I Was a Swedish Leftist — Now I Stand With Israel
How is it that a Swedish goy, once a left-wing activist, now dedicates his life to explaining the Middle East, Israel, and antisemitism to a Swedish and Western audience? Here is a short essay about losing one’s political religion and letting go of prejudice.
The Swedish Left
I grew up attending boarding schools in both Sweden and England. Like so many from that environment—I felt that this world was stifling. There was the bullying and a hierarchy where the older students could punish the younger students, but above all there was a conformity and uniformity in bourgeois thinking. People looked down on common people, mocked the school’s cleaners and called them wenches (subbor), and were so convinced that they would inherit the earth and everything in it that snobbery and pitiless mockery were the norm. The Swedish upper class is much worse than the English, where the gentle humour and the dedication to politeness files off the hard edges of class politics. Not so in Sweden. I loathed it. I fled to what I believed was the opposite: the punk scene and the radical left. I joined the Swedish left in the late 1990s.
Perhaps every generation of political activists has its own soundtrack and ideology. In Sweden each generation had its flavour. In the 1970s there was the singer songwriting, the flares and fifty shades of Marxism; in the 1990s there was punk, hardcore, and anarchism. The band that kicked off the radical wave in Sweden was Refused from Umeå. With their “I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism,” they set the tone for my generation — though left-wing radicalism had been present in Swedish punk since punk was born in the days of Ebba Grön in the late 1970s. There is something special about having a soundtrack. A surge of feelings. A sense of belonging crafted from the putty of pure emotion. A cry for freedom. Sweden in the 1990s wasn’t oppressive, but perhaps rigid, conformist, and, to me, culturally tied to the bullying and class hatred that existed in the boarding school world. Questioning everything was our way of breaking new ground, or so we thought. We also, partly, looked down on the previous generation of activists, since it was no longer possible to be a doctrinaire Communist after the fall of the Soviet Union, or a strict Maoist after Tiananmen Square. So we claimed to be going back to the point where everything went wrong — the split between libertarian and authoritarian socialism. Lenin was out, Kropotkin was in. There’s a logic to it, and of course I haven’t lost the view that freedom is better than dogma. Authoritarian socialism in the spirit of Mao and Stalin was, of course, a horror show on the grandest possible scale. But the non-existence of any anarchist thriving utopia after a century and a half of these ideas being out there is… Concerning.
The Tyranny of Groupthink
What I didn’t understand was that when you’re in a tight knit group or a closed environment— such as both a boarding school or a radical political group — you are especially vulnerable to conformity in thinking and group pressure. It is easy to believe that the rest of the world “doesn’t get it.” Just like the bullying older students who claimed that the rabble “didn’t understand” the beauty of violent, often sexually degrading initiation rituals and calling the cleaners “wenches”, the normies “didn’t understand” violent demonstrations, the intoxicating rush of a riot, or the good of humanity you represented by pouring sugar into the tank of a cement mixer meant to build new roads. Indeed, normies were so clueless they didn’t even realize that the best way to counter Nazi skinheads was to confront them violently in the streets. In that sense, I hadn’t broken free from groupthink at all — I had just found another clique, far superior to the plebs. I remember reading only a handful of leftist magazines. This was long before the internet was widely used, yet we were fully capable of creating beautiful filter bubbles all on our own. Because, you know — normies just don’t get it.
The Gothenburg Riots of 2001
During the protests against the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, I helped organize some of the most radical initiatives. At one point in the protest, I threw one pathetic stone at the police — the only time I’ve ever done so in my unglamorous career as a revolutionary. The stone bounced off the asphalt — powerlessly, pointlessly, impotently. Being a skinny vegan somehow didn’t endow me with the kind of strong throwing arm the situation perhaps required. This was the height of the “summit protest” era, following the major demonstrations against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 2000. The summit protests were symptomatic of their time. The left was still regrouping a decade after the fall of communism. The slogans were a potpourri of EU-criticism, vague internationalism, nostalgia for the Swedish welfare state, and utopianism. A movement without a clear cause has the dangerous potential lash out with its wrath in any direction.
