western leftists have lost the plot. Noah Smith Substack 10/10/2023. (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Meissner, Stuart (2023): X/Twitter 10/08/2023. <https://x.com/StuartMeissner/status/1711095487577616447?s=20> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Downing, Jared & Fiz-Gibbon, Jorge (2023): Pro-Palestinian rally met by Israel supporters in Midtown as Hochul slams ‘abhorrent’ demonstration after Hamas attack. New York Post 10/08/2023. <https://nypost.com/2023/10/08/nyc-pro-palestinian-rally-slammed-as-abhorrent-as-hamas-attacks-israel/> (Accessed: 2023-27-10). Meissner's photo also appears on the web version of the report.
Smith, Noah, (2023): The American socialist worldview is just totally broken (repost). Noah Smith Substack 10/26/2023. (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Dayan, Maya Tevet (2023): Being Israeli in California After Hamas' Attack: Now I Know What ‘Progressive Trolls’ Are Like. Haaretz 10/26/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-26/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israeli-in-the-u-s-after-hamas-attack-now-i-know-what-progressive-trolls-are-like/0000018b-6ba1-db57-a7cb-ebbfba210000> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Acevedo, Laura (2023): Hundreds march at San Diego State in support of Israel. ABC News 10 10/10/2023. <https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/hundreds-march-at-san-diego-state-in-support-of-israel> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Weisberg, Lori (2023): Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators march in downtown San Diego amid growing violence in Israel. San Diego Union-Tribune 10/21/2023.<https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/breaking/story/2023-10-21/hundreds-of-pro-palestinian-demonstrators-march-in-downtown-san-diego-amid-growing-violence-in-israel> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Pro-Palestinian group rally shuts down streets in downtown San Diego. NBC 7 San Diego 10/21/2023. <https://www.nbcsandiego.com/videos/pro-palestinian-group-rally-shuts-down-streets-in-downtown-san-diego/3334230/> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).