…. that the folks they’ve been associating with and championing for years now actually hate their guts not because of Israeli “occupation” of Palestine or the Gazan “open-air prison” or really anything rational – but because they’re Jews? (BTW: the term “antisemitism” needs to be dumped. When it was hatred for the only Semitic people in Europe it made sense, but we’re now talking about hatred between Semitic peoples. Let’s just call it what it is now: Jew hatred)

Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.

This sense of deep betrayal is not limited to New York. Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.

That’s one Michelle Goldberg writing in the New York Times, and she’s joined by Naomi Klein at the Guardian:

“Harder for us adults is the fact that, in their desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza — which occupied people have every right to do — some of our supposed comrades on the left continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them. 

But both articles give a clue as to why Left-Wing Jews largely won’t get a clue. Goldberg goes on to attack Israel as per usual, plus her other everyday enemies:

Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naive progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary.

Like this guy?

Professor Rickford is now really sorry that he said that. More precisely he says that it was a “horrible choice of words” and “the language I used was reprehensible and did not reflect my values.” 

Oh bullshit. They reflected exactly his values – or are we supposed to believe that he’s yet another, squishy Lefty who didn’t know what decolonisation really meant?

And while it’s good that leftwing propagandist Michelle Goldberg is finally noticing what decolonisation really means, she’s no hero; she’ll forgive Professor Rickford and remain focused on what really matters: the rightwingers that she is in favor of “decolonising” will be able to take victory laps about this on Twitter! The slaughter of Jews by Islamic terrorists is one thing, but the true horror would be rightwingers acting all smug on social media – like this blog! The terrorist slaughter of civilians might result in the calamity of mean memes from righties! No, no! Anything but that!

She was all in favor of it so long as it was being done to other people – and she’d call you a racist for opposing such an obviously-commendable project. Here she is writing in 2019:

It sounds almost messianic: the Republican Party, that foul agglomeration of bigotry and avarice that has turned American politics into a dystopian farce, not just defeated but destroyed. The inexorable force of demography bringing us a new, enlightened political dispensation.

But she’s Jewish, so now she has to take a position on whether she wants her very good BLM and Antifa friends to “decolonise” her – and even then she can’t, aside from some weak-beer psychoanalysing of her Leftie friends:

Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty… Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret.

Oh! You noticed that too? So did we on the Right, decades ago. And in fact there’s a Jewish guy who matches Goldberg’s description: Joshua Leifer is the editor of Jewish Currently, which is a very harsh anti-Israel publication. How harsh? Well, back when it was part of the Communist Party it defended the rape and murder of Jews in Hebron. But now even Leifer is feeling a bit discomforted:

There’s also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for. I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families & children in their beds. I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Are these not the values that led us to oppose the cruel siege on Gaza? To resist the brutalities of the occupation? To oppose apartheid? Where are these values when Israeli children are held hostage, families wiped out, corpses violated before cheering crowds?

To quote Dennis: “You’re fooling yourself”. – which famous Monty Python skit is quite appropriate because it turns out that Leifer and Klein not only knew people who had been killed in Israel but ones living on “autonomous collectives” – the Israeli kibbutzim.

Those places were sites of old-fashioned Jewish socialism long pre-dating Israel and they enraptured the Far Left for two decades after 1948 because they were working examples of Marx’s vaguely described, post-revolutionary utopia; a society of thousands of little cooperatives that would be collective about everything from property to growing food to child care to defence. The Far Left rapture ended around 1967 when they suddenly realised that most of Israel didn’t live like that, didn’t want to, and had instead built the usual centralised capitalist democracy, complete with a good war machine. And of course the USSR had already switched sides just a few years earlier for geo-political reasons and helped hatch the Palestinian Liberation movement.

But kibbutzim still exist in Israel, many along those old socialist lines, so the likes of Leifer and Klein were people who had connections to members of the anti-Israel Left. That is why this touches them where the previous murders of the usual scumbag Zionist “settlers” did not. And you can see that in this next quote from Klein:

In fact these callous displays are a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will

Great argument: you Gazans should stop raping and murdering Jews because it’s a gift to Zionism.

There is the occasional Lefty Jew who gets it, like Ilan Benjamin, who just happens to be a younger cousin of Daniel Pearl, an investigative journalist for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist jihadis while on assignment in Pakistan back in 2003, his murderers releasing video documenting it all just as the Hamas killers have done.

Despite this terrible event Benjamin’s ideals were not dented (he was 13 at the time of the murder), proudly describing himself as a liberal American Jew with all the usual attachments, like supporting LGBTQ+ causes, BLM, modern feminism and so forth. But then he began to notice realities that would not go away, as he describes all this in a Free Press article which is a must read, starting with his leftist Western friends:

At first, I thought it must be miseducation
“Ah, they think Palestinians are the indigenous people. I’ll show that Jewish history, and the archaeology to prove it, dates back millennia.” 
“Ah, they think we’re white colonizers. I’ll show how many Jews are people of color, including those who are Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ethiopian.” 
“Ah, they’ll get it once I show them that there are fifty Muslim countries, and only one Jewish state.” 

