Capitalism right and left spreads hatred and division

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Arson attacks on north London synagogues and a Jewish ambulance charity, armed attack on a synagogue in Manchester leaving three dead, two Jews stabbed in Golders Green. Recorded increase in anti-Semitic threats, graffiti and insults since the October 7 massacre and the ruthless destruction of Gaza; a further acceleration since the start of the Iran war. And it is not only in Britain. Following shootings in the US and the atrocity at Bondi beach[1], there is no doubt that we are seeing the spread and intensification of anti-Jewish hatred.

But it’s not only Jew-hatred which is on the rise. Judaeophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia and all the rest are the product of a capitalist society which, as it sinks into an advanced state of decay, is generating a toxic mixture of ethnic, religious, national and racial divisions. This decay is not new: the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews in the 1930s and 40s was one of its most graphic expressions. But today capitalist society is far more fragmented and lacking in even any short-term solutions to its insoluble crisis. Hatred against minorities is taking ever-more numerous forms and is increasingly manipulated by governments to boost their repressive campaigns against immigrants. And as imperialist wars spread chaotically across the planet, these antagonisms are directly encouraged and exacerbated in order to justify the slaughter of whole populations. We have entered a new era of genocides.

We see this, for example, in the unending massacres in Africa, from Rwanda in 1994 to Nigeria today where jihadist gangs, modelled on ISIS, regularly target Christians or rival Muslim sects or in Sudan where we are witnessing the slaughter and starvation of tens of thousands, a large part of it organised along ethnic lines[2]. But the imperialist war in the Middle East, widely presented as a conflict between Muslims and Jews, is certainly one of the main sources of the current wave of anti-Semitism, but also of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism. 

The ideological attacks

The attacks on Jews in Britain have been accompanied by a very loud campaign by the main political parties to prove that they are the real opponents of anti-Semitism and that their rivals are soft on the issue: Starmer, having assumed the leadership of the Labour Party with pledges to cleanse the party of anti-Semitism, accuses the Green Party of hoovering up the anti-Semitic exiles from the Corbynite Labour Party. But the Green’s leader, Zak Polanski, loudly proclaims his Jewish identity and his condemnation of anti-Semitism. At the same time, the government is considering the idea of banning pro-Palestinian marches, which would no doubt produce a counter-campaign in favour of preserving our ‘democratic right’ to protest. Similar arguments and counter-arguments can be heard across the world.

We will not enter into these wars of words between bourgeois parties. Our aim is to respond to the question: what and who is fuelling this rise in anti--Semitism?

If, as we insist, it is decomposing capitalism that is the ultimate source of all the different brands of racist poison, the governments and political parties who serve this system are all actively stirring the cauldron. The Israeli state generates anti-Semitism by presenting its own mass killings and ethnic cleansing as a heroic defence of Jewish people everywhere, thus strengthening the false idea that all Jews are accomplices to its brutal wars. At the same time, it helps to destroy any understanding of the actual reality of anti-Semitism by branding all criticism of its crimes as anti-Semitic.

The regimes in conflict with the Israeli state generate anti-Semitism in a more obvious way: the explicit objective of the October 7 operation was to kill as many Jews as possible. It was led by a proto-state, Hamas, whose constitution refers directly to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that classic ‘proof’ of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy forged by agents of the Tsarist secret police. There is reasonable suspicion that some of the recent attacks on Jews in Britain have been carried out by a proxy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Right and left parties help to spread the poison

The different political factions of the ruling class are no less involved in this re-emergence of anti-Semitic prejudices. In the USA and Europe, right wing and populist parties, mainly concerned with stirring up hatred against Muslims, have to a great extent aligned themselves with Israel and advertise their great love for the Jewish people. But you don’t have to scratch much below the service to find the old anti-Semitic tropes, even if you don’t include the more traditional fascist wing (like Fuentes in the US for example) who don’t hide their conviction that the Jews are agents of Satan. Thus, the majority of the populists adhere to some form of the Great Replacement Theory - the idea that a shadowy “globalist elite” is undermining traditional culture in the west by opening the floodgates to brown, black or Muslim immigrants. This is only one or two steps away from the mythology of the world Jewish conspiracy. Meanwhile, MAGA critics of Trump’s Iranian adventure are increasingly arguing that the real government of the US has been usurped by Israel.

And in any case the newly discovered ‘solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people’ trumpeted by the far right and the populists does not mean that they have finally understood that racism is a Bad Thing. On the contrary, it is a mere pretext for whipping up what they see as a more profitable and vote-winning form of racism – the kind directed against Muslims and particularly Muslims fleeing from zones of brutal conflict like Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq.

But the left wing of capital (Labour left, Greens, Trotskyists etc) also plays its part in this sordid enterprise, by proclaiming that the inter-imperialist carnage in the Middle East is really a war of national liberation and by its more or less critical support for the “Resistance”, made up of Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the theocracy in Tehran. Thus, the slogan “Globalise the Intifada” is anything but a call for world revolution against capitalism. Rather it is an appeal to the methods used during the actual “Intifadas” in Israel/Palestine between the late 80s and the 2000s: strikes and demonstrations that divide the population on purely national lines, and the action of terrorist gangs against Jewish Israelis.

The left and especially the far left often complain that the mainstream media are only concerned with the sufferings of a small number of Jews while having little or nothing to say about the fate of millions of Palestinians or the Iranians. Such arguments are yet another means to rack up further divisions in the working class and above all to justify supporting one imperialist camp against the other.

The only way out is internationalism

As we wrote in part two of our article on the history of anti-Semitism, Zionism and anti-Zionism[3], “In 1938, Trotsky warned that Jewish emigration to Palestine was no solution to the tide of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and could indeed become a ‘bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews’. Today Israel has the potential of being a bloody trap for several million Jews; and at the same time the increasingly murderous policies carried out in its ‘defence’ has created a new variety of anti-Semitism which blames all Jews for the actions of the Israeli state.

This is a true ideological maze and no exit can be found by following the mystifications of the pro-Zionist right or the anti-Zionist left. The only way out of the maze is the uncompromising defence of the internationalist proletarian outlook, founded on the rejection of all forms of nationalism and all imperialist camps”.

The struggle of working class, the exploited class under capitalism, which is international by its very nature, is the only force that that can point to a way beyond the dangerous divisions imposed by this putrefying social order.

Amos, May 2026

 

Rubric: 

Anti-Semitic attacks