ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the rise of anti-Zionism in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. Immediately after the war, members of the New Left spontaneously reacted by denouncing Israel as a ‘bridgehead of imperialism’ but without rejecting its right to exist. The subsequent rise of anti-Zionism was not, as some accounts have argued, an ‘antisemitism in disguise’. Nor was it, as others have argued, the consequence of recognising the rights of the Palestinians. It rested, rather, on an appraisal of Israel's ‘basic character’ as imperialist and devoid of any true national identity to provide it with legitimacy. The chapter argues that this position was in part founded on reviving the Left's traditional rejection of Jewish identity. More important, however, is that while the New Left continued the belief that Israel and ‘the West’ were intimately connected, they reinterpreted and reversed the character of this connection.
