The Enemy of My Enemy: Why the Left Keeps Landing on Jews
How anti-imperialism became a permission structure for the world’s oldest hatred
On Saturday, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a pre-dawn raid on Caracas. By Sunday, acting president Delcy Rodríguez was on national television explaining what happened.
Her explanation? “Zionist undertones.”
Not “American imperialism.” Not “illegal intervention.” Zionist undertones. For an operation with zero Israeli involvement, zero evidence of Israeli knowledge, and zero connection to Israel or Jews of any kind.
It would be tempting to write this off as a Maduro regime quirk—the ramblings of an authoritarian grasping for excuses. Except this isn’t a quirk. It’s a pattern. And the pattern has a century of data points.
The Historical Record
Start with Stalin.
In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union launched its “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign—a purge of “rootless cosmopolitans” who were insufficiently loyal to the motherland. The term was a euphemism. Everyone knew who it meant. Jewish intellectuals, artists, and scientists were arrested, fired, or executed. Yiddish newspapers were shut down. Hebrew schools were closed.
This culminated in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, in which nine physicians—six of them Jewish—were accused of conspiring to poison Soviet leadership. Stalin personally ordered their torture. “Beat, beat, and beat again,” he instructed interrogators. The doctors were scheduled for a show trial and public execution around Easter. Historians believe Stalin planned to use the ensuing “popular outrage” as a pretext for mass deportation of Soviet Jews to camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Stalin died before the plan could be executed. The doctors were released. But the infrastructure of Soviet anti-Zionism—the vocabulary, the tropes, the institutional machinery—remained intact for decades.
This wasn’t incidental. Soviet propagandists deliberately developed “anti-Zionism” as a politically acceptable container for antisemitic content. State media depicted hook-nosed Jewish bankers and serpents embossed with Stars of David. The messaging was explicit: Zionism was racism, imperialism, and a tool of Western capitalism. In 1975, the Soviet Union successfully pushed the United Nations to pass Resolution 3379, declaring “Zionism is a form of racism.”
U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned at the time: “The UN is about to make antisemitism international law.”
Poland, 1968. The Communist government launched an “anti-Zionist” purge during a period of economic stagnation and student unrest. Most of Poland’s remaining Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—were driven out of the country. The framing was opposition to Israel after the Six-Day War. The function was old-fashioned scapegoating.
East Germany refused to pay Holocaust reparations, arguing that Nazism was a purely capitalist phenomenon with no connection to the socialist East. Former Nazis were quietly rehabilitated. Jews were viewed with suspicion as potential Western agents.
Cuba aligned with the PLO, broke ties with Israel, and watched most of its Jewish population emigrate. The rhetoric was anti-Zionist. The Jewish community got the message.
Hugo Chávez picked up where the Soviets left off. In his 2005 Christmas address, he declared that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ” had stolen the world’s riches. Under Chávez, Venezuela broke relations with Israel, allied with Iran and Hezbollah, and began accusing Jewish institutions of being spies. Venezuela’s Jewish population dropped from 25,000 in the 1990s to roughly 4,000 today.
Maduro continued the tradition. He blamed “international Zionism” for the 2024 election protests. He accused “Zionists” of trying to “hand the country over to devils.” And now his successor blames “Zionist undertones” for his capture.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party became a case study in how this happens to an individual. A lifelong “anti-racist” who would be horrified to be called an antisemite presided over what the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found to be institutional antisemitism—23 instances of inappropriate interference in antisemitism complaints and two cases of unlawful harassment. The Commission noted “a culture within the Labour Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.”
Today’s campus left follows the same script. “Zionist” as disqualifying identity. Jewish students asked to denounce Israel before joining progressive coalitions. Loyalty tests that require American Jews to reject the Jewish state as a condition for acceptance into progressive spaces.
This isn’t cherry-picking. It’s a through-line from 1948 to last weekend.
The Sleight of Hand
Here’s where it gets slippery. There are actually three different things getting conflated—and that conflation is how the move works.
Zionism (the actual thing): A political movement founded in the late 1800s, arguing that Jews needed a nation-state for self-determination and safety. It succeeded in 1948. Today it mostly means “believes Israel should exist.” That’s it. You can be a Zionist and oppose Netanyahu, support Palestinian statehood, criticize settlements. Most diaspora Jews—surveys suggest 80-90%—feel some connection to Israel. This makes them Zionists in the narrow sense.
“Zionist” (the epithet): In the vocabulary of the global left, “Zionist” has become shorthand for settler-colonialist, Western imperialist, oppressor-class, capitalism’s enforcer in the Middle East. It’s doing a lot of work that has nothing to do with whether someone thinks Israel should exist.
Jews (the people): An ethnicity, a religion, a civilization. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews.
The left says “We’re not anti-Jewish, we’re anti-Zionist.” But then “Zionist” expands to mean “supporter of Western capitalism” or “hidden hand of global power.” And since most Jews are Zionists in the narrow sense, and since Jews have historically succeeded within Western economies, the categories start to blur.
So when Maduro says “international Zionism” is behind the protests, he’s not making a claim about Israeli foreign policy. He’s invoking the shadowy-cabal trope—global financial elites, hidden hands, powerful forces undermining the people’s revolution. “Zionist” is doing the work that “Jewish banker” did a century ago, but with plausible deniability.