For a theoretical underpinning, from the universities, came postcolonial studies, bearing a message adapted from Marxism. It was Frantz Fanon’s world of colonial powers and colonized people. But there’s a problem with this kind of theory. Fanon, writing in the 1960s, saw a world breaking free from colonialism, with wars of liberation, like the one he was describing in Algeria, raging at its bloodstained apex. But four decades later, at the turn of the millennium, there were hardly any actual European colonies left in the world, so one was forced to turn one’s gaze to the one place where this dynamic was supposedly still alive. Israel.
The Left Rediscovers Palestine
The Second Intifada had broken out almost a year before the protests in Gothenburg. Many of my leftist friends travelled to the West Bank as so-called “international observers.” What such an observer actually turned out to be was someone housed by Palestinian guerrilla groups, thereby receiving the most confrontational perspective on the conflict. During the Second Intifada, they saw checkpoints and soldiers deployed everywhere in the West Bank. Naturally, this was perceived as colonialism by those who had studied colonialism — let us remember that these people, and I along with them, also saw Swedish police officers as the obvious enemy in the vague struggle they wanted to wage.
These Western activists were then used as human shields in front of stone-throwing demonstrations. The Palestinians knew that the IDF would hesitate to confront Westerners, even at the expense of losing the ability arrest stone-throwers. This dynamic may have taught Hamas a thing or two — not long afterward they began building command centers beneath hospitals. But what took me many years to understand is that this also revealed something fundamentally Western about Israel’s relationship to these demonstrations. How do you handle violent protests? Other countries in the Middle East would respond differently. We know how they react to demonstrations —because ten years later the Arab Spring broke out. Assad’s forces and Gaddafi’s forces simply fired into the crowds when they felt that protests threatened their power. You cannot be an “international observer” when the other side shows complete disinterest in whether you live or die. The very democratic values of Israel is a weakness to exploit for groups like Hamas. That’s why they build a tunnel system under Gaza where no civilians are allowed to take shelter, that’s why the command centres and firing positions are built into schools and mosques — so that civilians will die and Israel will be blamed. When democracy meets death cults, the options may stand between losing part of your humanity or losing the war.
None of this is obvious. And of course, my friends came back to Sweden filled with righteous anger, more convinced than ever that the conflict fit perfectly into Fanon’s world of colonisers and the colonised. No matter how many buses and cafés in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the “resistance” blew up, the only possible interpretation was that the Israelis were the villains and the Palestinians the innocent. The media coverage — then as now, especially from the left — had one dominant perspective: the oppressed and the oppressors.
All my role models on the Swedish left wrote different versions of the following text, a string of superlatives about Israel: “A settler-colonial apartheid state that expelled the Palestinians and now carries out a brutal occupation and genocide in Gaza — Israel is just like Nazi Germany.” You had to say it all in one breath, and don’t you dare to stop and think, so the hypnosis can kick in at full force. I could not be unaffected by this at the turn of the millennium, I had no antibodies. The situation of Palestine felt so obviously unjust to my leftist heart. I accepted completely the narrative of evil versus good. I let myself be lulled into the hypnosis. I even attended one single Palestinian demonstration. I must say it was disturbing. Bearded men and furious old women wailed with hatred. It was so unsettling that I didn’t return. Intellectually, I didn’t throw myself in the sewer of anti-Israel rhetoric completely, but I confess I dipped my toes into the sludge. In this spirit, I wrote one such article in an anarchist paper under a pseudonym. Just like the stone I threw, and the demonstration I went to, so it was with the article — something that felt so right in the moment, within the worldview, I now see all of them as flirting with some of the darkest forces of human nature.
However, that the entire debate, the whole black-and-white framing, is permeated by antisemitism — with the Jews as child murderers and the Palestinians as the suffering Christ child — was something that took decades to fully grasp.
