The Jewish fifth columnists

The last few days have produced some diabolical examples of bigotry directed, of course, at the State of Israel.

In America, New York’s Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, chose to mark the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities by accusing Israel of genocide for defending itself against genocide.

Desecrating such a memorial day of grief and trauma by goading the Jews over their own victimization involves a degree of sadism, a hallmark of Islamic fanatics.

Mamdani went on to add other falsehoods from the Israel-extermination playbook, including the lie that Israel had committed war crimes and that these were paid for by American tax dollars. The only genocidal attacks and war crimes in the Middle East were committed by Mamdani’s soulmates in Hamas and Iran.

In Britain, the Green Party passed a resolution at its annual conference equating Zionism with racism, singling out the Jews alone as having no right to self-determination in their own ancestral homeland.

Declaring that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” and that the Palestinian Arabs should resist military occupation “by all available means under international law”—glossed in associated documents as supporting “violent struggle”—the party has made itself an accessory to Hamas.

Worse still, by rejecting proposed protection from such “violent struggle” for Greens affiliated to “Zionist” synagogues and Jewish organizations, the party explicitly fixed a bullseye onto the backs of British Jews.

As a result, the Greens and their Jewish leader, Zack Polanski, have been widely denounced. Even the chair of Israel-demonizing Amnesty International, Sandy Ruthven, announced that he had resigned his Green Party membership over what he described as the party’s “failure to confront prejudice” and its courting of the “hard-left” vote.

Mamdani and Polanski are easy to denounce because their extremism is so outrageous. However, the danger is that this serves to obscure the appalling nature of what passes for mainstream thought.

For what both Mamdani and the Greens are doing is simply following to its logical conclusion the thinking that has now infected the entire progressive world. This is the belief that defaming Israel and Zionism is fine because anti-Zionism is entirely different from antisemitism.

Hating Jews as people is understood to be very bad because that’s “what Hitler did.” By contrast, hating Israel and Zionism is acceptable because these are assumed to be merely political issues.

This shallow view is now also found among the Jewish left. Some of them claim further that the only way to remain true to Jewish ethics is to dissociate Judaism from Zionism because Zionism is based on the oppression of the Palestinians.

This is what Polanski is saying. He thinks that it’s a moral position to equate Zionism with racism and to accuse Israel of genocide, and that it’s therefore preposterous to call this antisemitism.

He’s the second senior Jewish politician in Britain to single out Israel for defamatory lies and justify it as somehow true to Jewish ethics. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has done the same thing with his unhinged denunciation of Israel’s “settler terrorism,” “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs in the “West Bank” and war crimes.

Not only are both men Jews, but they have drawn upon other anti-Zionist Jews and extreme left-wing Israelis to bolster these appalling falsehoods.

When the radical Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidemann was injured by a rock thrown at him by an Arab in eastern Jerusalem in 2013, he said he’d had his head bashed in because he was an “occupier,” and that “as long as the occupation exists, events like this will happen.”

At the end of last month, Seidemann boasted on X that in 2014 he had advised Miliband about plans for Jewish settlement expansion in the EI corridor between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim.

Said Seidemann of Miliband’s defamation of Israel in the House of Commons: “I knew he’d be good. I couldn’t imagine he’d be this good.”

A new book by journalist Benjamin Kerstein, Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists and Our Secret Civil War, lifts the lid on the enormous damage being done to the Jewish people by Jews running interference for the mortal enemies of Israel on both the left and in the Islamic world. Today’s tsunami of antisemitism relies to an enormous extent, he writes, on the endorsement of a tiny minority of American Jews who are pushed to the forefront as a conscious strategy.

This movement has made a fetish of these Jewish fifth columnists. They include politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); talking heads like journalist Peter Beinart; political operatives like former Obama administration foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami; left-wing activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace; nongovernmental organization stalwarts like Human Rights Watch’s former executive director Kenneth Roth; and others.

Kerstein calls such people, who enjoy high social, economic, cultural or political status, “Jews of Privilege.” Such Jews, he writes, have always strongly disliked and often hated Zionism, feared its potential impact on their chances of assimilation and the preservation of their privilege, and have felt little or no solidarity with other Jews.

Kerstein gratifyingly skewers such people. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein sanitizing the Muslim fanatic Mamdani as being “thoroughly if banally liberal.”

Klein, writes Kerstein, has endorsed the ultimate conviction of the “Jews of Privilege” that only minority status is moral, only powerlessness is redemption, and that multi-ethnic democracy guarantees the safety of Diaspora Jewry.

But, of course, the past three years in Klein’s Western multi-ethnic nirvana have been a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. As Kerstein witheringly writes, the “Jews of Privilege” are facing demographic collapse while the Jews of Zionism are burgeoning in a state that has proved itself “remarkably resilient and successful.”

Kerstein’s account is all the more powerful because he himself originally shared these anti-Zionist views. Although he didn’t come from a privileged background, he was alienated from his Jewish identity and, as a teenager, believed that Israel had no right to exist. Much of his book is an account of how his personal voyage of the soul led him to move to Israel, discover the complexity of the Middle East—and find himself as a Jew.

Indeed, the nature of Jewishness is perhaps the most significant and least understood element in anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews want to detach Zionism from Judaism to uphold what they refer to as “Jewish values.”

What they’re actually doing is swinging a wrecking ball at those values.

For Judaism consists of a fusion of three elements: the religion, the people and the land. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine mission to establish a particular society in “Zion,” the land of Israel.

While Jews don’t need to prove their Jewishness through religious observance, living in Israel or even just supporting it, detaching the land from Judaism is to dismember it. Anti-Zionism is an attack on Judaism itself.

Anti-Zionist Jews want to reframe Jewish values—the most particularist set of principles on earth—as universalist. This inevitably privileges the values and interests of non-Jews over those of the Jews.

This is because, writes Kerstein, anti-Zionist Jews have decided that it’s impossible for the “vast and kind” non-Jewish world to be wrong and the Jews to be right. And the outcome of that attitude is the belief that Israel must be dismantled and the Palestinian Arabs granted domination over everyone else.

Kerstein has performed a vital service in holding such people to account. Jewish community leaders refuse to do so because they are terrified of disunity and of washing dirty linen in public.

Undesirable though that is, there’s worse. We are living through an unprecedented cultural emergency for Jews and for the West in which they live.

While it’s vital not to lose focus on the battle against those who are out to destroy the Jewish people, it’s suicidally reckless to turn a blind eye to those Jews who, in their abysmal ignorance and pathological confusion or worse over their Jewish identity, are assisting them in their infernal aim.