The implications of the waning appeal of the left in Israel could be immense
By WILLIAM MAYER

December 18, 2012 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Leftist Israeli legislators have finally been forced to confront reality; the Middle East's political makeup has so radically changed - for the worse - over the last 4 years that the country's major lefty party, Kadima is no longer a relevant political force and hence its members are fleeing the legislature.

From its founding, Israel has always had a well entrenched and at some times dominant leftist mentality. Unfortunately the Israeli brand of leftism is essentially indistinguishable from that which has seen ascendance in the West over the past 100 years.

Bear with me on the following, the dots will be connected.

Two incontrovertible facts:

1. One of the most notable aspects of the left is its anti-Semitism, or if you prefer Jew hatred.

2.The lynchpin of leftist economic theory is its dogmatic attachment to what, in classical Marxist jargon is generally called the labor theory of value.

Inherent in the labor theory of value is the idea that the "workers" are oppressed because they have been denied [mainly by a power imbalance] the full measure of their contribution to the making of any product. This difference between a goods' ultimate worth in the marketplace and what the worker has been paid in wages for his labor to produce it is appropriated by the capitalist.

The capitalist is then a vulture preying on defenseless workers who are held in a condition of virtual slavery by the low wages - "I owe my soul to the company store."

Why is this important and what does it have to do with the disintegration of Kadima?

Let us expand a bit...

Marxism is far more than an economic doctrine, it is also a political philosophy as well as being a predictive theory of history. It therefore holds great sway among its adherents, often displacing the role of religion because of its nearly all-encompassing nature. In this regard it has much in common with Shari'a - a legalistic Muslim blueprint for life covering nearly every aspect of human activity

Marx's demonization of capitalism to a large degree legitimizes the worst aspect of human nature - envy, greed and covetousness. Marxists, and latter day neo-Marxists - such as Mr. Obama - therefore tend to see a land of haves and have nots - a basic separation of the polity into the greedy rich and the long suffering exploited poor.

This provides a basis for employing a strategy of divide and conquer.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was a personification of this mentality. There are the 1 percenters, smugly wealthy/avaricious and the 99 percent, the wage slaves.

The rage produced by such twisted thinking finds and has found through the ages, many outlets, none of them pretty.

One of these has been a brand of anti-Semitism, one based upon the perverse belief that certain rich Jewish bankers essentially control the world's economy.

Witness the Bilderberg and similar irrational conspiracies.

In such a system then the apex villain is the uber rich capitalistic [and therefore necessarily predatory] Jew. Anti-Semitism naturally flows from such a perverse logic and hence there is a pernicious linkage between Marxist/hard leftism and Jew hatred, anti-Semitism.

So if you have been following along you might still be asking, "so what? - how does this explain the precipitous fall of Kadima?

We proffer the following:.

Much of Israel's left, especially its intellectuals, are almost violently anti-Zionist. They view their own country as an apartheid oppressor, a colonial power holding the "Palestinian people" in hell-hole settlements. [There are no Palestinian people, but that topic is beyond the scope of this essay].

These people viscerally hate the country of their fore-fathers, figuratively the land of Abraham and Moses with a birthright bequeathed to them from the Almighty.

It is this inner rage which has driven in previous years huge anti-war protests in Israel where the indictments hurled against the Jewish nation - by Jews - were nearly indistinguishable from those lodged by the Islamists...that Israel had not right to exist.

We believe that at its core Kadima [a "peace" party formed by the late Ariel Sharon] harbors these same anti-Zionist tendencies...and now for the dark truth, also secretly loathed itself for its very Judaism.
Jewish self-hatred.

Please note this is a very simplified and incomplete explanation, there are other factors leading to the phenomenon of Jewish self hatred. For example, Kenneth Levin a psychiatrist who taught at Harvard, gave two additional causes; one, a version of the Stockholm Syndrome, where captives come to identify with their detainers and second, a dynamic similar to that which affects abused children.

We feel that the so-called Arab Spring did serve one positive purpose, it awakened the leftist Israeli voter - not the leaders of the movement here, but the electorate - to the fact that the existence of Israel was by no means a given, that there were people and ideologies loosed by the Arab Spring which threatened their physical existence.

Seeing the stakes in such stark terms triggered a survival instinct that overrode the loathing of Israel as a Zionist entity.

It simply melted away.

Self preservation will always over-ride abstract theory. One should not be expected to engage in intellectual nitpicking when someone is holding a gun to your head.

Thus the rapid collapse of Kadima - the majority of the Jewish people now understand that to survive they must fight for their country, thus making it a worthy love object.

So as we see it, the death of Kadima is a historic occurrence. It might well have killed off Jewish leftism while at the same time given Israel's people a reason for national pride, patriotism.

Kadima's leaders, though probably not having the same take as do we, understand that such a growing nationalism is their death knell and acted accordingly.

©2012 William Mayer. PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved.