Left about-turn takes Israel in new direction as villain

ISRAEL was once a cause celebre of the Australian Left. “Don’t be fooled by the Jew-baiters,” a pamphlet produced just ahead of its birth by the Eureka Youth League, the Communist Party of Australia youth wing, says. “Demand that the Australian government recognise the state of Israel … Work for world peace and international friendship.”

Intellectual fashion changes. Left sloganeering remains.

Back in 1948 it was battling bigotry. Now there are fears it is licensing extremism, stripping out nuance and denying a deeper understanding of cause and effect in the Middle East.

As the ground war has developed in Gaza two high-profile journalism educators have portrayed the conflict in simple black and white instead of attempting to present all the varied shades needed to show the full picture. University of Technology, Sydney academic Jenna Price retweeted a confronting image of a wounded Palestinian child clinging to a paramedic, while her colleague Wendy Bacon has kept up a steady stream of tweets highlighting Palestinian casualties and retweeted statements from the group Electronic Intifada.

In a contentious second straying into global politics Price used a column in the Fairfax press this week to complain “For 10 days now, Tony Abbott has focused just on those 39 (who died in Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17). He’s done the job a politician ought to have done. And now he needs to turn to the rest of us … (I) t creeps me out every time I read or hear a commentator say how statesmanlike Abbott has become … (T) he task of standing up for those who’ve died at the hands of terrorism is what could be described as a set piece.”

Price justified her work by pointing to the social media metrics. “Fascinating,” she tweeted. “The tweets and emails are running 100 to one in favour of my column.”

Ignored in this approach to world affairs was the fact that as recently as the start of last year Hamas rejected reports it had changed its position and would accept a two-state solution. Its officials made it clear: Hamas would continue to deny Israel’s right to exist.

Also missing was the acknowledgment that before the current conflict began at the start of last month in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers and the suspected revenge killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian, close to 500 rockets had been fired into Israel from Gaza since the start of the year, let alone the fact that Hamas uses civilian centres as places to store and deploy its weapons — no less personage than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed “outrage” at the discovery of rockets in a UN school in Gaza.

Mary Spongberg, dean of the school of arts and social sciences at the UTS, was unable to respond by deadline to a request for comment on this activism by her journalism academics.

But Matthew Lesh from the Australasian Union of Jewish Students warns of the impact of stripping the substance from debate. “Some academics provide a less-than-balanced perspective about what is a very complex and nuanced ongoing conflict,” he tells Inquirer. “This can range from claiming Israel is a colonialist construct to blatantly asserting land has been stolen.”

Lesh says this has left Jewish students “uncomfortable and unable to voice their opinions in class” — and more.

“Fashionable anti-Jewish thoughts have quickly changed to action,” Lesh continues. “Jewish students undertaking social, political activity or even just walking around university are consistently attacked as supporters of Israel.”

In recent weeks protests in Europe against the conflict in Gaza have degenerated into violent displays of anti-Semitism accompanied by chants of “Gas the Jews” in Paris and “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight on your own” in Berlin.

In London, protesters have displayed an Israeli flag with the Star of David replaced by a swastika. A version rendered in the black, red and white of the flag of the Nazi regime was carried at a rally in Sydney.

Julie Nathan, the research officer for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who has documented the Sydney incident and dozens of similar gestures in other protests and on social media sites, has a stark warning of their implications. “Anti-Semites are emboldened by any negative portrayal of Israel in the public arena, and use this as a pretext to demonise Jews generally,” she says.

“The outpouring of vile expressions of Jew-hatred on social media is a strong and frightening warning that racist violence at street protests might become as common in Australia as it already is overseas.”

Monash University’s Philip Mendes says sections of the Left in Australia are now offering views on Israel that would have once been associated with their ideological opposites in the League of Rights. “Conservatives ... have become more pro-Israel since September 11 and conversely those sections of the Left have come to view Israel more and more as the enemy,” he says. “That eventually conflates to seeing local supporters of Israel, Jewish or otherwise, as the enemy.”

His Monash colleague Nick Dyrenfurth pinpoints the Six Day War in 1967 as the turning point for Left attitudes to Israel. “Until then there had been a broad Left consensus supporting the creation of the state of Israel and its ongoing security,” he says.

More than geopolitics was involved. “The Left is fundamentally changing during that period,” Dyrenfurth says. “You have to understand the ascendancy of the new Left. At its core is a myopic version of anti-imperialism which focused almost solely on the US and saw Israel as merely an extension of American imperial power.”

The subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the two intifadas merely hardened positions but, as Dyrenfurth points out, more has also been at play. “From the middle of 19th century on until the establishment of the state of Israel there was a defacto alliance between large sections of the Left and intellectual factions of the Jewish diaspora,” he says. “It’s the fraying of that relationship which is really important. The Jews need the Left less once they’ve set up their own state.

“Many of the prominent local critics of Israel would share a core belief that a two-state solution is not viable. They would claim to support a democratic, secular state of Palestine rather than two independent states.”

Dyrenfurth says that while the majority of Left parties around the world still support Israel’s right to exist, there is a significant fringe. “Many on the international Left were simply unable or unwilling to recognise that simple premise of Zionism, which is that Jews have national rights.”

Mendes also speaks of the influence of post-colonialist theory on the academic Left.

“It’s an extension of the earlier new Left critique,” he says, “but I think it carries a far more overt identification with the Palestinians as third-world coloured people supposedly being oppressed by a first-world European nation.”

Mendes says this thinking has had a significant impact on students. “Their sympathy is automatically with the Palestinians,” he says, condensing the view as “How can anyone committed to social justice not be anti-Israel?”

British commentator Alan Johnson denounces this approach. “Left-wingers today often talk in trite soundbites that show no grasp of the horrific choices facing Israel, the reality of who Hamas are and what motivates them, and ignorance of how the conflict is being conducted, how the Israeli Defence Forces operate compared to other armies including our own, or how on earth one might try to deal with vicious terrorists operating embedded in a civilian population in an urban area.”

He is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 declaration of principles by left-wing academics, journalists and activists based in Britain to oppose “those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic ‘anti-imperialism’ and/or hostility to the current US administration”.

Johnson insists “A simplistic ‘Blame Israel’ approach is anything but ‘left-wing’. Since 2001 Hamas have fired 15,200 rockets and mortars, an average of over three rocket attacks every single day, into Israel.

“I don’t expect leftists to cheerlead for Israel or to be glib about civilian casualties, but I do expect them to study what is actually going on and deliver balanced, insightful and constructive comments rather than speak as though they are regurgitating the round robin emails that pro-Palestinian activists are flooding their inbox with.”