Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism

In this article, Nirenstein describes the left's turn against the Jewish State around the time of the Six Day War.

 

An excerpt from the article:

 

"When I went back to Italy [just after the 1967 war] some of my fellow students stared at me as somebody new, an enemy, a wicked person who would soon become an imperialist. My life was about to change. I didn't know that, because I simply thought that Israel rightly won a war after having been assaulted with an incredible number of harassments. But I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jews, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl, the coterie that sanctified by Judaism in left-wing eyes. […] [A letter from leftist Italian academics to "their Jewish friends", accusing them of making the Palesinians suffer as they once suffered] is an excellent summary of all the characteristics of the new anti-Semitism. There is the pre-Zionist definition of the Jewish people as the one that suffers, has to suffer by nature, a people bound to bear the worst persecutions without even lifting a finger, and is, therefore, worthy of compassion and solidarity. And there is the well-established, democratic, militarily powerful, and economically prospering State of Israel, which is the antithesis of this stereotype. The "new Jew" that tries not to suffer, and that, above all, can and wants to defend himself, immediately loses all his charm in the eyes of the Left."