I’m about to say something that may not land well with my usual readers who are opposed to the State of Israel. But I think it’s true.

We often compare Israel to settler colonial states. Increasingly the comparisons have been made to fascist movements and states, even Nazi Germany.

I’d like to suggest a different comparison, which may help make better sense not of Israel itself but of its supporters, particularly the ones I know best, here in the United States. I’d compare those supporters to the true believers on the left, who supported the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s, often even afterward.

I’m not the first to make this comparison; Tony Judt did before his death in 2010 as well. Had he lived to see the lunatic levels of denialism that we now see among Israel’s defenders in August 2025, he might have felt that he was being too soft on those defenders back in the aughts, when he simply called them useful idiots, which is how the Soviet Union’s international defenders were referred to, even by leaders of the Soviet Union. I don’t know how useful these folks can be anymore; they seem more desperate and confused, exhibiting climate-change levels of denialism.

But where they do bear comparison with Stalinism’s loyal ranks on the left is in their absolute refusal to believe that their side could ever commit terrible atrocities. If you want to get a sense of how palpable and deep such denialism ran, read Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism, particularly where she describes the effects of Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations on her own family. It’s like what you hear about in families where all of the children, save one, deny a history of physical or sexual abuse by the parent.

What’s strange in the case of Israel’s defender denialists is that, first, we know from the twentieth century that movements of the oppressed can commit the most terrible crimes against humanity. We’ve seen it time and again. We have the knowledge; we have no excuse, absolutely no excuse, to think otherwise. Yet somehow Jewish defenders of Israel simply believe, against all the evidence, that Jews, because of their history of oppression, cannot do such things, that they are exempt from the facts of history.

Second, we have the documentary record of Israel’s crimes, where you have, as has been often noted, a genocide being livestreamed before our eyes. Now you might say that communists and leftists in the 1930s had the documentary record, too. But it was of a different sort. Yes, there were trial transcripts, but they required close reading to see the kind of torture and abuse that had extracted the confessions from the victims. The real documentary record was one that required hallucinations that would make AI blush: believing that the original leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution had truly betrayed the Bolshevik cause. Even so, in a movement that was based on the starkest differentiation between friends and enemies, where treachery was always a possibility and factionalist skullduggery always a reality, anything could seem possible, even betrayal by the movement’s original leaders.

What is the excuse of Israel’s defenders? What is the background noise that could possibly make sense of their denialism? To claim that what we see happening right before our eyes is not happening, that the testimony from international trustees of conscience and truth is not in fact conscientious or truthful, Israel’s defenders have to concoct a conspiracy so immense that it extends all the way from the United Nations to the leaders of Europe to the mainstream media to academic experts in the universities to the Jews themselves (at least among Israel’s critics). Hmm, where have we seen that kind of thinking before?

I began this post thinking that I was going to compare Israel’s defenders to the Soviet Union’s dead-enders. I wind up referencing the John Birch Society and McCarthyism. So maybe the parallels to the old radical right are really the most revealing, after all.