How Israel Became the Whipping Boy

European Socialists' Mystifying Stand-For-Islam Explained

Daniel Pipes
February 28, 2015

Oct. 28, 2012 update: In a surprisingly good article for the usually worthless New York Times opinion page, Colin Shindler (emeritus professor at the University of London asks "why do today's European socialists identify with Islamists whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?" He points to leftist anti-colonialism as the key, something I did not mention in "[The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace":

Colin Shindler of SOAS.

The old left in Europe was forged in the struggle against local fascists in the 1930s. Most of Europe experienced a brutal Nazi occupation and bore witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The European left strongly identified with Jewish suffering and therefore welcomed the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. Some viewed the struggle for Israel in the same light as the fight for freedom in the Spanish Civil War. But the succeeding generation of the European left did not see things this way. Its frame of reference was the anticolonial struggle — in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia and a host of other places. Its hallowed icon was not the soldier of the International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain, but Che Guevara — whose image adorned countless student bedrooms. Anticolonialism further influenced myriad causes, from America's Black Panthers in the 1960s to Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today.

It began with Israel's exclusion from the ranks of the nonaligned nations more than 50 years ago, when Arab states refused to attend a 1955 nonaligned conference in Indonesia if an Israeli delegate was present. The Jewish state was snubbed in favor of such feudal kingdoms as Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen. And Israel's collusion with imperial powers like Britain and France during the Suez crisis the following year cemented its ostracism.

Given the deep remorse for the misdeeds of colonialism, it was easier for the New Left of the 1960s to identify with the emerging Palestinian national movement than with the already established social democratic Israel. This deepening hostility toward Israel was present in Europe before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and before the rush to build settlements on the West Bank.