Why the far left sides with Hamas

Nick Cohen 3 December 2023 The Spectator Australia 

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the sovereignty of Islam’ or face ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ if they refuse. You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country. Their kind will turn a blind eye in Palestine, but not in New York or Chicago. No left-wing organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition Hamas embraces, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious. It ‘fellow travels’ with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of ‘fellow travelling’, with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always how far they would go. As long as they did not live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed. W. H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a ‘successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off’. But as communism happened in backward Russia ‘a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment’, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

You see the same pattern of lies and indulgence in the case of Hamas. Journalists have produced a multitude of examples of fellow travelling since 7 October, but let one meeting of the Oakland City Council in the Bay area of San Francisco speak for them all.

A council member wanted the council to pass a motion that condemned the killings and hostage-taking by Hamas, who, in case we forget, prompted the war that has devastated Gaza, by massacring Israeli civilians. The motion got nowhere.

According to one speaker, Hamas did not massacre anyone, a modern variant of Holocaust denial that is becoming endemic. ‘There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,’ a woman said at the meeting. ‘Israel murdered their own people on 7 October.’ Another woman said that calling Hamas a terrorist organisation is ‘ridiculous, racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.’ Hamas was the ‘armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance’, said a third who seemed to have no knowledge of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah. To condemn Hamas was very ‘anti-Arab racist’ cried a fourth. The meeting returned to modern Holocaust denial as a new speaker said the Israeli Defence Forces had murdered their own people and it was ‘bald propaganda’ to suggest otherwise. A man intervened to shout that ‘to hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wifebeater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back.’

Anyone who contradicted him was a ‘white supremacist.’

Of course they were.

If theocrats were to establish an Islamist tyranny in the Bay area, I am sure every single speaker would scream their heads off, as Auden predicted. They can turn into fellow travellers as there is no more of a prospect of theocracy threatening them than there was of communism threatening readers of the left-wing press in the UK and US in the 1930s.

A serious left would have plenty to complain about. Consider the Israeli position after the breakdown of the ceasefire. The Israeli state is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a catastrophe of a prime minister, who left his people exposed to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His war aims are contradictory: you cannot both wipe out Hamas and free the hostages.

Worst of all, the Israeli defence forces are to move to the southern Gaza strip where two million Palestinians are crammed. Just war doctrine holds that a military action must have a reasonable chance of success if the suffering is to be permitted. How, reasonably, can the Israeli army expect to find guerrilla fighters hiding in a terrified population? According to leaks in the Israeli media, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of state, was warning the Israeli government that they can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way they did in the north. But he was ignored. A radical movement worth having would surely be putting pressure on the Biden administration to force Israel to listen to its concerns.

Unfortunately, the radical movement we have will not engage in practical politics because compromise is anathema to it. Any honest account of the war would have to admit that Israel has the right to defend itself against attack. It is just that the military position it finds itself in now may well make its war aims impossible and therefore immoral. You can see why practical politics has no appeal. Where is the violent satisfaction in sober analysis, the drama in compromise? Where is the Manichean distinction between the absolute good of the Palestinians and the pure evil of Israel?

A serious left might try to revive a two-state solution by building an international consensus that the settlements in the West Bank must go. Once again, however, that is too tame an aim. For the fellow traveller watching Palestine from a safe distance, satisfaction comes only by embracing Hamas’s call for the destruction of Israel. Some progressives try to dress up the urge to destroy by pretending that Jews and Palestinians will go on to live together in some happy-clappy, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. But most must know they are advocating a war to the death. What makes their position so disreputable is that, if they thought about it calmly, they would know it would be a war that only Israel could win.

I am sure that, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, my sole concern would be the removal of Israeli forces that threatened me and my family. I would either not care about demonstrations in the West, or I would receive some comfort from the knowledge that people all over the world were protesting on my behalf. Nevertheless, a kind of betrayal is still at work. By inflaming and amplifying the worst elements in Palestine, the global left is giving comfort to the worst elements in Israel, which are equally determined to make a compromise impossible.

Celeste Marcus made that point well in the New Statesman. She came from the Zionist far right and was taught doctrines that dehumanised Palestinians. She grew up and grew away from the prejudices of her childhood and became a liberal. But after she moved into her new world, she ‘recognised immediately that progressive leftists feel about Israelis the way radical Zionists feel about Palestinians: these are not real people.’ The result is that for all its power on the streets and in academia, the global left is almost an irrelevance.

‘To influence Israel,’ she writes, ‘one must be willing to recognise it. Since leftist leaders cannot bother to do this, they cannot be of real use to Palestinians. This is a betrayal of their own cause.’

 The dilettantism of fellow travelling always ends in betrayal and denial for the reason Auden gave: terror is always more tolerable when it happens far, far away.