Why would Islamist Jihadists and leftwing progressives make common cause concerning Israel and the Jews? The answer is: why not? Both are ideologies, carefully crafted by shrewd political warriors who use age-old tactics. Exploiting ambiguities in texts held sacred, they distort reality and glorify “righteous” violence, engaging in zealous asymmetric warfare. Radical ideologues are dualists who pit Good vs. Evil; Poor vs. Rich; Islamist Jihadists vs. Infidels; Blacks vs. Whites; Anti-Racists vs. Racists, etc. Ideology is a great bargain: twitter-size history and built-in morality, two for the price of one. Most ideologues end up fighting with one another. Some switch from one ideology to another. But the savviest among them form coalitions, to be dissolved when circumstances change.

Islamist Jihadists appeal to the only “true” reading of the Koran; whoever contradicts it is an infidel who deserves death. “Martyrs” who die executing the sentence are instantly admitted to Paradise. The hard left also rejects debate, albeit by embracing contradiction. “Motion itself is a contradiction,” declared Karl Marx’s patron and disciple Frederick Engels in 1877. As defined by Marx, later embellished by V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong, contradiction must actually be stoked to expedite the putatively inevitable march of history. Never mind that inevitability would seem to contradict the notion of human intervention. Contradiction leads to confusion, which stokes conflict and violence. Finally, after the Apocalypse-Revolution, comes Paradise. On earth, in heaven, why quibble?

No ideology, however, has persisted longer than Jew-hatred, or anti-Judaism, now generally known as antisemitism. With their stubborn insistence on worshiping their own way and maintaining their traditions, Jews have been mistrusted and persecuted ever since being expelled from their homeland by the Romans in 70 AD, who destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

Judaism does not advocate conquest; rather, each Passover Jews have prayed for God to return them to Zion. The best educated and more secular, especially in Western Europe, held out hope that assimilation would permit them to be patriotic citizens of the states where they lived while observing Jewish practices in their homes. And for a brief time, they did gain a degree of acceptance. Accustomed to hard work and a culture of education, predictably, they thrived.

Starting in the nineteenth century, however, they experienced a precipitous rise in discrimination, especially in Austria and Prussia. This led many Jewish intellectuals to wish they were no longer at the mercy of a hostile majority. By the century’s end, the idea of having their own country seemed possible, if not, indeed, necessary.

On April 1, 1890, Nathan Birnbaum gave that idea a name: Zionism. Referring to the movement to recreate a national home in the Jews’ ancestral land, it lay dormant for six years. And then, Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State. A year later, in 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The Jews were ready to resettle—but without a shot being fired. There were too few of them.

The contrary was true of revolutionary anti-Zionism, even before the term was coined. Predicated on irreconcilable antagonism, the germ of that toxic ideology had already been sown, ironically, by a Jew, one who had succumbed to the deadly pathology of self-hatred. In 1844, Karl Marx, the grandson of great rabbis, famously declared that “the God of the Jew is money.” In the ominously titled essay, “On the Jewish Question,” he provided the answer: the Jew had to “be abolished.” A century later, that nearly happened.

Bolshevik Jihad: Made in Germany, Implemented in Soviet Russia

The conflation of Judaism with money-worship and capitalism would eventually provide the ideological glue linking Islamist Jihadism with Communist anti-Zionism to achieve their common aim: the eventual destruction of liberal capitalist democracy. But the connection would not be made until the early twentieth century, and almost by chance, thanks to the Kaiser advisor and renowned Orientalist, Max von Oppenheim.

A converted Jew from a distinguished family of bankers, Oppenheim had long sought to ally with Germany and Turkey. Eventually, he found a partner in the Ottoman Minister for War, Enver Pasha, who on August 2, 1914, signed a secret defense alliance with the German Ambassador. World War I had begun; they would fight side-by-side. On November 11, 1914, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V urged all Muslims to join the Jihad. His speech had been written in Oppenheim’s think tank. The call went nowhere then, but the torch would soon be taken up in Moscow.

