Progressive Benefits for Everyone — Except the Jews

The principles of progressivism, loudly invoked for everyone else, suddenly disappear the moment Jews might benefit from them.

In progressive politics, violence is strictly forbidden, except when you call for it against the Jews. (photo: Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.

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

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There is a rule in modern public life that has become impossible to ignore: Whenever Jews stand on the front line against tyranny, the tyrants somehow become the victims and the Jews become the villains.

It does not matter whether the enemy is Hamas, Hezbollah, or now the Iranian regime. The pattern repeats with almost mechanical precision. First comes the inversion of reality, then come the conspiracy theories, soon after comes the violence.

The latest confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran is proving once again how predictable this cycle has become.

Within days of the latest escalation, antisemitic incidents across the world surged. Synagogues in Toronto were targeted in shootings. An attacker drove a truck into a synagogue and Jewish school in suburban Detroit. A nail bomb was thrown at a demonstration in New York. A bomb attack struck a synagogue in Belgium. Flags were burnt and chants calling for genocide rang out across British cities. Across Europe and North America, Jewish communities once again find themselves on heightened alert, under attack, with a near 40-percent increase in antisemitic incidents since the latest phase of this conflict began.

Alongside the violence has come the rhetoric.

The conspiracy theories are depressingly familiar. Jews pushed the United States into war. Israel controls Western governments. Jewish money manipulates politics. The media is somehow “influenced.” The words change, the accusations and the tropes never do.

Antisemitism is an old pattern; it has survived for centuries because it is uniquely adaptable. It reshapes itself to reflect whatever the world most fears at any given moment.

In the 1930s, when economic collapse gripped Europe, Jews were cast as the shadowy bankers manipulating global finance. During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda reinvented the same hatred, portraying Zionism as a colonial conspiracy at the heart of Western imperialism. In the age of globalisation, Jews were accused of secretly controlling international institutions and media.

Now, as the Islamic Republic emerges as one of the most destabilising forces in the world, the pattern has simply adapted again. Those confronting the regime are transformed into the villains and once again, the Jews stand accused.

Antisemitism has always worked through inversion, turning aggressors into victims and victims into aggressors. Once again the pattern is repeating itself in real time.

All of this obscures a simple truth: The Iranian regime is not the victim, and Iran is not merely another state engaged in a regional dispute. It is a regime that openly calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state, a regime that funds terrorist proxies across the Middle East, a regime that brutally represses its own citizens, supplies weapons to Russia’s war machine, and has spent decades attempting to destabilise democracies far beyond its borders.

To pretend this is morally ambiguous is to abandon reality.

This is not a complicated conflict between equal actors. It is a confrontation between a revolutionary theocracy that glorifies violence and the democratic nations attempting to contain it.

One might imagine that those willing to confront such a regime would be welcomed. Instead, and because that confrontation comes in part from the only Jewish state, the response has been depressingly familiar.

Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran and Israel were not enemies. Iran was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, dating back more than two and a half thousand years to the time of Cyrus the Great. Jewish life in Iran existed long before the Islamic Republic and its ideology that now dominates Iran.

The hostility we see today is not the product of ancient rivalry between peoples. It is the product of a revolutionary regime that seized a country, imposed a theology of permanent conflict, and turned hostility toward Israel into one of the central pillars of its identity.

That distinction matters. Because when we speak about Iran, we are too often speaking about the regime while forgetting the people who have been forced to live under it. These are the same people who only weeks ago watched thousands of their fellow citizens murdered by the regime’s security forces during protests demanding freedom. These are the same people who have endured nearly half a century of repression, corruption, and religious dictatorship.

Yet as the regime has come under pressure, something remarkable has happened: Iranians across the world have celebrated arm in arm with Jews. They have defended Jewish sites of worship, waved Israeli flags alongside their own, they have marched openly for democracy. They have spoken with courage about their desire to see their country free again.

The Iranian people, it turns out, understand perfectly well who their enemy is.

One cannot say the same for many in the West, who for years have built Western progressive politics on a simple moral framework of self-determination.

Oppressed peoples deserve self-determination. Colonised peoples deserve their own land. Those living under tyranny deserve liberation. It is a principle applied passionately across the world — for the Palestinians, for indigenous communities, for countless national movements deemed to have been historically wronged.

However, there has always been one consistent exception: the Jews.

For decades, large parts of the progressive movement have insisted that Jewish self-determination alone is illegitimate. Zionism, they argue, is racism; Israel is a colonial project. Jews are cast not as a people returning to their historic homeland but as foreign interlopers. This framing has always served a single purpose: to delegitimise the existence of the only Jewish state.

