Left and right – strange bedfellows when it comes to Jews

As the leadership of the Western world appears to be moving right with electoral gains for right-wing parties in Europe and beyond, it’s as much of an indicator of growing antisemitism as it would be if left-wing governments were on the rise. Jews remain a convenient scapegoat for both extremes.

At the end of February 2025, to the shock of many, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AFD) won more than 10 million votes, the second highest number in Germany’s election. This result gave the party 20% of the seats in the Bundestag – Germany’s Parliament. This avowedly anti-immigration party evokes toxic German ultranationalism, including antisemitic ideas, with echoes of the Nazis.

There have also been gains for right-of-centre parties that oppose immigration in recent elections in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, among others, even though such parties are frequently frozen out of ruling coalitions. Should we therefore expect a rise in antisemitic incidents, with the oldest hatred traditionally synonymous with the far right? Antisemitism levels are already higher than normal the world over in reaction to Israel’s war against Hamas, emanating more from those on the political left in the current circumstances. And how do we explain that, despite their often-antisemitic rhetoric and policies, parties on the political right are often pro-Israel? They generally support the right-wing coalition government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With a right-of-centre Republican-dominated Congress, albeit by just a few seats, and Donald Trump back in the White House, will this be good for Jews and for Israel? Initial indications are that Washington is squarely behind the hard choices Jerusalem will have to make in the coming months. These will deal with the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza and whether negotiations will proceed to the second phase, or whether Israel will resume its attacks on Hamas. Whether Trump is able to stop harassment of Jewish students on American campuses, vandalism of synagogues, vile slogans at pro-Palestinian rallies, and other antisemitic actions remains to be seen.

Sometimes, political parties on the far left and the far right of the political spectrum have more in common in their tactics and policies than they do with parties in the centre, including on antisemitic and Islamophobic speech and action. Hate can make for strange bedfellows.

David Saks, who has been responsible for tracking antisemitism at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies for decades said, “It’s important to distinguish between being ‘on the right’ or ‘right leaning’, which need not be synonymous with being anti-democratic or racist, and ultra-right, extremist movements and/or ideologies. The first largely eschew antisemitism – at least officially – while almost invariably, it’s a core component of the world view of the second. While right-wing hardliners also sometimes combine standard antisemitic invective with anti-Israel rants, this is despite the fact that it puts them in the same camp as the anti-Western, postcolonial left, which it regards as the inveterate enemy of the white races.”

Milton Shain, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cape Town, said, “The late George Mosse, a renowned scholar of fascism and Nazism, always told me that the heart is on the left. Spending his early years in Nazi Germany, Mosse knew all about right-wing (in his case Nazi) antisemitism. But we need to recognise that the ‘left’ has also not been immune to Jew-hatred. It has oft-times raised the ‘Jewish Question’ in ugly ways.”

“Arguably this began in earnest with Karl Marx, himself a Jew,” Shain said. “Subsequently, many prominent left-wing intellectuals have opined in conspiratorial terms about ‘the Jew’ and the ‘Jewish Question’. Consider the writings of JA Hobson and his contention that specifically Jewish cosmopolitan financiers initiated the Anglo-Boer War. Conspiratorial left-wing anti-Jewish thinking persisted long after Hobson, especially in Russia and later, the Soviet Union. By most accounts, Joseph Stalin – at least in his last years – was a Jew hater. On the other hand, it would be foolish to ignore the right and its history of Jew-hatred. It was central to Nazism.

“In more recent decades, right-wing populism has spawned many Jew-haters. Holocaust denial is only one dimension of warped and conspiratorial thinking. Attacks on George Soros and the period of Jörg Haider in Austria typify the survival of such thinking, which has been grafted to an Islamophobia which echoes the discourse employed against Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century. Interestingly, such xenophobia has dampened but not removed antisemitism on the far right and has even led to support for Israel.

“It would, however, be myopic to assume that far-right populists are cleansed of Jew-hatred. It would similarly be naïve to believe that antisemitism plays no part in left-wing anti-Zionism. For many so-called progressives this obsession is a hygienic form of Jew-hatred. Jeremy Corbyn is a case study. But the former Labour leader has support in many quarters. In inexplicable ways, many on the left support Hamas, an anti-modern and misogynistic death cult that has no place in the universalist and meliorative project that has informed the best of the leftist thought for the past two centuries.”

As history has tragically shown, when things go wrong in a country, blame is heaped on its Jewish citizens from both left and right. Jews become apparently responsible for all the ills of society, no matter where the hate comes from.

• Steven Gruzd is a political analyst in Johannesburg. He writes in his personal capacity.