OPINION

Why Do Leftists Hate Israel? (It’s Not What You Think)

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

I'm not going even to begin to pretend that I know the complete truth about what's been going on in Gaza over the past several months, and you shouldn't, either. On the one hand, it would be foolish to trust everything the Gazan side has to say about casualties, given that they have everything to gain from exaggerating. On the other, though I certainly lean more toward believing them, Israel's claim to be entirely above reproach when it comes to minimizing civilian casualties and human rights abuses is likely also at least somewhat overblown. War, especially of the sort being fought over there, is an ugly thing, and we'll doubtless never know all the facts from the fiction about this conflict, even years after it mercifully ends.

That said, just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that the pro-Hamas leftist protesters blocking traffic, attacking police, kidnapping people, destroying property, and making general nuisances of themselves are right, that Israel really is waging a murderous, scorched-earth campaign of aggression not seen since Scipio Aemilianus plowed and salted the earth where Carthage once stood, and that the Hamas leaders of Gaza are merely a ragtag bunch of plucky freedom-fighters just taking a stand against the man or something. Let's assume all that is right in the worst/best possible way for both. 

Would the protestors then have a valid point? Under those assumptions, sure. Would their point, however valid, justify the carnage they themselves are creating in trying to bring attention to the matter? Obviously not, especially considering their actions are turning off the moderate Americans Joe Biden will need to win in November.

But more than that, the utter hypocrisy displayed by these leftist protestors is more blatant and transparent than your typical, run-of-the-mill leftist hypocrisy, of which there is legion. Have you ever seen these pampered prima donnas get riled up like this about any other bloody or one-sided foreign conflict? Take a gander at this large list of ongoing armed conflicts, from the Boko Haram insurgency in Africa to the Mexican drug wars on our own continent, most of which have lasted many years, if not decades, and claim hundreds and even thousands of lives every year. You don’t see anyone donning cut-up plastic trash cans as makeshift shields and awkwardly running headlong into police over any of those, do you? Even when Russia invaded Ukraine, though most on both the left and establishment right sided with the underdogs, things didn't get THIS hairy. And don’t even mention the well-documented global persecution of Christians, which these Bolsheviks probably fully support.

There IS a difference, though, isn’t there? First, I’m going to go out on a limb and defend these clowns on one thing: It isn’t technically “antisemitism,” not by any reasonable definition. These people, or most of them anyway, aren’t against “Jews” per se. After all, if you look closely, you’ll see plenty of leftist Jewish people protesting right along with them. No, they’re against “Zionism,” or the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. I can see how people on the right, especially the ones who were raised to think of Jews as “God’s Chosen People,” might conflate the two, but they’re not the same thing, and it’s disingenuous to pretend they are.

Even so, they are clearly against Zionism and Israel as a state. But why? I submit, given the intellectual inconsistencies listed above, that the object of leftist scorn in Israel’s case has far more to do with the race of most Jewish people than their nationality or religion. Why, you ask? You know the answer. Most Jewish people are … you guessed it … White.

In the twisted worldview these lunatics have adopted or been brainwashed into, white people, in general, are evil, colonizing, mass murdering psychopaths who have brought nothing but evil to the world, which, were it not for their existence, would be a peaceful, amazing place full of cottontails and fairy dust and pink-haired, multi-ethnic, queer pixies dancing together in the streets. 

It’s only “whiteness,” you see, that keeps the world from becoming the utopian paradise Bolsheviks have dreamed of creating for almost two centuries. Sure, most of these brainwashed lefties are Lilly “white” themselves, but that’s just a minor problem. Thankfully, don’tcha know, they can be to some extent absolved of their “whiteness” by renouncing it, and their ancestors, and working to advance the interests of everyone BUT white people. It’s a religion more stringent and pernicious than anything any 17th-century Puritan could have dreamed up.

In their worldview, a non-white entity that commits any atrocity on a white “colonizer” - because all whites are colonizers by their mere existence - can’t be doing an evil act. Oh, when pressed, most will pay lip service to pretend that they don’t support “everything” Hamas did on October 7th, but the very next moment, they’ll be shouting “death to Israel” and ripping down posters of Israeli children being held hostage by Hamas.

If most Jews in Israel were the same skin color as the Palestinians but doing the exact same thing they are now, do you think these young leftists would be donning keffiyehs and going ape-sh*t on their Democratic overlords? Ask Derek Chauvin if he would be in prison right now if he had brown skin, and you’ll have your answer, which is ‘not in a million years.'