How the Left abandoned the working class and embraced… Hamas

One Jew's attempt at making sense of another weekend of protests

Last week the third of three pro-Palestine protestors was charged for inviting support for a proscribed organisation. Specifically, the three are alleged to have attached to their clothes images of paragliders. Similar images were posted by a number of BLM chapters in support of Hamas. The three protestors were alleged to have done so on October 14^th, just seven days after the atrocities were perpetrated.

Since October 7^th, the world has been trying to make sense of the Hamas massacres and the reaction to it, particularly the outbreak of unabashed militant Palestinian support along with much anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiment. There has been a degree of mystification in particular as to how non-Muslim Britons on the Left have so readily found common cause with Jihadist militants.

By way of illustration, consider the image of one white British protestor from November 11^th posted on social media staring malevolently at the camera. Her placard reads: “No British Politician Should be a Friend of Israel.” Above the words is a Star of David intertwined with… a swastika. For all her concern for Gazans, that image is calculated to be as offensive as possible to Jews. She has been identified on X, formerly Twitter, as Kay Green, an English teacher and member of Eastbourne Constituency Labour Party.

But this should not come altogether as a surprise. After all, the hall at Labour Party conferences during the Corbyn years were a sea of Palestinian flags. This was a source of mystification rather than genuine alarm for most and overt Palestinian support was exiled or suppressed by Kier Starmer. But why has the New Left now become so keen to play useful idiot to a terrorist group that is outcompeting Isis and Al Qaeda for sheer inhumanity and brutality?

This must be a consequence of the vacuum created by the abandonment by the Left of the working class. James Lindsay is the best thinker I have come across at tracing the transition over several decades of Marxism into Woke. Watch his brief speech to the European Parliament from earlier this year. Lindsay is highly compelling on the influence of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault on the rise of postcolonial theory and the way in which the New Left reframed Marxism to focus on oppressed minorities in lieu of workers. Communism ultimately failed, after all, because even in feudal countries such as China and Russia, workers turned out to be aspirational and yearned for the flourishing lives afforded by capitalism, a sentiment evident today in residents of Cuba. Once communism reached its end-of-history moment with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists set about fulfilling the vision of Fanon and others. Workers were forgotten and increasingly regarded by the New Left elites with contempt. Remember Emily Thornberry’s “Welcome to Rochester” tweet depicting a white van sporting a St George’s flag parked in the driveway of a modest house? While this led to her resignation from the Shadow Cabinet, it was emblematic of how the New Left now viewed the working-class: repulsively nationalistic, Brexit-voting, Gammons.

Instead, cultural Marxism led to the replacement of concern for the working class with concern for oppressed minorities be they black, trans or Palestinian. While the domestic “culture wars” have focused on the first two, the third never went away. Why? Because in the oppression Olympics, Palestinians could be explained as being at the top of the podium: a poor, brown people displaced by white colonialist oppressors who also happened to be Jews. This worldview leaves aside two inconvenient facts: a) Jews have a pretty robust claim to be descended from Israel’s indigenous population and b) barely 50% of Israel’s population is white.

What James Lindsay says about Frantz Fanon goes some way towards explaining what has happened over the last few weeks. But when I see a picture of the paraglider protestors, now named as Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, I wonder to what extent they have read Fanon. My guess is they were influenced by BLM posts and became embroiled in a degree of social contagion not seen since the protests following the death of George Floyd. The object of those protests was, at least initially, perceived US police brutality. What was disturbing about the immediate response to October 7^th was the way in which protestors, far from objecting to a much greater incidence of brutality, instead reveled in what had just happened. Protestors in subsequent weeks have been able to use Israel’s defensive response to hide behind the veil of calls for ceasefire. But Palestinians have been selected as the victims of choice because supporting Palestine also offers a veil for Jew hatred. And the only thing that can explain the explosion of pro-Palestine protest and genocidal chanting is the visceral hatred of Jews on the part of so many on the New Left. It is this that has taken many of British Jews by surprise, more so than the alignment of some (I would suggest a small minority) of Britain’s Muslim population with jihadists.

As to how to explain this hatred, one needs to explain antisemitism in all its long and bloody history. The same themes and tropes recur: control of the media and banking system; killing children; being too rich and successful. Politics of envy has always been a powerful motivator for the left. Where once this was directed at the upper classes or property owners, it has – thanks to a post-colonialist impulse – found a different target. Unfortunately, many British institutions from the BBC, the Police to even the Church of England have imbibed post-colonial theory to such an extent that they are blind to their own antipathy towards Israel. When combined with a visceral fear of offending the Muslim community, the result is a climate in which displays of flagrant antisemitism have no consequence, thus encouraging more widespread and more egregious displays. Supportive pronouncements from government ministers are welcome, but far from controlling these institutions, it turns out that they can barely influence them. A concerning time for Britain’s Jews indeed.