Exploring intellectually dishonest anti-Israel factions part 1: leftwing postmoderns
By Lucy Rogers
I have previously criticised the anti-Israel movement for being intellectually dishonest, and provided examples: https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2025/10/guest_post_stop_accusing_anti-israel_westerners_of_antisemitism_and_start_accusing_them_where_appropriate_of_intellectual_dishonesty.html At the time I did not cover why people are intellectually dishonest about this issue, which is a question I would now like to explore. The answer differs according to the faction of anti-Israel protester in question.
The first faction are leftwing postmoderns. Postmodernism in its leftwing form is obsessed with various oppressed minorities: certain favoured ethnic minorities, LGBTQI+, women, disabled people, Muslims, etc. (If you’re a transgendered lesbian Muslim woman in a wheelchair and a native American Sioux you win the Oppression Olympics.) The political right tends to refer to these people as “woke”, although I think “postmodern” is a more appropriate and less dehumanising term.
I used to think that what postmoderns want more than anything else is marijuana and sex without babies. I have come to realise that I am wrong. What postmoderns want more than anything else is the absence of moral responsibility. Which is to say: leftwing postmoderns want to be able to do whatever they want and have the consequences be the fault of “the system”. (Rightwing postmoderns, by contrast, just want to be able to do whatever they want and not have social obligations to their neighbours.)
I realised this when I was thinking about the Green Party’s contradictory approach to prohibition of tobacco and marijuana respectively. The reason for the contradiction is that the respective policies make different moral points. Treating marijuana use as a “health issue” means that users are officially labelled victims of the system who are not responsible for their own choices. That in turn makes a moral point about responsibility for our actions which has wider application to other social issues as well.
On the other hand, there has been a social consensus that tobacco should be legalised for some time, which means that it is no longer helpful to make an ideological point about moral responsibility for our own actions. Instead, it is helpful to make a different ideological point: that the government has an important role to play in bossing us around for our own good. Cannabis use isn’t what leftwing postmoderns actually want per se: rather, the respective policies make a desired moral point.
Leftwing postmoderns want to believe that their every failing is the fault of the system and that they are victims of circumstance. They are terrified of responsibility. They want to have sex with whomever they wish or smoke whatever they wish or do whatever they wish and have it be someone else’s fault.
It’s the same reason that so many people are marriage-phobic. They may end up getting married, but only on their own terms: they’re not prepared to refrain from casual sex or cohabitation beforehand, or to avoid no-fault divorce, not primarily because they’re reluctant to forgo sex (although they are) but because accepting that these things are wrong would entail accepting the concept of moral responsibility, which is even worse than going without sex.
Of course, this means that they have to spend their lives raging against the system and sticking it to the man, while never practising self-examination and trying not to think about the fact that deep down they know full well that although of course circumstances can be hugely mitigating and that judgementalism is wrong that at the end of the day we still make moral choices. (If they didn’t know that, they wouldn’t need to be intellectually dishonest.)
How does this translate into unbalanced hostility to Israel? I think the answer is that in their view, Jews count as white. (This isn’t true: Jews were murdered for not being white in the 20th century, but let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.) Accordingly, they see the Israel/ Palestine conflict through the lens of white colonisers oppressing indigenous Palestinians. That means that they demonise everything Israel does and do not want to acknowledge complexity in the conflict, because Israel in their eyes represents an ideology and social structures which they have a vested interest in believing the worst of.
The reason they don’t take an obsessive interest in (say) Tibet is that criticising Chinese imperialism doesn’t make the desired moral point, because they don’t live in Chinese society but in Western countries. They want to believe the worst specifically of the social structures in which they live, not of colonialism in general. Jews, as I have said, are considered Western.
The result is that leftwing postmoderns fervently believe that they are not antisemitic, and repeat ad nauseam that criticism of the Israeli government is not in itself antisemitic, while deliberately ignoring the fact that their views of Israel have everything to do with the ethnicities involved, and knowingly ignoring the complexity of the conflict.