Sometimes one is left wondering exactly why the political left hates Israel so much. After all a large number of people who founded the state were on the left themselves. That is why the Kibbutz settlements were so popular. People voluntarily organized into collectivist communities in some of which private property was not recognized. Additionally the dominant political party for most of Israels existence has been designated as the Labor Party" in the American press which has accurately described its orientation. It was on the political left. What you might ask happened?
The answer to this question may lie in an aspect of Marxist pseudo-philosophy. It is the doctrine that specifies that all profit is theft and that if someone is wealthy that wealth must have accrued from as a result of theft from others. It is the same idea that leads people to conclude that American wealth came from the work of slaves regardless of the fact that the old south where slavery was the norm was much less well off than the north where it was not permitted.
In the Middle East the modern leftist looks at Israel and its comparative wealth its healthy middle class and so on. It then looks at the surrounding Arab dominated states and sees relative poverty as the rule. It ignores the wealth that is held by the oil billionaire potentates such as the Saudi royal family. It then assumes that Israel must be wealthy because it stole the wealth from the surrounding Arabs just as it assumes that the wealthy American is wealthy because he or she has stolen that wealth from the poor. Wealthy leftists by the way are exempt from this condemnation but that does not carry over to Israel or Israeli leftists.
A second issue that relates to this is Israels habit of winning when confronted by foreign aggression. This was explored following the 1967 Six Day War by Israeli political humorist Ephraim Kishon in a column entitles Why Israel Forfeited World Sympathy." Israel surrounded n all sides and outnumbered to boot somehow won the war in convincing fashion and thus became the big bad bully picking on its peaceful neighbors who were suddenly the victims despite their being ruled by military dictatorships which constantly waved the banners of holy war blood fire revenge." It is the same today with Hamas but Nancy Pelosi has decided to believe that Hamas is a humanitarian organization" because the Qataris say so. Calls for death and destruction are tossed by the wayside. Even when imams make an impassioned call to kill all the Jews it is ignored.
There is also some perverted logic behind all of this. It comes from the dont confuse me with facts" school of logic but it is trusted by some people nonetheless. Because the people involved have accepted a dogmatic view of the world and how it operated they refuse to acknowledge even the possibility that they could be wrong in their conclusions. Because their view cannot accept that free market economies are anything other than evil they conclude that any non-free market economy must be good. They further assume that any failure of such economy to generate significant wealth must be due to the evil capitalists or some other outside force that is preventing it from happening. It is the same thing as I heard back in high school on a National Lampoon radio show in which a commissar tell a little boy that he cant have any toys for Marxmas because capitalist elves have sabotaged all the toy factories. It couldnt possibly be that the Russian economy was a fault.
In the same way because Israel is successful it cannot be that they have hit on a better way to run their nation. So they must be the bad guys who are preventing the poor Arabs from doing well. The fact htat they Arab regions are controlled by oligarchs who keep most of the money for themselves and let only a small amount out to the benefit of the common folk is ignored. After all it isnt the fault of the wealthy Arab potentates that they rule over nations of poor people. It is Israels fault. Apparently the Israeli government is forcing the Saudi royal family to keep all of the oil money instead of allowing everyone else to participate in the business and develop a healthy middle class to drive further success.
The problem with the left is that it will not accept the possibility that it is wrong in its opinions even when faced with cold hard facts. It also fails to condemn its own hypocrisy in that it condemns wealth but only when that wealth is not its own. Thus it will continue to denounce Israel regardless of who is responsible for the continual violence in the region. Condemning the victim for successfully defending itself from the local bullies is now so ingrained that it cannot be changed.