A brilliant strategist, Oppenheim was fully aware that Russia’s exiting the war would benefit Germany. Realizing that the Bolsheviks’ February 1917 toppling of the czarist regime provided an unexpected opportunity, he decided to send Lenin and his entourage from their exile in Zurich back to St. Petersburg. Having arranged for the train, he also provided a hefty sum to help jumpstart the new government. Ironically, the trip had been bankrolled by fellow-Bolshevik and friend to both Lenin and Enver, Alexander Lvovich Parvus (Israel Lazarevich Gelfand). The opportunistic Enver proved eager to cooperate with the Soviet regime. With Lenin’s support, he was hired to direct its Asian department. 

“The Palestinians’ liberation struggle fit squarely into the students’ Third World paradigms and critiques of colonialism. The Palestinians were heralded as valiant freedom fighters.”

Since Lenin was mostly focused on concentrating power in his own hands, Jihad was not a priority. However according to historians Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz: “Enver would persuade Lenin to support an Islamic religious revolt based on a plan drawn up for the Kaiser.”

Lenin understood the power of political Islam. Thus the Soviet effort to coopt Muslim, African, Asian, and other Third World populations to join the Communist camp began almost immediately. In September 1920, the Communist International (Comintern) organized a conference, billed as “a congress of … workers and peasants of Persia, Armenia, and Turkey” calling itself the Congress of the People of the East. Its goal was a “holy war [Jihad] for the liberation of all mankind from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of exploitation of man by man.” Both the Congress Chairman, Grigory Zinoviev/Hirsch Apfelbaum, and its co-organizer, Karl Radek/Karl Sobelsohn, had been members of Lenin’s Zurich “family.”

Radek would also help negotiate the April 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, whereby the Communist state and Germany would renounce all territorial and financial claims to one another’s territory. These negotiations advanced Oppenheim’s vision of using Jihad for political purposes. They also, unwittingly, secured the basis of the Green/Islamist-Red alliance. As Laurent Murawiec explains in The Mind of Jihad, “Out of these talks also grew the Bolshevik Jihad.”

Adapting Marxism to Islamism, a remarkable feat of conceptual gymnastics, is testimony to the genius of the dialectical template. The revolutionary strategists effectively simplified “the complex phenomenon of ideological adaptation and change,” explain Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, by taking advantage “of the propensity of some human rights groups to see in Marxism the answer to their local demands and dilemmas.”

Zinoviev and Radek, alongside many others, were murdered by Stalin’s KGB in 1939 on trumped-up charges of espionage. Increasingly antisemitic, the Communist dictator’s pact with Hitler that year was not merely tactical. Stalin had no problem demonizing money-loving Jews. As carefully documented by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, only his death in 1953 prevented the most massive slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, this time in the USSR. Stalin indeed supported United Nations General Assembly’s November 29, 1947, resolution, which established two states in what was then known as the Palestinian Mandate; he had expected that Israel would aid communist penetration of the Middle East, but that hope evaporated soon after May 15, 1948. The Jewish state was born. After the Holocaust, Jews had been determined: “Never again.” It provided the fuel for a nearly miraculous victory against overwhelming Arab attacks that had followed the partition.

But Israel was now facing an additional enemy: the USSR, whose war on Zionism began in earnest at Stalin’s bequest. The KGB fine-tuned dialectical anti-Zionism, boosting the terrorist leadership with arms and financial aid.

Anti-Zionism Weaponized in Moscow

The Soviet propaganda department decided to revive the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903 under the auspices of the Russian Secret Police, the Okhrana. Though long discredited as a forgery, it had already been disseminated throughout the world by American car-maker Henry Ford. Purportedly “minutes” of a secret speech among the Elders, or Sages, of Zion, it allegedly demonstrates their conspiracy to run the world by dominating money and communications. 

In 1951, the KGB’s chief of foreign intelligence brought the Protocols to Bucharest, for Romania’s secret police to translate and disseminate throughout Western Europe. “It had to be done secretly, so no one would know that the publications came from the Soviet bloc,” writes former Romanian chief of foreign intelligence General Ion Mihai Pacepa. Soon “the Securitate was spreading the Protocols around the Middle East as well.”

Fast forward to 1960. The Soviet leadership established the Patrice Lumumba University, ostensibly to help “developing nations,” in fact a Kremlin grooming school. The third largest university in the USSR, distinguished alumni included Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, whose 1982 dissertation (in English “The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement”) questioned the existence of gas chambers and numbers of Jewish victims. Abbas accuses the Jews of colluding with the Nazis: “The Zionist movement … even placed obstacles in the way of efforts made by Christian groups or by non-Zionist Jews or a number of countries that saw fit to find a solution to this humanitarian problem.” Anti-Zionists are masters of the “Big Lie.” 

