Westerners Against Western Civilization

The Radical Self-Loathing of Left-Wing Anti-Zionism

Civilization meets barbarism at a pro-Hamas demonstration in Washington, DC. Source: @OSINTdefender

Columbia University’s anti-Zionists call themselves “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” They exaggerate, of course. Many of them, like former spokesman Mahmoud Khalil, are not Western. Nevertheless, this Ivy League slogan captures the almost comically extreme ideology motivating far-left anti-Zionism. It’s only “almost” comical because Elias Rodriguez—the assassin of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, DC—took it deadly seriously. Rodriguez wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last, true believer to commit murder for a diabolical absurdity.

Journalist

Ken Klippenstein

posted Rodriguez’s chat logs, which “reveal a man who hated the Republican and Democratic parties, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the right and left, the ‘bourgeoisie,’ the United States, the West, and, of course, Israel.” Under a rainbow emoji, Rodriguez self-identifies as a Maoist Third Worldist who believes only the Global South has “revolutionary potential.” He thus directly mirrors the rhetoric of Columbia’s Hamasniks, who posted that “We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South” and “seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination.” Rodriguez was surely inspired by those same militants when he did his own part to “globalize the intifada.”

It’s certainly possible to oppose the Israeli war in Gaza, or even the existence of Israel, and still be in favor of Western civilization. Nevertheless, there’s a reason that chants of “Death to America” (or Canada) follow “Death to Israel.” For far-left anti-Zionists, Israel exemplifies evils that are common to all Western countries: imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism, “whiteness.” The United States (or Canada) may be “too big to fail,” at least for now. But for anti-Westerners, the destruction of Israel (in the Iranian theocracy’s telling phrase, “the Little Satan”) is mouthwateringly plausible. On October 7, Rodriguez posted: “Love checking back in with the news every few hours like, ‘Hm I wonder if Israel still exists?’” Not long after, a Cornell University professor proclaimed at a rally that the Hamas attacks “exhilarated” him. These are the sentiments of anti-Westerners who, for at least one day, got a foretaste of “the total eradication of Western civilization.”

For traditional Marxists, the Western proletariat was the revolutionary class, since the West was where capitalism (with its supposedly fatal “internal contradictions”) was most highly developed. The far left’s abandonment of the West is a tacit admission of Marxism’s failure as a theory. The working class is culturally conservative, nationalist, and more in favor of gaining wealth than redistributing it. So, of course, campus radicals don’t “stand in full solidarity” with their MAGA- and Brexit-supporting countrymen. Instead, today’s far-leftists combine Marxist revolutionary fantasy with cultural self-loathing. The Global South now inherits the naive idolization that the left once applied to urban factory workers. Meanwhile, the West has become the bourgeoisie writ large, an entire civilization based on oppression and false consciousness. Thus, even theocrats like Hamas and Hezbollah are considered “progressive” for having the right enemies.

Israel is an odd fit to be a scapegoat for Western sins. Although a Western-style democracy, around two-thirds of its citizens are of longstanding Middle Eastern pedigree, being either Mizrahi Jews or Arabs. Moreover, the European-born ancestors of its Ashkenazi Jews sought to escape a continent that rejected them, not extend Europe’s dominion.¹ Insofar as the British supported (per the Balfour Declaration) “a national home for the Jewish people” in Mandatory Palestine, Israel is tied to empire. But so is neighboring Lebanon, which was created by the French to be a homeland for Maronite Christians. In humanity’s 4300-year history of imperial iniquity, letting under half a million Jews migrate to their ancient homeland—where they legally purchased land, grew the economy, and ended malaria—doesn’t rank.² Even in the 400-year history of the British Empire, a few decades of often-ambivalent support for Zionism is hardly epochal. Certainly, America’s “special relationship” with Israel, dating back to the Cold War, binds the Jewish state to the West. But strangely, Israel has now become symbolic of the West itself.

For Frantz Fanon, patron saint of the academic left, decolonization is putting the Biblical phrase “The last shall be first and the first last” into practice. Moreover, “to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.” In America, “placing the last at the head of things” takes the relatively anodyne form of DEI programs. But anti-colonialism, like fascism, glorifies violence as both a means and an end. Per Jean-Paul Sartre: “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.” Israelis aren’t European. Nor, as descendants of refugees, are they “the first” from any historically informed perspective. But they’re coded that way to the left. Thus, for Westerners taught that their own societies are “settler-colonial projects,” October 7 offered the vicarious thrill of revolutionary action.

Yet some anti-Western Westerners, like Elias Rodriguez, want more than just a vicarious thrill. They’re not content with encouraging “resistance by any means necessary” on Instagram. They believe in what anarchists call propaganda of the deed: violence intended to inspire others. In his manifesto, Rodriguez wrote that “there are many Americans for which the action [murdering two innocent people] will be highly legible and, in some funny [!] way, the only sane thing to do.” And indeed, a number of pro-Palestine and Marxist groups rushed to his defense. Personally, I’m a Westerner in favor of Western civilization. Nevertheless, I recognize that the West has its failings. Among them is a tendency to romanticize “the Other,” classically characterized as a noble savage. For today’s radical leftists, the noble savage is the Hamas gunman who, by freeing Palestine, will somehow free the world from Western evils as well. But no matter how many manifestos or PhD theses they write to justify murder, barbarism is still barbarism.

1. Of course, Zionist Jews were influenced by European ideas and values. In the Middle East alone, so were Lebanese Francophiles and Turkish Kemalists. The Kemalists actually went in the opposite direction of Zionists. Whereas Zionists revitalized Hebrew, with its Aramaic script, Kemalists replaced the Turkish Arabic script with the Latin alphabet.

2. The Balfour Declaration also promised that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." Palestinian displacement was not a consequence of Western imperialism, but of the Arab-initiated war to destroy Israel following the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan. After Israel won that war, its largest sources of immigration were Holocaust survivors and Middle Eastern Jews kicked out of Muslim countries. Not the typical profile of a European colony.