But my friends weren’t interested in correcting their misunderstandings. 

And ending with his “Palestinian neighbors”:

When I immigrated to Israel at the age of 18 and enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, I was still driven by ideals. I thought I could promote more goodwill with our Palestinian neighbors.
…
On my rare free weekend, I spent my time at Kibbutz Be’eri. Because I was a “lone soldier”—that is, an immigrant without much close family in Israel—I was given a host family. They treated me like a son, including teasing me relentlessly for choosing to come to Israel and serve, whereas most Israelis have no choice. They were politically left, just like me. Despite rockets often raining down on them, they believed in peace, just like me
…
There was a time when these types of events couldn’t shake my ideals. I used to argue relentlessly for a two-state solution. I fought bitterly with Israeli friends about the decency of the Palestinian people. Even though radical Islamists had murdered my cousin, even though civilians had been blown up in buses daily during the Second Intifada, I refused to give in to nihilism.

He certainly chose the correct political sentiments:

I agreed that the settlements were unlawful, that Gaza was a humanitarian crisis, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyuahu was a dictator. I assumed—if I cared enough, if I mourned for the Palestinian dead, if I put nuance above all else—our neighbors and their allies would give us the same decency.

But in the end it all fell through:

How wrong I was. This past week, as over 1,300 Jews were slaughtered, the most murderous attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I saw the true face of Palestinians and their allies. All around the world, they celebrate. They gloat. They mock our tears. They do not protest against Hamas. They embrace pure evil. 

And so, to the terrorists I now say: When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left. 

To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language. To the Palestinians: you have lost all moral authority to claim victimhood. I will never advocate for you again. To my family, friends in Israel, and Jews around the world hurting right now, I love you. Stay safe.

In Berlin, where I live today with my German-Ukrainian Jewish wife, Germans love to say “Never Again.” Right now, Never Again is happening again in real time, livestreamed for the whole world to see.

I think he’s going to be an exception. A few weeks or months, and certainly a full-scale invasion of Gaza by Israeli and all this recent horror will be forgotten. The Goldbergs, Kleins and Leifer’s won’t change their minds or split the Western Pro-Palestine movement. Instead, they’ll will go right on being useful idiots for a movement that they now know wants to kill them, like this moron who advertises herself as:

A writer, strategist, and psychedelic facilitator from the San Francisco Bay Area, Amanda is the Founder of Psychedelic Exploration and Chief of Staff at Vaya Consulting, a diversity, equity, inclusion, and consulting firm focused on film/TV culture. She is a proudly Jewish & anti-Zionist and has 20+ years of experience running social impact programs and building thriving organizations. Amanda graduated with honors from Stanford University and received a Fulbright Scholarship. She currently resides in Amsterdam.

To be fair it’s not just Jews but a good chunk of the Western Left who have been clueless about themselves:

Including the feminists, like old-timer Phyllis Chesler:

I have pioneered women’s rights for more than 50 years.

Sadly, I must conclude that what was once a diverse and independent-minded movement has become hijacked by a “woke” death cult.
…
A quick survey of surviving feminist websites, including Ms., Women’s eNews, Jezebel, Slate, Salon, Lilith, etc. revealed nothing that specifically condemned Hamas for raping, kidnapping and mutilating women.
…
“[T]he feminist movement I once knew… has lost its moral compass. It is moribund, hijacked, ‘Palestinianized’ and Stalinized…It is, at best, an arm of the Democratic Party, which shows every sign of restraining if not betraying Israel….Feminists, including academics and human-rights-organization officials, rose up and at least cried out when Afghan, Saudi, Iranian, Pakistani, Yazidi and Ukrainian women were raped, kidnapped into sex slavery or murdered…. Rape in a war zone is considered a crime — as long as the victims are not Jews.

Now Ms Chesler has actively worked to rescue woman and girls from shit holes like Afghanistan but frankly I don’t recall a lot of feminists in the West speaking out about it or the other nations she names, certainly not in the form of mass demonstrations by the sisterhood. For that matter, I missed all the feminist remembrances of Rotherham and the mass rapes on New Year’s Eve in Cologne a few years ago.

That’s because feminist theory has been in conflict for some time now with post-colonialist theory, which makes it very difficult for many feminists to openly, publicly, and relentlessly criticise the misogyny of Islam. Ms Chesler certainly knows that because she’s one of the few who has done so – but it’s only now that she realises how stricken her movement is and that the racial component of Jew-hatred is at least as big a problem as the misogyny?

But like Mr Benjamin, Ms Chesler is going to continue to be an exception to her side, and they’re too few to make a difference to the Left now.