The tell: Nobody says “Zionist undertones” when they mean “the Israeli government was involved.” You’d just say Israel. “Zionist undertones” points at something murkier, more diffuse, more conspiratorial. It’s not a policy critique. It’s a trope in a new costume.
The Mechanism
How does a movement built on solidarity with the marginalized keep ending up aligned with regimes that persecute minorities?
The answer is anti-imperialism as master value.
Once you define the West as the primary evil in the world—the source of colonialism, capitalism, and oppression—a certain logic follows. Israel gets framed as a Western outpost in the Middle East. Jews have succeeded within Western systems. The enemy-of-my-enemy logic kicks in.
The Latin American left has long embraced movements opposed to Western liberal capitalism. Many of those movements have centered “anti-Zionism”: see Corbyn’s sympathy for Hezbollah and Hamas, his warmth toward Cuba and Venezuela’s Chavismo. This entire coterie—the global far left, the South American authoritarian left, and various Israel-hating jihadist groups—are unlikely bedfellows who are also longtime fellow travelers.
The framework makes the destination inevitable. If Western power is the problem, and Israel is coded as Western, and Jews are successful within Western capitalism, then “Zionist” becomes the acceptable way to name the enemy. The vocabulary launders old hatreds through new categories.
This is how you get self-described Marxists who oppose all nationalism somehow spending disproportionate energy on one particular nationalism. This is how you get progressive coalitions that welcome every identity except one. This is how liberation movements keep generating the same output.
The Category Problem
Jews break the binary.
The left’s moral framework depends on a clean division: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, powerful and powerless. Jews don’t fit.
They’re history’s most consistent victims—persecution, expulsion, genocide—and they’ve succeeded within Western systems. They’re white-passing in America but weren’t considered white for most of European history. They’re indigenous to Israel but also diasporic and European. They maintained cohesion and literacy and commercial networks while holding no political power for centuries.
For any ideology that needs clean categories, this is intolerable.
There’s something else: Jews are visible enough to target but invisible enough to fear. Compare to other minorities who’ve faced persecution—Black Americans (highly visible, oppression takes the form of overt exclusion), Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia (somewhat visible, concentrated in certain industries), Roma in Europe (highly visible, treated as permanent outsiders). Jews occupy an uncanny middle space. They can assimilate visually and culturally—often have—but maintain internal cohesion through religion, tradition, community institutions.
From the outside, that looks like: “They’re among us but not of us.”
And that’s the perfect fuel for conspiracy thinking. If you can’t see the group, but you believe the group exists and is coordinating, then their power must be hidden. The invisibility becomes evidence of sophistication rather than absence.
Here’s what’s darkly ironic: much of that insularity was imposed. Jews were forced into ghettos, banned from guilds, restricted from land ownership. The community cohesion that now reads as “clannish” was survival infrastructure. Then the survival infrastructure becomes the evidence for the conspiracy.
It’s a trap with no exit. Assimilate fully and you’re “infiltrating.” Maintain distinctiveness and you’re “refusing to integrate.” Succeed and you’re “taking over.” Fail and you’re “parasites.”
The Horseshoe
The right hates Jews for being cosmopolitan, rootless, undermining national purity.
The left hates Jews for being successful within capitalism, associated with finance, and—through Israel—associated with Western power.
Same target, different costume, same permission structure for hostility.
Some researchers argue that American polling shows antisemitic attitudes are dramatically more prevalent on the right than the left. That may be true in terms of raw numbers. But it misses something important: the right’s antisemitism is marginalized within mainstream conservatism. It exists, but respectable conservatives denounce it.
The left’s version is more interesting because it’s more contradictory—and more likely to be found in elite institutions. It comes wrapped in the language of liberation. It claims moral authority. It doesn’t feel like bigotry to the people practicing it. That makes it harder to name and harder to fight.
When a “Nazi and a Zionist” mean the same thing in Maduro’s mouth—as he called Argentina’s government—something has gone badly wrong with the categories. The term “Nazi” is supposed to refer to the ideology that murdered six million Jews. Using it interchangeably with “Zionist” isn’t political analysis. It’s incoherence dressed up as critique.
The Question
I’m not accusing anyone of conscious antisemitism. That’s not the point.
The point is that a movement’s vocabulary can do antisemitic work even when the people using it don’t intend it to. Structures produce outcomes. Frameworks generate targets. If your ideology keeps landing on the same scapegoat that every other authoritarian ideology lands on, maybe the problem isn’t the scapegoat.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: What does it mean for a liberation movement when its logic keeps producing this output?
Is it a bug—a correctable error in an otherwise sound framework?
Or is it a feature—something built into the structure of anti-imperialism as a totalizing worldview?
And what would it take to build a left politics that doesn’t require this enemy?
Related reading:
Fathom Journal: “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” — How Soviet propaganda shaped modern discourse
The Connector: “On Antisemitism and the Fight for Democracy” — AOC’s dialogue on antisemitism and progressive spaces
Jay Michaelson: “Liberal Zionists Are Finding Our Voices Again” — The disorienting experience of liberal American Jews post-October 7
American Dreaming: “A Year of Leftist Anti-Semitism” — A retrospective on the discourse since October 7
Damon Linker: “Liberalism v. the Left” — Isaiah Berlin and the limits of anti-nationalist universalism
Australian Institute of International Affairs: “Red Terror: How the Soviet Union Shaped the Modern Anti-Zionist Discourse” — The origins of “Zionism is racism”