The Progressive Cowardice of the Left on Israel

How modern progressives excuse Islamist nationalism while attacking Jewish self-determination.

Since its founding in 1948, the State of Israel has faced relentless criticism and rejection, particularly from many Muslim-majority countries. Among the most vocal is Pakistan, which has refused to recognise Israel, banned travel there, and cast its full support behind the Palestinian cause. Many Pakistanis see Israel as an illegitimate colonial project that displaced the Palestinians from their historic homeland. Yet they rarely reflect on their own country’s strikingly similar origins.

Pakistan itself was created only a year before Israel, in 1947, through a violent and traumatic partition of British India. The entire basis for Pakistan’s independence rested on the Two-Nation Theory, the belief that Muslims and Hindus could never peacefully coexist in a single state. Led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League argued that Muslims would be permanently dominated under a Hindu-majority democracy, and only a Muslim-majority homeland could guarantee their religious and cultural rights. In the end, British India was split, producing one of the largest forced migrations in human history, with between ten and fifteen million people uprooted and as many as two million killed in communal massacres.

Compare this with Israel, where the Zionist movement argued that Jews needed their own homeland after centuries of brutal persecution in both Christian and Muslim lands, culminating in the Holocaust. Jewish communities feared permanent vulnerability as minorities, and sought national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. When the United Nations voted to partition the land into Jewish and Arab states, conflict followed, displacing around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs.

In both cases, a religiously defined group feared domination by a larger population and demanded and achieved an independent homeland. In both cases, huge and tragic population displacements followed. Yet while Pakistan’s right to exist is broadly accepted, Israel’s is continually questioned.

Zionism is often singled out as racist or colonial, but pan-Islamic identity is rarely challenged, even though Pakistan was explicitly built as a Muslim homeland and is defined by its constitution as an Islamic Republic with Islam woven into its legal system. By contrast, Israel does not define citizenship based on religious faith. Israeli citizenship is available to Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, and others, with around 20 percent of Israeli citizens being Arabs, most of whom are Muslim. The Jewish identity of Israel is cultural and historical rather than a legal imposition of religious faith. Those who accuse Israel of being a religiously supremacist state might consider Pakistan’s constitutional commitment to Islam, which is far more exclusive.

Pakistan’s own human rights record also raises uncomfortable questions. In 1971, the Pakistani military tried to crush Bangladesh’s independence movement, killing anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million people in a campaign marked by systematic rape, mass displacement, and the targeting of civilians. Pakistan opposed Bangladesh’s freedom on the grounds that the Bengali Muslim population should remain under Pakistani rule, despite their distinct culture and language. Millions of Bengali Muslims were victims of this brutality, yet there was no mass campaign across the Muslim world to boycott or delegitimise Pakistan, no talk of dissolving the state, and no international movement to isolate it. The irony is even starker today, when weekend protests across British cities are filled with demonstrators waving Palestinian flags in solidarity with Palestinians, yet no one waves Bangladeshi flags to remember or stand with the victims of Pakistan’s own genocidal violence. That selective memory reveals how Pakistan’s religious nationalism is forgiven while Jewish national self-determination is uniquely demonised. It exposes a double standard where solidarity is only granted when it fits a convenient anti-Israel narrative, ignoring other Muslim victims who suffered far worse at the hands of a fellow Muslim state. This clearly shows how some lives are worth more than others, and it’s ok but only when they are the ones doing it. When Hamas murder their own, that’s fine. That’s ok! Just not when someone else does it. It’s not a genocide when Bangladeshis are murdered, but it is when Palestinians are murdered. Why is that? 

This blind spot extends beyond the Muslim world. In Britain, left-wing protesters frequently champion the Palestinian cause while being stunningly ignorant of the history of Pakistan or the bloody partitions that accompanied its birth. Many chant slogans condemning Zionism while saying nothing about Pakistan, oblivious to the fact that Pakistan’s founding logic was virtually identical. Their selective rage betrays a troubling undercurrent of antisemitism, where hatred of Jews is masked as anti-Zionism while Muslim nationalism is excused or even celebrated. There is also a wider fear at play: many on the left appear terrified to criticise or question Islam at all. They show a remarkable willingness to attack Christians and to condemn Jews in liberal democracies that safeguard their right to protest, yet hesitate to challenge Islamic political identity or violence committed in its name. This fear has even extended to the way some left-leaning institutions covered up or downplayed the Rochdale grooming gang scandal rather than confront uncomfortable truths about certain groups abusing vulnerable girls. At the same time, they show no such hesitation in promoting conspiracies about Jewish power or Zionist influence, apparently feeling no cultural or social risk in attacking Jewish communities.

This pattern is not new. Historically, left-wing and Marxist movements have repeatedly formed alliances with religious or Islamist movements in the name of anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism, ignoring that these religious forces are often fundamentally opposed to progressive values. Many leftists fail to see that once Islamists take power, they frequently turn on those same Marxists and liberals who supported them. After Iran’s 1979 revolution, for example, leftist parties like the Tudeh were initially courted by the Islamists but then systematically crushed once Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated power. In Egypt, secular and left-wing parties helped overthrow monarchy and colonial structures, only to be later persecuted under Islamist or authoritarian regimes. These patterns expose an inconsistency in leftist thought: if their worldview is based on secularism, women’s equality, and minority rights, why do they so eagerly back religious nationalist causes, like Hamas, whose social values are utterly opposed to these ideals? 

If protecting a vulnerable religious community justified Pakistan’s creation in 1947, then the same logic supports the creation of Israel in 1948. If you accept Pakistan as a state, then logically you should accept Israel as a state as well. Of course, none of this means Israel’s modern governments or policies are beyond criticism, just as Pakistan’s government should be scrutinised. But denying Israel’s right to exist while accepting Pakistan’s is the clearest example of a political double standard and antisemitism. 

If human rights truly matter, then Pakistan’s abuses deserve the same global outrage as Israel’s. If self-determination is a principle worth defending, then Jews have as much right to it as Muslims. We cannot build peace on selective outrage and contradictory moral frameworks. Only consistent principles, human rights for all, self-determination for all, and an honest reckoning with every nation’s flaws, will build a fairer path toward coexistence and peace.