August 9, 2012
http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=4226
Robert Wistrich, Hebrew
University professor of European and Jewish History and director of the
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of anti-Semitism has
just published his 29th book titled "From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel" (click here for Amazon link).
It is an impressive tome of over
600 pages and follows his monumental seminal work "A Lethal Obsession:
Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad”, published in 2010 and
now recognized as the definitive work on the world's oldest hatred and
an indispensable text for scholars.
In a fascinating preface to his
new book, Wistrich provides a brief autobiographical sketch. His father
had originally been a supporter of the illegal Polish Communist Party in
pre-war Cracow but became alienated from Stalinist communism after
being arrested by the NKVD. He and his wife, who had experienced bitter
Polish anti-Semitism, survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Kazakhstan
where Robert was born.
Wistrich was educated in
England, and to use his words, was “radicalized” in grammar school and
later at Stanford University. He first visited Israel in 1961, returning
in 1969 when he was appointed editor of the left wing Israeli journal,
New Outlook. However his passion for the Jewish State led to a parting
of the ways with the Israeli far left. Robert became increasingly
engaged in academic scholarship related to anti-Semitism, received a
senior appointment at the Hebrew University, and is now recognized as
the world’s foremost scholar in the field.
From Ambivalence to Betrayal is
an historic review and analysis of the abandonment of the Jewish people
by the left from the early 19th century until the present. It also
relates to the extraordinarily disproportionate number of socialist
thinkers and leaders who were of Jewish origin and seeks to explain what
motivated so many of them, in the course of their utopian and futile
efforts to ‘repair the world’, to abandon their people and their
heritage and frenetically seek to deny their kinsmen the right to
self-determination.
The introductory essay is a
brilliant overview of the contemporary Jewish political arena viewed in
the context of the concurrent rise of Zionism, Communism, anti-Semitism
and Nazism. It focuses strongly on the hypocrisy of the existing left
which has become obsessed with demonization and delegitimization of the
Jewish state. Wistrich demonstrates the extent to which today’s radical
anti-Zionists, despite purporting to represent the left, often share the
identical obsessions and delusions concerning the alleged malignant
influence of the Jews in the modern world as classical fascist
anti-Semites.
Wistrich provides fascinating
and innovative insights on left-wing revolutionaries. He skillfully
relates the connection of “the prefigured 19th
century seabed of anti-Semitic socialism found in Marx, Fourier and
Proudhon, extending through to the orthodox Communists and
“non-conformist” Trotskyites to the Islamo-Leftist hybrids of today who
systematically vilify the so called racist essence of the Jewish State”.
His analysis of the linkage of
these revolutionaries with the left's contemporary abandonment of Israel
is a major intellectual and scholastic achievement and provides an
intriguing insight into the sources of the far left’s current
application of double standards and anti-Israel venom.
Wistrich reviews in depth the
attitude towards the Jews adopted by many of the great socialist
revolutionaries of Jewish origin like Karl Marx, Bernard Lazare, Moses
Hess, Ferdinand LaSalle, Karl Kautsky, Victor Adler, Rosa Luxemburg,
Leon Trotsky, Bruno Kreisky, Isaac Deutscher and others.
His chapter on Leon Trotsky, entitled ‘A Bolshevik’s Tragedy’, is
a masterly essay which breaks new ground on this extraordinary
charismatic Jewish revolutionary who desperately sought to repudiate his
Jewish origins. Yet, despite achieving the reputation of being “the
most intransigent of revolutionary Bolsheviks”, Trotsky was ultimately
forced by Stalin into assuming the traditional Jewish role in society
and became reviled as the scapegoat for the failures of the Revolution.
Wistrich highlights the fact that many of today’s anti-Jewish Jews inherited the mantle of the 19th and early 20th
century anti-Semitic Jewish radical revolutionaries. Yet he stresses
that these renegade Jews have vastly exceeded the anti-Semitic tirades
of their predecessors and even to the extent of allying themselves with
reactionary clerical zealots and Jihadists, who represent the antithesis
of their purported world outlook.
He points to their public
support and endorsement of terrorists and religious fanatics, noting
that even the most extreme early anti-Jewish revolutionaries like Marx,
Engels, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg or Trotsky “would never have remained
silent about sharia law, censorship, female genital mutilation, honor
killings, suicide bombings, or making the world safe for Allah’s rule”
and rarely resorted to outright racist outbursts like their current
successors”. Nor would they have gone to the extreme of allying
themselves with those explicitly committed to our physical destruction.
Wistrich asserts that Holocaust
inversion, now a major component of the Left’s effort to besmirch
Israel, whilst initially introduced by British historian Arnold Toynbee
who referred to Zionists as "disciples of the Nazis”, was in fact
institutionalized as the “Zionist-Nazi” nexus at the Prague Trials
orchestrated from Moscow.
He reminds us that it was post
war Jewish Marxists who encouraged the left’s current paranoia and
“anti-racist” racism against Israel. As an example he quotes the Polish
born Jewish biographer of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, who already in 1967
described Israel as the "Prussia of the Middle East" and a bastion of
“racial Talmudic exclusiveness and superiority".
It was the Soviets who, in 1975,
succeeded in passing a UN resolution bracketing Zionism and racism.
Whilst this was ultimately rescinded in December 1991, it remains today
the central plank in the Arab-Leftist efforts to criminalize Israel and
brand it as a state engaging in war crimes.
The concluding chapters review
the anti-Zionist myths, many of which seem to have been directly
replicated from Nazi propaganda and are today enthusiastically promoted
by the Marxist Islamist alliance who regard Israel as the "Jew of the
nations" fulfilling a dark preordained fate as an eternal scapegoat.
Wistrich relates to the quasi-religious belief of these groups that “the
world will only be “liberated” by the downfall of America and the
defeat of the Jews. This chiliastic fantasy has today emerged as a
notable point of fusion between the radical anti-Zionist left in the
West and the global jihad. Revolutionary anti-Semitism has become an
increasingly important factor in cementing the anti-capitalist populism
much as it was during the birth pangs of modern socialism over 150 years
ago.”
This is a magisterial work,
providing a comprehensive understanding of the origins of the most
pernicious challenges currently facing the Jewish people, especially
those originating from the enemy within. It will be especially valuable
to those directly engaged in the struggle to neutralize the evil efforts
against Israel by the left-Islamic alliance and its acolytes of Jewish
origin.
The writer’s website can be viewed at www.wordfromjerusalem.com.
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