Confessions of a Jew Wrestling With Post-October 7th Politics

I grew up liberal. Then reality happened.

People parading through the streets of contemporary Western capitals calling for genocide of the Jews is a stark illustration of the failures of modern liberal and progressive thought. (photo: Merch HÜSEY/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Daniel Saunders, who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I’ve never been into the rock band, The Sex Pistols, but in recent years I’ve find myself echoing their lead vocalist Johnny Rotten’s words a lot: “Do you ever think you’ve been cheated?”

We have been cheated, but it takes a long process of discovery for many of us to realise that.

I was a child of the 1990s and grew up in the era where global peace and prosperity seemed not just possible, but probable. Like many Jewish families in Britain, various of my family members described themselves as “socialist.” In reality, they were really social democrats (and monarchists!), but there was an unspoken sense that we had to remember that we came from poor immigrant tailors in the East End of London and should care about “the poor.”

My grandparents, while not immigrants, did grow up in East London and my paternal grandparents lived there for most of their lives; many of my forebears on both sides of the family were in the clothing industry. Politically, however, I’m really talking here about my father and his father, since they were the family members who talked about politics most. We were also strongly Zionist, which didn’t seem terribly significant at the time, but would become so in the coming decades.

In high school, I was an advanced student of economics, which demolished any sense I might have had about socialism working. At this point, I started defining myself as a liberal in a vague sense, blurring the line between classical liberalism and welfare liberalism as many people do.

I might have gone on with this unquestioningly, were it not for two things: One was my Zionism and a reasonable (and constantly growing) knowledge of Zionist/Israeli history, and the other was the repeated burnouts and depressions that characterised my 20s and 30s, culminating eventually in my autism diagnosis (in 2021) and my final realisation that I am not going to have the “classic” middle-class professional career, along with the status, income, and financial security that come with it.

The Second Intifada (which began when Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat turned down Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000 and lasted until 2005) saw the creation of the modern media narrative on Israel: that of Israeli brutality crushing innocent Palestinians for “no reason.”

The maintenance of this narrative required exaggerating the brutality Israeli military operations and ignoring Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties alongside various Israeli peace proposals, while simultaneously downplaying Palestinian violence and ignoring Palestinian rejectionism, against a sustained misrepresentation of Jewish and Israeli history to portray the Jews as interlopers in the region who have never been interested in peace, only conquest and expansion.

For the first time, I noticed discrepancies between what I saw in the mainstream media and what I knew from elsewhere, primarily from the Jewish press and general historical reading, but also from elsewhere. Occasionally, a mainstream journalist would say something that did not accord with the standard narrative as when CNN’s Anderson Cooper admitted in a blog post (but, tellingly, not on air) that Western journalists covering the Second Lebanon War were threatened by Hezbollah to show only the terror group’s narrative.

Sometimes, it would be a politician who told the truth, as when former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs revealed a serious Israeli peace proposal that the media had simply ignored. Once or twice, it was even Hamas. This led to the beginning of the unravelling of my trust in the mainstream media, albeit at first limited to Middle East reportage, which I assumed was a particularly bad area perhaps due to the complicated history of the region, to Western narratives of post-colonial guilt or simply antisemitism.

Simultaneously, I could see the anti-Iraq War movement being hijacked by the anti-Zionist movement, as if the two conflicts were somehow related. When I saw photos of anti-war protests in the newspaper, there seemed to be as many “Free Palestine” banners as anti-Iraq War ones. The implication, of course, was that Israel was dragging the West into “imperialist” wars in the Middle East and, as it was advanced by innuendo rather than argument most of the time, it was hard to counter. It’s hard to disprove a knowing wink.

Around this time, I started reading George Orwell’s essays seriously and understanding politics more seriously as about power and language, things that permeate culture. Orwell was a lot of things I’m not: socialist, atheist, anti-Zionist. Yet his understanding of the way totalitarianism operates, especially totalitarianism of the Far-Left kind (the kind building an alliance with Islamists over “Palestine”) seemed pertinent and helpful. His understanding of the corruptions that the Left is prone to, as well as his analysis of the abuses of political language, are still relevant and invaluable.

As time grew on, I became aware and irritated by the liberal hegemony of Western culture, without at first having the words to describe it. This was a slow process that unfolded alongside my political development. Whether it was the assumption in fiction that extreme individualism, in the sense of meeting the needs of the self, should always take priority over the needs of the community, or the increasingly lazy attacks on conservatives and religious people by “comedians,” and a general refusal of cultural creators to even try to understand people with a more conservative mindset, it seemed that a lot was being presumed rather than analysed — especially by people who prided themselves on their knowledge, open-mindedness, and tolerance.

It took me a very long time to realise that I was naming a political reality here rather than just a clash between my religious values and the secular culture of the arts world.

When the Financial Crisis hit in 2008, I became aware of the poor standard of presentation of economics in the media and by politicians. Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties were presented both by the politicians concerned and by a mostly Left-wing media (including the BBC) as two starkly different parties, one standing for fiscal austerity, the other for more public spending, but their manifesto spending promises seemed very similar to me.

Another telling moment came when reading the economist Paul Krugman’s book, “The Return of Depression Economics.” Krugman praised then-U.S. President Barack Obama for increasing state spending, and attacked British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Cameron and George Osbourne, for cutting it, but a simple internet search revealed that, even after these policies were implemented, British government spending was a significantly larger proportion of GDP than was the case in the United States.

That a Nobel Prize winning economist (and one with a newspaper column called, “The Conscience of a Liberal”) could make such an intellectually dishonest argument was deeply dispiriting, and it made me wonder what other misrepresentations were passing me by because of a lack of knowledge or expertise.