Two Moments That Changed My View of the Conflict
Then something unexpected happened. While attending a circus school in Bristol, I fell in love with an Israeli woman. She was left-wing like me — but belonged to the Zionist left, which at the time I saw as a contradiction in terms. How could anyone on the left support Zionism? The ultimate colonial project! The very symbol of oppression.
To resolve this paradox, I placed myself halfway between my ideals and my love. This meant that my version was still correct, and hers was the result of “false consciousness.” In other words, I truly believed that my girlfriend had simply been brainwashed by her upbringing. Surely there couldn’t be anything about the conflict that a Swedish leftist who had never been to the Middle East didn’t already understand. So the conflict, in essence, was about uncovering the “brainwashing” and speaking the “truth.” After all, I had read an awful lot of articles using those very unpleasant words to describe Israel. Even a couple of books! The breathtakingly arrogant attitude of it still makes me blush.
The first time I visited Israel, my image of the conflict was shaken by two events. First, my girlfriend took me to visit a friend — a peace activist. The two of them, my girlfriend and this woman, had previously gone to Gaza together to make a documentary. For me, from my outside perspective, she was an ally in her role as a peace activist. I expected her to spew venom at Israel, the occupation and the IDF. She described a difficult situation in which Israel had indeed made many mistakes. In my eagerness to agree with her, I said something ignorant and patronizing — I don’t remember exactly what — but her response still makes me cringe to this day:
We can’t just say that the Palestinians are the good guys and the Israelis the bad guys and then go have hummus.
I felt stupid then, and I still feel stupid when I remember it. Because yes, this is exactly how large parts of the international left see the conflict. Goodies and baddies? Seriously? How old are you people? Even at university level, you are taught — with ever more unforgiving clarity — about the good and the wicked. It’s one of the problems the Israeli left has with understanding the international left. Surely they can’t really be this dumb? Er… I’m really sorry. Yes.
The second moment that shook my worldview was on Rabin Memorial Day — perhaps the most important day in the calendar of the peace movement, held in November. It was a year after the Second Lebanon War, and David Grossman gave a speech. He’s a heavyweight of the Israeli left, and my girlfriend translated every word. It was a powerful speech about peace, made ever more gut-wrenchingly moving because his son had died in combat with Hezbollah in Lebanon less than a year before. Grossman was furious at the government, at the war, at the failure to achieve a two-state solution and the lack of priority given to peace. And then he too said something I hadn’t expected:
”Israel is a miracle.” David Grossman (and hundreds of others, but here, Grossman)
For me, the nation-state was something inherently suspect — and the Israeli nation-state in particular seemed more or less like a criminal enterprise. So why was this great left-wing intellectual calling Israel a miracle? That kind of language — nationalism, the nation as something unique and precious, the notion of ”a people” separated from other peoples, the myth that is the sacral glue that holds it all together — wasn’t that exactly the kind of nonsense that we on the left were supposed to fight? With sarcasm and cynicism.
Moving to Israel
After that, I moved to Israel, married my then-girlfriend, and started a family. But that nagging feeling remained — the sense of being on the wrong side of history. “Oppression” is a powerful word. And what of the settlements? What of the West Bank? What of the blockade of Gaza? What of Netanyahu? What of the messianic right? All of this concerned me and kept me anchored to the left. For democracy and secularism. For peace wherever it is possible.
However, for the Israeli left, a two-state solution is just as much about establishing real borders as it is about empathy for the Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank. You can see why. Believe me, the last thing I want is for my children to patrol the refugee camp in Jenin — or Gaza. However, there may not be a choice we can make by ourselves. In Gaza and the West Bank, the schools, TV, mosques, politicians, UNRWA and terror groups are teaching Palestinian children that their goal is for Israel to disappear and for them to one day “return” to villages that vanished some three generations ago. This fuels hatred and makes peaceful solutions ever more distant. Like Grossman, I too wish for eventual Palestinian independence — two states for two peoples. If the Palestinian people could transform their national ambition from a fantasy of “returning” to granddad’s farm into a desire for a real state — then I believe it is our duty to help make that happen. The risk right now, or rather, the certainty, is that such a state would become a base for terror, with suicide bombers and rockets as its only export — a repeat of what happened when Israel withdrew from Gaza. On this point, the Israeli right, is correct. Oh, how I wish it weren’t so.
