The left doesn’t understand the Middle East conflict

It has come to this: 50 years after the Yom Kippur trauma, hundreds of Israelis ended up butchered or kidnapped; antisemitism spiked; and thousands worldwide are calling for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”. 

The left doesn’t understand the implications of any of it. But at least it’s clear now who they are.

For decades, far-left activists, armed with Marxist theories, have tried to delegitimise Israel’s very existence. 

This is the spirit underlying University of California professor Judith Butler’s recent complaint that “Unless people condemn Hamas, they are not considered acceptable.” 

The same spirit led progressive US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to threaten President Joe Biden politically for standing with Israel — and then led Bernie Sanders, progressive leader in the US Senate, to hedge in condemning Tlaib’s endorsement of the “river to the sea” mantra.

Some on the left, foremost Biden, have strongly affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence. But too many others, when asked what that means, admit they have no idea. 

All they allow is that Israel, on moral grounds, should only neutralise armed terrorists if the risk — to non-Israeli, not Israeli, civilians — is zero. Just maybe, being ignorant of the security threats faced by Israel, they should be more humble in imposing their military advice on the country.

We can’t continue to be blind to the facts

For many on the left, anti-Israel bias leads to myopia — and to suggestions that Israel has never been unjustly attacked or faced extinction, or that Palestinian representatives have never forfeited the moral high ground (by, for instance, tormenting Palestinian Christians, sexual minorities or political dissidents). 

To suggestions, ultimately, that were Israel simply to lay down arms, stop guarding the gates, and relinquish the land it has controlled since its 1967 war of survival — then terrorism against Israelis, and against Jews writ large, would magically melt away. 

Don’t they understand the vulnerability Israel has faced every single day since its creation by the United Nations?

In Europe, the left has urged for — and I have agreed — significant EU funding to meet Palestinians’ humanitarian needs.

But these same voices have also pretended that any and all such EU funding is a harmless, risk-free investment for peace. 

I and many others have long understood this is just false. We know EU money has gone to undergirding barbaric attacks against Israel: by paying for school content fostering an ecosystem of hate, contributing to pensions and pay-outs incentivising martyrdom, and buying materials which Hamas and their cronies have not just hoarded, hurting their own people, but also weaponised against Israeli civilians. 

The EU’s high representative and vice-president for foreign affairs and security policy, the socialist Josep Borrell, simply can’t or won’t understand these connections, though I have pressed him repeatedly. How can’t he see them?

A case of pathological naïveté

Perhaps nowhere is pathological naïveté towards Israel more evident than among my Swedish compatriots. 

In July, for instance, in her Foreign Affairs Committee report for the European Parliament on EU relations with the Palestinian Authority, the socialist MEP Evin Incir made no mention of Hamas. Or terrorism. Or antisemitism. Or the persecution, by Palestinians, of Palestinian Christians. 

These stories play no part in her Middle East narrative. Didn’t she understand that releasing all Palestinian political prisoners, as she urged Israel to do, would mean releasing members not only of Hamas but of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — all EU-designated terrorist organisations? Or that Hamas has actually (mal)administered Gaza since 2007?

In another example, a member of the Swedish parliament’s foreign affairs committee, another socialist Jamal El-Haj, spoke at a conference affiliated with Hamas — earning him a rebuke, but not expulsion, from his party. Couldn’t he imagine that hugging a terrorist might send dangerous signals?

And when a failed rocket from Palestinian terrorists blew up a Gaza hospital on 17 October, Swedish socialist party leader Magdalena Andersson (who’s angling to be Sweden’s next prime minister), in a knee-jerk reaction, and based on Hamas-sourced reporting, blamed Israel. 

How could she not understand the risks of such a source — and the costs of spreading such lies?

Two weeks ago, in the European Parliament’s plenary session, a Swedish member of the Left Party, Malin Björk, passionately urged not just a humanitarian pause in Gaza but a permanent ceasefire. 

Doesn’t she know that Hamas doesn’t want peace; doesn’t give a damn, in fact, about the Palestinians they themselves put in the cross-fire — but will use whatever time they can to carry out all over again their campaign to wipe Israel from the map?

Hatred and hypocrisy fanning flames of falsehood and frenzy

The left doesn’t understand the Middle East conflict. For whoever delegitimises Israel’s right to exist, whoever denies Israel’s right to self-defence, and whoever fails to see the links between the Holocaust and hate is actually carrying water for the terrorists bent on Israel’s annihilation.

It’s time to wake up. To the systemic oppression characterising so much of the Palestinian leadership, including especially Hamas-ruled Gaza. 

To the naive, feckless policies which have demanded of these groups such little accountability. 

And to the hatred and hypocrisy rife in our own societies, fanning flames of falsehood and frenzy. It is to our lasting shame — a shame that alarms — that we, in my home of Sweden, of Europe, of the West, find we have not after all left behind our dark past of identitarian ideologies, including even bald antisemitism. 

Tragically, it is the left, most of all, which has not left this legacy behind. If 7 October doesn’t prompt an awakening, I fear it may only come too late.

David Lega (Kristdemokraterna, EPP Group) is a Swedish Member of the European Parliament, where he serves on the Foreign Affairs and Human Rights committees.

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