The argument being made on the Left was, at least implicitly, that the state can do almost anything; that it should do anything it can do; and that there could be no downside to its actions, because it helps people and reduces harm. The idea that welfare dependency destroys the soul, teaches learned helplessness, and creates perverse incentives to stay unwell or unemployed was barely even mentioned by this stage, even to shoot it down.

Then came 2016, “The Year of the Great Disruption.” I was a “reluctant Remainer” in the European Union referendum. When Leave won, I thought we should honour the vote and was disgusted and horrified at those in the technocratic class, both Right and Left, who wanted to use lawfare and legalistic politics to prevent a democratic vote being enacted. A similar thing happened with Donald Trump over the next eight years, as I moved from shock at his victory, to disgust as the years progressed with those who used lawfare and constitutional chicanery to stop him being re-elected.

Whatever trust I had in the mainstream media would be demolished in the years after 2020, as Western society seemed to simply unravel before our eyes, while those in power attempted to keep up appearances of normality.

Most absurd of all was the widespread, expert-sponsored ideas that the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter riots were legitimate and even praiseworthy during COVID lockdowns because “Racism is a public health issue.” The description of the riots in the media as “mostly peaceful” while fires raged in the background was a further indication of the corruption of the legacy media: politicised versions of “truth” that were no better than that in a dying dictatorship.

And then came October 7th, the Ground Zero for many Jews’ trust in Western institutions. Even before Israel had moved into Gaza, while there were still Hamas terrorists in Israeli territory, there was an outburst of mass antisemitism on the streets of the West; of media hatred; of Western politicians queueing up to accuse of Israel of “war crimes” with no proof; and of NGOs and the UN gaslighting the Jews about what happened, particularly about the mass rapes committed by Hamas. “Believe women” did not apply to Jews.

In the years to follow, there would be widespread, uncritical use of Hamas’ casualty figures by Western politicians, journalists, academics, and activists (the lines between these categories are no longer clear) even after they had been comprehensively disproven. Above all, this was the point where I moved from observing gaslighting by authority figures to being directly gaslit, alongside realising that the government and the police in Britain might very well let me be murdered, and would certainly let me be intimidated into hiding my Jewish identity in public, rather than risk Muslims rioting or even just not voting Labour.

Since then, it has felt, not like Western civilisation is about to collapse, but that it has already collapsed and we are standing among the ruins, wondering what to do next, not sure that we are even still alive, while all around people are trying to carry on as if nothing has changed. A number of episodes of the classic TV series “The Twilight Zone” revolve around people who, we discover at the end, are actually dead, but in denial of this. That is what Western civilisation has become: an uncanny realm, haunted by the ghosts of the living trying to carry on as before.

I had always read in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Jewish thought alongside some serious fiction and non-fiction (mostly history, Jewish, British and European), but now I wanted to delve more into these topics, alongside philosophy and politics.

As a result of these things, I gradually moved away from the liberalism that I had felt so sure of, initially to a feeling of political homelessness, which lasted a long time. Although I started voting for the Conservative Party around 2010, I didn’t really identify with them, and for a long time I groped around for alternative terms for my political beliefs. For a while, I borrowed George Orwell’s term, “Tory Anarchist,” and I still do sometimes use it as I do think it captures something about my thought.

Last year, I read Roger Scruton’s “How To Be A Conservative”; his argument is that conservatism is more a feeling more than an ideology, a feeling that we have inherited wonderful things from those who came before us that we have a duty to pass on to those who come after us. I realised that I have had this feeling all of my life, long before I started voting rightwards, and that it is part of the reason I was never entirely comfortable on the left. I love the past. I love old things. I love old quotes and old ideas. I want to preserve them, even if they aren’t of practical use to us, just for their own sake.

I also realised that the so-called Conservative Party in Britain has not actually wanted to conserve anything for decades. This made me realise that I have been a conservative for a very long time, even if the Conservative Party has not been.

Also important was reading Mary Harrington on rejecting the concept of progress. This seemed shocking at first, but made sense on reflection. I accept that there has been scientific and technological progress, but not political progress, certainly not in a linear sense of constant improvement as defined by the Left (albeit that they think it can be derailed temporarily by something they call “Fascism,” which means “things we don’t like”).

As for moral progress, after October 7th and much of the West’s reactions to it, I no longer believe that we have come far at all since ancient times. Basic concepts like the sanctity of human life have been eroded in the West, alongside personal responsibility and objective truth. In their place, the ancient hatred of antisemitism has returned, habitually disguised as “anti-Zionism.”

Similarly, the idea of innate human goodness, fundamental to liberalism, and other progressive ideologies have been disproven by the Holocaust; although the West has proceeded as if this were not the case, October 7th simply underlines the point. Seeing people parading through the streets of contemporary Western capitals calling for genocide of the Jews — in the name of “freedom,” “equality,” and “diversity” — is a stark illustration of the failures of modern liberal and progressive thought, and a failure to bring about the progress that they insist is part of the inevitable “arc of history.”

I wonder if it is even possible to be a Burkean conservative any more. Controversial British politician Enoch Powell said that a conservative is someone who thinks that institutions are wiser than the people who run them. However, all our institutions have been captured by the technocratic, progressive hegemony. Populism often feels more like a revolt against institutions than an effort to reform them, and revolts and revolutions are distinctly unconservative.

Conservatives favour evolutionary change. We are standing in the ruins and it is not clear what we can do to rebuild. The only way forward is restoration, but a restoration so drastic that it feels like building from scratch, albeit with old blueprints.

Is this actually conservatism, or something else entirely?

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