USING ANTISEMITIC STEREOTYPES TO DEMONIZE ISRAEL, 1967–1973

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state. This was a period, bounded by two wars that threatened Israel with destruction, in which the far left devoted particular attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Leading far left publications joined the Arab guerillas in charging that Israel was aggressively racist and expansionist.

To support these claims, the far left often invoked long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, both economic and theological. It attributed to Jews enormous financial power and an arrogance and sense of superiority that drove them to exploit and dominate other peoples. In a three-part series published in 1969 on what it called the “History of Middle East Liberation Struggle,” New Left Notes, the newspaper of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), declared that the Jews’ chosen people concept gives Israel “the right to expand and expand.” Like Nazi Germany, the Jewish state would “not contain itself within any set borders.” It explained that the “architects of Zionism were mainly bourgeois Jewish intellectuals” and that the movement’s early sponsors were “leaders in ... world imperialism” like wealthy Jewish banker Edmond de Rothschild, who wanted to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine to promote “his own financial interests.”