For nearly twenty years, the British radical left wasn't just my politics—it was my entire life, my social circle, my identity. If there was a picket line anywhere in London, a climate blockade on the M25, or a counter-demo against some far-right marchers in Whitehall, I was there. And I wasn’t just rocking up to march; I was usually the bloke with the megaphone, the one drafting the press releases on a battered laptop at 2 AM, or coordinating the stewards so we didn't all get nicked.
I spent years deep in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), doing the weekly paper sales and living on a steady diet of Marxist theory. I was heavily involved in Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), genuinely believing we were building a broad coalition against bigotry. Then, when the climate stuff started feeling more urgent, I threw myself into Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil (JSO). I’ve been arrested. I’ve sat in the back of police vans, shivering in a cells-issue tracksuit, completely convinced I was one of the good guys saving the world.
Back then, "Zionist" was just a swear word to us. It meant colonialist, racist, oppressor. End of story. No nuance allowed.
Then October 7th happened.
What followed that morning didn't just rattle me; it completely blew my world apart. It forced me to look at a massive, ugly blind spot right in the middle of the spaces I called home. It took months of misery and isolation, but I eventually came to a conclusion I never thought I’d reach: that Jewish people have a fundamental right to self-determination in their ancestral home.
I became a Zionist because the left I loved completely lost its basic human empathy.
Part 1: The Left I Knew—And What We Conveniently Ignored
To understand why I walked away, you have to understand how we looked at the world. In the SWP, everything was viewed through a rigid, binary lens. You had the oppressed and the oppressors. The colonizers and the colonized. It’s a very simple, comforting way to view reality, but it means you have to ignore anything that doesn't fit the neat little boxes. Israel was always boxed as a Western imperialist project, and the Palestinians were the ultimate symbol of resistance.
When I was organizing with Stand Up To Racism, we talked a massive game about protecting minorities. We marched against Islamophobia, we stood with refugees, we fought the fash. But there was always a weird, unspoken condition when it came to Jewish people. Antisemitism was only real to us if it came from some skinhead waving a St. George’s cross. If Jewish students on campus said they felt terrified during "Israeli Apartheid Week," we just rolled our eyes. We muttered about "bad-faith actors" trying to shut down free speech.
We used to chant "anti-Zionist, not antisemitic" like a mantra. It was our get-out-of-jail-free card. It let us feel morally superior while completely ignoring what British Jews were actually telling us about their lives.
When I drifted into Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, I honestly thought I was leaving some of that heavy sectarian baggage behind. I wanted to focus on keeping the planet inhabitable. But because these groups are so decentralized, the same hard-left factions quickly filled the vacuum. Suddenly, local JSO meetings weren't just about stopping oil licenses; they were about "smashing global capitalism" and signing onto statements about geopolitics that half the people in the room didn't understand.
I just kept my head down. I didn't want to rock the boat. I told myself the broader fight for the planet mattered more than arguing over a few lines in a newsletter.
Part 2: The Day the Mirror Shattered
On October 7, 2023, I woke up early and checked my phone. The first videos out of the music festival near Re'im were already hitting Twitter. Over the next few hours, the scale of the horror became clear. The deliberate slaughter of teenagers, the systematic sexual violence, families being burned alive in their homes in the kibbutzim, toddlers taken hostage. It made me physically sick.
I remember thinking, Right. This is the turning point. We’re humanists on the left. We care about human rights and international law. We’ll condemn this absolute barbarism outright, even while we keep fighting for a Palestinian state.
I opened the activist Signal chats to see how we were going to respond.
There was no horror. There was no grief. There was literally people cheering.
I saw comrades—people I’d shared pints with, people I’d been in cells with—calling the massacre a "historic victory for the resistance." The SWP put out lines basically saying the victims had it coming because of the occupation. That very weekend, while people were still trying to identify bodies, the WhatsApp groups were buzzing with logistics for a massive rally in London. Not to mourn, but to celebrate.
I tried raising it at a local organizing meeting. I asked if we could include just one sentence in our materials condemning the murder of civilians. The room went totally cold. Someone sighed and told me I was "falling for Western media propaganda." Another person started lecturing me on Frantz Fanon and told me, with a straight face, that "decolonization isn't a dinner party."
It was like a slap in the face. The movement I’d given my entire adult life to didn't actually give a toss about human rights. It was all just a game of team sports. If an atrocity was committed by a group they labeled "anti-imperialist," then the victims stopped being humans. They were just acceptable losses.
Over the next few weeks, London felt unrecognizable. I watched Stand Up To Racism banners flying next to placards with swastikas drawn inside Davids' stars. I saw climate networks tweeting about an "intifada" instead of carbon emissions. The total lack of empathy for Jewish trauma from people who claimed to be the kindest, most progressive people on earth was mind-blowing.
Part 3: Unlearning the Script
So, I quit. I stopped replying to the Signal chats, left the Facebook groups, and handed in my notices. I spent the winter of 2023 sitting alone in my flat, feeling completely isolated and politically homeless. But I also realized I needed to actually read something outside of my usual echo chamber.
For two decades, I’d only read books published by left-wing presses or recommended by party leadership. Now, I started reading actual Jewish and Middle Eastern history from sources I used to dismiss out of hand.
And I found out that a lot of what I’d been parroting for twenty years was just flat-out wrong.
The "White European" Myth: I found out that over half of Israel's Jewish population actually consists of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews—the ones who were forced out of countries like Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen in the 1940s and 50s. Israel wasn’t some playground for wealthy European colonizers; it was the only place millions of non-Western Jews had to flee to when their own neighbors turned on them.
Indigeneity: The left loves using the language of indigenous rights when it comes to Native Americans or Māori people, but completely denies it to Jews. When you actually look at the history, archaeology, and language, Jews are indigenous to that land. Zionism wasn't a foreign invasion; it was a displaced people returning home.
The Soviet Connection: I started looking into old Soviet propaganda from the Cold War era. It was terrifying to see that the exact slogans and arguments we were using in British activist circles in the 2020s were lifted almost word-for-word from state-sponsored Soviet campaigns from the 1970s, which were explicitly designed to weaponize anti-racist language against Israel.
I finally understood what Zionism actually means to normal Jewish people. It’s not some grand scheme to oppress anyone else. It’s just the basic, desperate understanding that after centuries of pogroms, expulsions, and the Holocaust, they need one tiny piece of land where they can defend themselves. It’s a national liberation movement, pure and simple.
Part 4: Where I Stand Now
To my old mates, I’m a write-off. I’m a traitor, a fascist, a genocide defender. My entire social circle pretty much evaporated within a couple of months.
But honestly? I’ve never had more clarity in my life.
You can't call yourself an anti-racist while actively calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state—an event that would lead to a massive slaughter. You can't call yourself a feminist and stay silent about the weaponization of rape by a religious fundamentalist group. And you can't say you want a better world while aligning yourself with ideologies that would throw LGBTQ+ people off buildings.
I haven't turned into a Tory. I still care about workers' rights, I still hate poverty, and I still think the climate crisis is going to ruin us if we don't fix it. I still want Palestinians to have safety, dignity, and a state of their own. But I see now that Hamas, and the Western left's obsession with wiping Israel off the map, are the biggest roadblocks to that ever happening.
My shift wasn't about moving from left to right. It was about moving from performance to reality. I used to march because I wanted to feel like a righteous person. Now, I just want the truth. And the truth is, if your vision of justice doesn't include the right of the Jewish people to exist in safety, it’s not justice at all.
By: Jonah Elman Published: May 2026
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