An Open Letter to Anti-Zionists from a Veteran of the Left [View all]

For 25 years, I was a member of a small, insular, Trotskyist organisation. Periodically during some febrile internal dispute, our Great Leader would invoke Oliver Cromwell. ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ’, he’d howl, ‘to think it possible that you may be mistaken.’ The Great Leader seldom admitted he was wrong about anything, of course—any more than I did or, I suspect, than had Lord Protector Cromwell himself. Still the injunction is a good one. You must at the very least be able to think it possible that you could be wrong.

I want you to consider that your beliefs about Zionism are seriously distorted and that the way a broad swathe of the left community responds to Israel both reflects and perpetuates antisemitism. I say this as someone who for many years shared these beliefs. I marched against Israel countless times and railed about ‘Zionist terror’. I believed Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II; that there was nothing wrong with comparing Israel to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa; that twinning the Magen David with a swastika was an unobjectionable way to indicate their moral equivalence. I know how good it feels to take what you believe is the side of oppressed against oppressor, and to anathematise those who challenge this worthy goal. I want you to think again.

https://fathomjournal.org/an-open-letter-to-anti-zionists-from-a-veteran-of-the-left/