In her new book, The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield begins with this bewilderment. Linfield, who teaches cultural journalism at New York University, suggests the emotionally charged phenomenon cannot be explained by reasoned opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank alone. “For many on the Left are repelled not only by Israel's oppression of the Palestinians; they are repelled by the existence of Israel itself…. Furthermore, for the past half century of so, those who define themselves as progressive shown a startling ability to support regimes far more repressive and violent, and far less egalitarian and politically open, than Israel.”
Why, then, after the 1967 Six-Day War—when Leftists “were enthralled by Cuban, Vietnamese, Mozambican, Chinese, Algerian, and Palestinian nationalism,” when they indulged or romanticized guerrilla movements in the Third World—was Israel “almost instantly transformed into the colonialist-racist-imperialist-fascist oppressor”?
Through a series of portraits of twentieth-century leftist intellectuals, some more self-deceived than others, Linfield brilliantly shows how Israel became “the prism through which changes in Left values can be most clearly seen.” The Left's increasing animus toward Israel, she proposes, has principally to do with “the transformation of the Left itself.”
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