The bitter legacy of the Gaza conflict will change us for the worse

A new extremist spiral is on the way

Nov 23, 2023

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In 2007 I published what was probably my most-read book What’s Left. It asked novel questions.

"Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal-left is against come from the liberal-left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don…Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see?

“After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?”

In short, I asked why was the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic right-wing ideas. In the early 2000s, overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists were more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists were white, they had no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognizable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that was anti-Western and they treated it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

I say my questions were novel because, although socialism was one of the great political movements of the 20^th century, few discussed the consequences of its collapse in the 1980s. The decline of the socialist religion had as profound and as perverse consequences as the collapse of Christianity in the late 19^th century. But no one, or next to no one, wanted to think about them.

As a good atheist I hated to paraphrase GK Chesterton, but there’s no escaping the old Catholic apologist. My argument boiled down to saying that what Chesterton said about God, or is meant to have said about God, applies just as well to socialism. When men stop believing in it, “they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

After dreams of socialism and communism vanished in the 1980s, large sections of the radical left preferred any enemy of the West to the West having no enemies at all: radical Islam, insane Sunni and Shia dictators, Putin’s Russia, violent misogynists and homophobes. As long as they were anti-western, and in particular the enemies of the US and Israel, the radical left was happy to form alliances.

Or as Judith Butler explained the new orthodoxy in 2006, “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” That by any normal standard Hamas and Hezbollah were tyrannical, inquisitorial, and misogynist was irrelevant. They were anti-western and that alone made them “progressive”.

Not everything I wrote in 2007 stands up well today. In the 2010s we began to see Conservatives fawning over trash like Viktor Orban, and from 2016 on we have seen the wholesale abasement of the US right before Donald Trump. The lure of authoritarianism was by no means confined to the left

But overall, what I said remains true. And just to be clear, I did not then and do not now believe in the horseshoe theory. The far left is not the same as the far right. There is a huge difference between living in a country ruled by Donald Trump and a country ruled by Nicolas Maduro or between Iran and North Korea. The far left and far right target different people, and serve different interests.

It is better to think of radical Islam seducing elements of an exhausted radical left. The white western working class would no longer die for the revolution (truth be told, it was never that keen on dying for the revolution even at the best of times for the left). But young Muslim men would fight and kill Americans and Israelis. And if you could forget about the obscurantist religious tyranny, the hatred of every human right, the persecution and murder of Arab and Iranian leftists, they might in a certain light appear to be a replacement for the western working class that had let the far left down so badly.

When What’s Left came out respectable critics said words to the effect of “come on, Nick, you are just talking about tiny groups of post-Stalinists and post-Trotskyists. The real left was in the then Labour government, trade unions and charities and campaign groups.”

I replied with words to the effect of politics is downstream of culture. Look at academia, the comment pages of the Guardian, the organisers of demonstrations, the left trade unions and many of those supposedly respectable campaign groups and charities. They are getting drunk on a weird mixture of far-leftism, far-rightism and postmodernism. They will embrace medieval levels of superstition and regimes they would have no hesitation in describing as fascist if they were white.

I asked where this was leading. The far left provided an answer when, to the astonishment of my respectable critics, it took over the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn.

Now the Gaza war has led to another pact being formed between the western far left and radical Islam. Over at Quillette, an American academic, Susie Linfield, has gone through the whole hideous detail of how leftist thought leaders and academics celebrated the murderers. Some of those she indicted are so predictable you would miss them if they were not there.

Linfield notes that in the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations against the Netanyahu government.

Ah, the academic left: it writes in ink and dreams of blood

Elsewhere depression replaces tedium. Anyone who remembers the scrupulous work of Michael Waltzer on what constituted just war will be appalled about what has happened to Dissent, the journal he edited. Dissent used to believe that the deliberate targeting of civilians was a war crime. Not so now when the civilians are Jews. In its pages, one writer described Israel as a ‘genocide machine’ and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved.

“It is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” So grief is impermissible. Indeed, it’s worse than that: grief is colonialist.

Elsewhere tenured academics were unable to contain their enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory,’’ one wrote.

Ah professors. They write in ink and dream of blood.

The essential point to bear in mind is that these expressions of joy at the death of Jews on 7 October was almost instantaneous. It came before a single Israeli bomb fell on Gaza. It was not a condemnation of Israel’s disproportionately violent response. That was still to come. Instead of rational protest there was a celebration of the mass murder of Jews by Hamas, a terrorist group inspired not only by Islamism but by European fascism. As if to confirm my argument in What’s Left the far left was cheering the far right because it has no one else to cheer.

The same question I asked in the early 2000s can be asked now: where is this heading?

I do not go along with the view among conservatives that all who march with Islamists and their leftist allies are antisemites by definition. From the start of this war, I have said that Israel’s aim of destroying Hamas is impossible. I was going to say that it is impossible without unacceptable civilian casualties. But in truth it is impossible in all circumstances. The Israeli forces simply cannot find Hamas fighters as they melt into a population of two million disorientated people. This is not simply my view. Military specialists are noting the low level of Israeli casualties and the small number of Hamas kills the Israeli Defence Forces are claiming to have made. The odds are that Hamas is refusing to opt for a direct confrontation, and allowing civilians to pay the price. It is always reasonable to protest against futile wars and needless suffering, and this war is no exception to the rule.

And yet before I turn too accommodating, let me say there is no other area of progressive life where liberals and leftists ally with racists and don’t show even the smallest embarrassment about their behaviour.

Here’s a thought experiment. There is a growing concern on the western far right about low birth rates. Rather than allow immigration, Viktor Orban in Hungary is offering tax exemptions to women who have four or more children. The left naturally wants higher welfare payments for mothers, too, and in the case of the UK wants to end a nasty Conservative policy which penalises families on benefits if they have more than two children.

For all that, no progressive would join a demonstration of neo-Nazis or alt-right supporters in favour of encouraging British mothers to have more children. They would think that there was a serious flaw in a campaign that attracted ultra-right white support. They would worry about inciting prejudice against ethnic minorities in the UK. And yet they see nothing wrong in going along with campaigns that attract ultra-right Islamist support or in worrying too much about the UK's Jewish minority.

If the grim absurdities of the left of the early 2000s presaged Corbynism and the collapse of the Labour party, what do the 2020s have in store? I am trying to be objective and so won’t go off into long laments about the moral health of the sacred “Left”. I long-ago gave up worrying about that in any case.

First and most obviously the failure of the white left for more than a generation to oppose Israel while also opposing antisemitism has mainstreamed racial prejudices. The explosion in anti-Jewish attacks since 7 October is an inevitable consequence. I have never seen Jewish people feel so isolated. It’s not simply the far left and Muslim agitators who scare them. BBC presenters and others in the mainstream, who make their indifference to the massacre of Jews plain, foretell a future where Israel is a pariah state and Jews are damned by association and must pay the price. Perhaps that future is already here, and we will be permanently in a Corbynista world where Jews are seen as sinister agents in a Zionist conspiracy manipulating western policy.

Second, the uncritical treatment of Hamas naturally reinforces the most bigoted and reactionary elements in British Muslim communities. The consequences we can only guess at, but I think we can say by looking back at the last time the British left ran off with radical Islamists, they will lead us down new spirals of extremism.