Yesterday was the 68th anniversary of Israel’s independence. 8.5million people, of whom 75% are Jewish, are a testament to a seven decade old social experiment in making the desert blossom and under the most testing of geopolitical conditions.

The country has much to be proud about since its establishment in 1948. The ‘start up economy’ of the past 20 years or so is just one example. I can also point out how the diversity of those people who officially opened the annual independence celebrations is a tribute to how Israel tries to integrate all comers. And in the past year alone, aid teams from the Holy Land have been sent to Japan, Ecuador, parts of flooded Britain and even the burnt prairies in Canada.

For all that and more, the country has its enemies. I am not just referring to Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran and many Palestinian groupings. Tom Gross, a veteran analyst of the Middle East, circulated two articles that observe just why much of the “left wing” loves to hate Israel. To quote Joel Braunold:

The utter refusal of the hard left in Britain to accept that anti-Semitism can morph from the traditional eugenics into parts of modern-day anti-Zionist discourse stems from its rejection of Jews as a people.

Just Britain? Only the hard left? And this ideological debate only started up since 1948?

My late grandfather was born in Poland. Well read and educated, I always loved to investigate the wonders of his library. One of the slightly unusual set of books was published by Gollancz in the 1930s and called “The Left Book Club“. Many of the writers went on to become ‘big stars’ in the British Labour movement, such as George Orwell and Prime Minister Attlee.

For some unfathomed reason, I inherited some of the titles. These include “The spirit and structure of German Fascism” (1937) and “The Hitler terror”. While both mention the Jews, and the former title was written shortly after the Nuremberg Laws were passed, neither deals with the subject in depth. According to the authors, Hitler’s key problem was with the proletariat only. Thus and to simplify for reasons of brevity, if the Jews united with the workers, the issues of these religionists would melt away.

Well, not then, and not now. As Braunold went on to discuss, even over the past decade the National Union of Students, a continuous bastion of left wing beliefs, has struggled to simply say; “The Holocaust was the deliberate mass murder of Jews, which we condemn”. So much for unity.

Sadly, my university days are a long way in the past. When campaigning on campuses, we would argue that the students of today will become the political leaders of tomorrow. More importantly, they would carry with them the arguments forged in student bars. We did not realise how accurate our prophecy was to become.

There is nothing wrong in being left of centre. I always thought that whatever a person’s strand of socialism, it directed you to accepting the views and beliefs of others as equal. What appears to have happened is that too many on the left demanded and still demand that this form of justice replaces Judaism, more than any other religion, a viewpoint which allows it to justify why “anti-Semitism can morph from the traditional eugenics into parts of modern-day anti-Zionist discourse.”

68 years on and Israel is still proving that there is another truth.