Similarly, in 1962, Ahmad Shukairy (appointed head of the PLO in 1964) termed Zionism “a blend of colonialism and imperialism in their ugliest form.” He recommended that the UN “exterminate” the Zionism movement. Then immediately after the Israeli military prevailed against a much larger combined Arab army in just six days, the USSR took to the world stage. On June 19, 1967, Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin presented the theme of the relationship between Israel and Nazism for the first time at the UN.

On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly voted to advance “the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.” Israel had become enemy number one for a majority of the UN’s membership.

By 2015, the Assembly had condemned Israel 140 times; Iran, 7; North Korea, 8; China, Cuba, Libya, Qatar, and a few other dictatorships, zero. Most Western democracies routinely abstain, deferring to the Soviet-orchestrated “Unaligned” bloc alongside the international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and most Western media. Only rarely have US ambassadors, with the notable exception of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, defended Israel. By the 1960s, a new generation in the Free World, mostly ignorant about the Holocaust and geopolitics, were rejecting their own culture. Primed by academics who presented the Vietnam War in Marxist terms as an imperialist crusade against a colonized people’s liberation army, they pitted white colonizers against exploited non-whites. The Communist Vietcong were likened to American Blacks. So when Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, almost overnight David became Goliath. The reversal proved a decisive catalyst for the New Left. Progressives suddenly “discovered” the Palestinians, as Berlin-based historian Paul Hockenos put it. Here was another victim of world capitalism. After all, since “Israel’s staunchest allies just happened to be Washington, Bonn, and the right-wing Springer group,” it followed that Israel belonged to the vast capitalist/imperialist conspiracy. 

White Israel vs. Black Palestinians

“The Palestinians’ liberation struggle fit squarely into the students’ Third World paradigms and critiques of colonialism,” writes Hockenos. “The Palestinians were heralded as valiant freedom fighters.” A radicalized leftist audience had made common cause with a resentful Arab-Muslim constituency, due in part to a highly effective “massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that entered a particularly active stage in 1967,” writes Kennan Institute scholar Izabella Tabarovsky. “Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, …. [it] succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and apartheid.”

It succeeded. “Anti-Zionism in the 1970s and 1980s,” writes Robert S. W. Wistrich, increasingly began to look like the leftist functional equivalent of what classical antisemitism had once represented (in the interwar period) for the fascist Right … [thus] steadily emerging as the lowest common denominator between sections of the Left, the Right, and Islamist circles.”

Some leftists, among them Paul Berman, began to understand. Days before 9/11, he wrote in The New Republic: “The New Left’s vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly re-configured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state?” In 2006, critical theorist Judith Butler (who, incredibly, is Jewish), made it clear: “Understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”

How better to attack the liberal democratic cabal that keeps underprivileged colored people in poverty, apartheid, and misery? In June 2021, Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar told Vice News he wanted “to remember the racist murder of George Floyd. George Floyd was killed as a result of racist ideology held by some people. The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and in the West Bank.” By the time the quote resurfaced on October 18, 2023, the narrative had made even further inroads into elite culture, especially the academy. Indeed, “academia may be even friendlier to Hamas than [is] the leftist political world,” writes Lorenzo Vidino in the Wall Street Journalon November 3, 2023. “Hamas is more than a terrorist organization intent on killing Jews and eradicating Israel. It is also a savvy international political player that has used the West as a staging ground for an influence operation aimed at policymakers, public opinion, and Muslim communities.”

Western ideologues have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations in using liberal concepts to illiberal ends. Progressives, using postmodernist jargon, have managed to insinuate radicalism deep into the American cultural mainstream. It is reminiscent of Communist propaganda: the “parallel between … contemporary critical theories and the Marxism-Leninism of my Soviet youth has received new proof,” wrote Natan Sharansky on October 31. Not only Israel but “the United States is also fighting a war for its survival,” writes Sharansky. “American universities crossed a red line in the aftermath of October 7. The struggle for campuses is therefore a struggle for America and its values—for an America that is liberal, that supports free speech and human rights, and that protects all of its citizens, regardless of race or creed, from vicious, lawless assault.”

He titles his article: “Never Again is Now.”

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This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.