7th of October
On October 7, the concepts finally became, terrifyingly, crystal clear. The orgy of violence. The display of mass murder, rape, and kidnappings — especially targeting Israel’s most peace-loving kibbutzim — changed the game. Not least because Jews know this. This is the SS. This is the Cossack attack. This is the Farhud. Beyond the shock of the event itself came the shock to the narrative I had once believed in. My former hatred of Israel had been diluted by the fact that I now lived here, but it wasn’t until after October 7 that I truly dared to rethink my fundamental understanding of the conflict. I still, until that day, believed that “oppression” was the main, fundamental issue. I had to reevaluate. That belief is rooted in the fundamentally antisemitic idea that Israel is “the evil state”, “the oppressor”. Helped along by this misunderstanding, this blatant incitement, this ambient hatred, the Western left — and formerly I myself among them — came to misunderstand the actual meaning of words carelessly bandied about in the Middle East discourse.
The left may imagine that “Free Palestine” refers to a state in the West Bank and Gaza. For most Middle Easterners, Free Palestine refers to getting rid of the Jewish state. Indeed, Hamas weren’t even shouting “Free Palestine” — they were shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they murdered Jews. Hamas’s goal is not state-building but the imperialism of Islam, the dream of a caliphate with a Jew-free Palestine at its core. When the Arab world speaks of “oppression of Palestinians,” it is not about this or that Israeli policy that makes life difficult for Palestinians. At its core, “oppression” refers to the humiliation of living in a non-Muslim country in the heart of the Middle East. When many Muslims speak of settlements, they mean Haifa and Tel Aviv just as much as Ariel. When they use words like settlers or settler-colonialists about Israelis, it is not a useful academic analysis — it is the same vein as calling the Jews a cancer in the Middle East, a foreign disease in the heart of the Arab, Muslim-majority body politic. In other words, cockroaches.
In this all-encompassing narrative, it doesn’t matter who the prime minister of Israel is, it doesn’t matter which groups are settlers or what they think or do. Israel is evil until Israel is gone. This “anti-colonial freedom”, will be born in an apocalyptic bloodbath, all beneath the smiling beard of the Caliph.
No thanks. My people are on the other side.
Am Israel Chai
Today, I am proud to be an Israeli citizen. I may disagree with the current government on many issues, but I am proud to live in the Middle East’s only democracy – the pluralism, the tolerance, the equal rights to all citizens. Even in times of war. Especially in times of war.
Ideologically, Israel – like other frontier states where democracy fights tyranny and terror, such as Ukraine – have much to teach the international left. Zionism is, at its core, a state-building project, the fulfillment of the dream of a land where the Jewish people can find refuge. This means that the role of the army and loyalty to the state cannot simply be dismissed – it is the guardian of the framework where democracy, tolerance, and prosperity can be built. No, the settlements do not help, which is why the Israeli left opposes them. We are not blind. We know that military rule in the West Bank can be unjust, we know that war is cruel – it is a natural consequence of the army trying to govern a people who hate us. We’re just not sure how to get out of this without more war and more bloodshed, given the ideology of the Palestinians.
Israel – including the Israeli left – thinks in terms of civilization versus barbarism. We quite literally face barbarian incursions into our land – there is no other way to think about it.
Because David Grossman was right: Israel is a miracle. First and foremost for the Jewish people. But in a broader sense, all democracies are miracles. They are the only systems proven to be able to create freedom, security, prosperity, and tolerance.
Without them, we have nothing.
עם ישראל חי
—
This text was previously written on my Substack, but after thousands saw it I thought TOI readers should get the chance to see it too.