Now that same intellectual framework is colliding with an inconvenient reality. The Iranian people themselves want liberation and those seeking to liberate them are Jews. Recognising that fact would require acknowledging that weakening the regime which has stolen their country could bring them closer to that freedom. This, in turn, would mean admitting Israel and the United States, in confronting that regime, may in fact be enabling the very self-determination progressives claim to champion.

For many, that is a conclusion they cannot bring themselves to reach — so the logic flips. Instead of supporting the Iranian people, they condemn the pressure being applied to the regime that oppresses them.

We have seen this same moral blindness elsewhere.

Since October 7th, many of these same voices have refused to call on Hamas to lay down its arms and return Gaza to the Palestinian people it rules through fear — a leadership that siphons billions in aid while its citizens suffer and its leaders live comfortably abroad. Acknowledging that reality would complicate a narrative in which Israel must always be cast as the villain, and so the same pattern repeats itself again.

The principle of self-determination, loudly invoked everywhere else, suddenly disappears the moment Jews might benefit from it. For many in the West, self-determination is a sacred principle unless the people seeking it are Jews.

This dynamic is not confined to activists or demonstrations. It is increasingly visible in mainstream politics itself.

In the United States, more than 50 sitting Democratic politicians recently voted against declaring Iran a state sponsor of terror. Pause for a moment on what that means. A regime that funds Hezbollah, arms Hamas, sponsors militias across the Middle East, openly calls for the annihilation of Israel, and has targeted and murdered thousands of American troops, yet dozens of elected officials in the world’s leading democracy felt comfortable voting against formally recognising that reality.

The question is not simply how they reached that position; the question is what makes them so confident they can take it publicly. Confidence like that does not emerge in a vacuum. It reflects the political environment around them and, in many cases, the voting base they believe they must appeal to.

Britain faces its own version of this problem. From the Green Party leadership to the remnants of Jeremy Corbyn’s political movement, anti-Zionism has increasingly become the respectable language through which antisemitic ideas re-enter public discourse. A parliamentary petition circulating in Westminster now calls for a “public enquiry into pro-Israel influence on politics and democracy” — by implication, Jewish money influencing British politics. The petition has already gathered more than 100,000 signatures.

Different century, same libel, same trope.

This is part of a wider issue in Britain, a country where a dangerous ambiguity has long been allowed to fester. Over the past 18 months, the British government itself has confirmed that more than 20 Iranian-backed terror plots have been foiled by UK security services. Twenty plots against British Jewry, twenty plots against British citizens, not rumours or hypotheticals — and these are just the ones our government is willing to share.

Active operations planned on British soil by a regime that openly calls for Israel’s destruction and funds terrorist proxies across the globe. Yet when Israel and the United States act against that regime, Britain’s response has been hesitant, questioning the legality of strikes and offering no meaningful involvement even as Western bases in the region, including our own, come under attack.

The domestic consequences are already visible. Vigils have been held in London and Manchester mourning Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding leader of the Iranian regime. Demonstrations praising the regime have taken place in London, Manchester, and Birmingham.

At one such protest the Israeli flag was burned while crowds chanted for the death of Jewish soldiers. To cap it all off, just last week, 10 people were arrested in North West London in connection with an alleged Iranian plot targeting local Jewish communities.

Extremism flourishes where it senses hesitation; it grows where it smells weakness through implicit, complicit, explicit support.

We ignore this so evident pattern at our peril. First come the conspiracy theories, then come the demonstrations, soon after come the attacks. History has shown this pattern too many times for us to pretend it is accidental. What begins with the demonisation of the Jewish state rarely ends there. It spills outward, into synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish communities which suddenly find themselves paying the price for a conflict they did not start.

This pattern has been playing out for all to see since October 7th; this current phase of the conflict with Iran has reinvigorated the hate which fuels it.

The truth we must be willing to say is that the Iranian people know who their enemy is. They have lived under the regime’s brutality, buried their dead, and risked everything to demand the freedom the regime has stolen from them. Israel knows who its enemy is. For decades, it has listened to the threats of those who openly promise its destruction and watched their proxies spread violence across the region.

What is far less certain is whether the democratic world still recognises the same reality. Because this moment demands more than diplomatic caution or political convenience. History has rarely judged kindly those who could not tell the difference between tyranny and those willing to confront it.

The question is whether the West still remembers the difference.

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