‘You’re talking antisemitism’

Notwithstanding Stalin’s realpolitik myopia in 1947, in which he misjudged Israel for two reasons, the Left has always hated Jews and Zionism (“Zionism and the Left: From solidarity to enmity,” April 29).

At that time, Stalin conflated the Jewish people’s antipathy to Britain because of its failure to live up to the clear meaning of the Balfour Declaration, with his view of Britain as his enemy. He also saw the socialist/kibbutzim nature of the nascent state of Israel as somehow analogous to Stalinist socialism. Fortunately, this realpolitik myopia resulted in Russia’s vote for Israel at the UN in 1947. However, Stalin soon realized his mistake and returned to the Left’s comfortable position of murdering Jews.

Nothing makes the Left’s foundational antisemitism clearer than Paul Robeson’s deafening silence when his Jewish friends begged him to speak out when Stalin was about to murder them. For Robeson and the Left, blind obedience to antisemitic terror in any form – Communist, Muslim, and so on – against the Jews has always been far more important than Jewish lives.

In fact as far back as 1918 the Jewish section of the Communist Party, the Yevsektsiya, was approved by Lenin. Its stated objective was “the destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement and Hebrew culture.” In 1921 the Yevsektsiya called for the “total liquidation of Zionism” (Conspiracy U by Scott A. Shay, 2021).

Not only did Stalin return the Left to murdering Jews after 1947, but by 1964 the KGB had joined with the PLO to support the PLO charter’s demand for the murder of every Jew in Israel.

Stalin’s blip in the radar – his 1947 realpolitik myopia – should not in any way be construed as the Left ever having been pro-Israel and Zionism. For 90 years from Lenin and Stalin to Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and so on, Jew-hatred, including the visceral hatred of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland – which Article 80 of the United Nations Charter defines as all of Israel including Judea, Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem – has been foundational to the Left.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said with great wisdom and prescience at Cambridge University shortly before his death: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you’re talking antisemitism.”

RICHARD SHERMAN

Margate, Florida