The Anti-Zionist Left Reaches Fever Pitch

How the post-woke era is destroying the political centre

Legend has it that the Age of Woke began around 2012, when the corporate world and banking sector grew weary of leftist activists camping on Wall Street and decided to pour vast amounts of money and resources into redirecting their energies toward ideas less likely to affect their bottom lines. Out went the structural critiques of capitalism, in came the pride flag, out went the focus on the 1% (whoever they may be), in came amorphous allusions to whiteness and white privilege. This “Great Awokening” would bring into the centre ideas usually found on the periphery of leftist thought, and relegate the core, which is to say economics, to the periphery.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Age of Woke will go down in history as uniquely cringeworthy; however, unlike a poorly drawn tattoo or a mullet haircut, many of those surgeries will be there for good.

Within the logic of the “Woke Mind Virus” was a faulty piece of wiring that was present all along but not too much of a problem until October 7th, 2023. Where in a worldview rooted entirely in identitarian power dynamics did Jews and Israel sit? Were they, too, a vulnerable minority group? Or were they “white”? And further still, where did Israel sit as a country propped up by the West and predicated (as they saw it) on oppressing powerless non-white people? Generally speaking, the left opted for the safer route of lumping Israel in with the general theory of white privilege, albeit the plot holes and paradoxes were skipped over, mainly.

This meant that when Zionism sought to retaliate against Hamas and other forces aligned against it, it discovered that a considerable number of people embedded within institutions across the West, and particularly in America, agreed with the terrorists!

Conveniently, then, the re-electing of Donald Trump meant that woke would be “put away” because it had become a rival node of power within the system. The institutions were purged of their mad progressive ideas so everyone could return to the 1990s. The Mad Dog left would be taken out back and put down like Ole Yella.

In America, at least, the woke left seems to have taken a drubbing, but I argued a while ago that the possibility of a similar purge taking place in the United Kingdom was doubtful. Yet it can’t be denied that the most egregious and irritating form of woke has indeed receded, and we are in a new paradigm.

The idea that a movement can be relegated to obscurity because its institutional and corporate incentives have been severed is, in my view, becoming a flawed perspective. The human capital that constitutes the ideology does not simply evaporate because the incentives have changed; instead, a more militant rebranding emerges, half in and half out of institutional power structures.

And this is where the post-woke left is now.

The rainbow flags have been replaced with Palestinian flags, and the purple hair has been replaced with a keffiyeh.

The recent Glastonbury debacle, where a black rap artist led the crowd in chanting “Death to the IDF” saw an institutional backlash, though not because the same person also gloated that native Brits would never get their country back. Owen Jones, long regarded as emblematic of the entitled leftist wet lettuce who never knew struggle for a cause, now claims he is prepared to go to jail for his stance on the Israel/Gaza issue.

Across the left, the term “Zionist” is spat out with contempt, and associated with a corrupting force that dictates institutional policy across the West. One young lady on TikTok claims to yearn for the end of the West, because of its unending support for the genocide in Gaza.

I leave my readers to ponder how such a young lady would survive in a state of nature, but the dedication to the cause and the contempt shown to Power are pretty apparent.

More problematic is that the “West” and Israel are inextricably linked in their world view, and in terms of power dynamics, it is difficult to refute. During the Glastonbury affair, the revealed preferences of the mainstream right were, predictably, to instantly white-knight for the IDF and leave the insult to their own countrymen ignored. Objectively speaking, some of the reports of atrocities coming out of Gaza are truly horrific, yet the toilet seat warmers on the centre-right are happy to defend it. The thousands of dead children, families buried alive under rubble, starvation lines, and general sadism — none of it seems to faze the smug idiots of Julia Hartley Brewer-style punditry.

Thus, within just two years, we have gone from culture war dynamics wherein the left wanted to trans the kids, to the right turning a blind eye to piles of dead kids (many with headshots). A right servile to Zionism is now compromising the successes in pushing forward the discourse on demographics and nativist sentiment.

Demographics Discourse Heads for the Mainstream

Moreover, the anti-establishment energy is drifting to the left because the toilet seat warmers are handing the left that most incendiary device, a legitimate moral cause. Leftists such as Aaron Bastani are now easily able to score their own rhetorical headshots on people such as Matthew Goodwin by asking why they put the interests of a foreign regime over British interests.

Israel is an anvil made of solid lead hanging around the neck of the populist right, and it simply does not have to be there. Naturally, the anti-Zionist left is also more than happy to highlight the pay-offs and backhanders used to grease the wheels of the pro-Zionist right.

In the midst of all of this, Keir Starmer’s dithering and confused Labour government finds itself in a truly horrible position. Formerly, it was received wisdom that while the British right consisted of numerous micro-parties ready to undermine the Tories, the left was primarily confined to the Labour Party. Therefore, Labour could lurch to the right, further to the right than the Tories, in a Machiavellian power move. And this is precisely what Starmer did in his “Island of Strangers” speech (recently apologised for). Disillusioned leftists can vote for the Green Party (who currently have as many MPs as Reform UK), the Liberal Democrats and now, what seems to be an emerging Corbynista Party that will place the Israel/Palestine issue front and centre. Starmer is being squeezed on his right, and now his left flank is about to be exposed too.

To return to the main point, this was supposed to be the post-woke age in which crazy leftists had been put in a holding pen and we all returned to the ‘90s.

Fundamentally, the outcome is one of an overproduction of consensus-maintaining apparatchiks. The ideological logic has not receded with the incentives; it is “baked in”, and the attempt to reel in the managerial ideology has resulted in millions of educated people milling around within the framework of institutional power, seeking catharsis.

As usual, the biggest loser is the political centre, which in the context of British politics refers to the Blairite centre. The populist right gnaws its way in from the fringes on mass immigration and the failure of multiculturalism, and now a new front is opening by a left energised because saving the kids is more morally sound than transing them.

It would seem that we are finally entering an era wherein the British centre can no longer hold. I for one will not lament its passing.