It took a few minutes for the accusations hurled at me and my friends in the left-wing camp to sink in.

Their beginning was so predictable that I didn’t really listen: “All the terrorist attacks going on right now are your fault,” the speaker stated — and I didn’t even bother to respond. (As a veteran participant in such meetings between left and right I am used to being accused — after all it was we who “gave them guns” and “did not let the Israel Defense Forces win”). But then came the next statement that left me gaping: “As long as there are leftists in the nation there will be terror attacks, because the terrorists know that it affects you and because of you, all of us are weakened.”

I froze.

This time it wasn’t about our opinions, but our very existence.

The significance is clear: If our very presence as people who hold a leftist ideology is what fuels Palestinian terrorism, there can be only one conclusion: the “leftist existence” must be eradicated.

And yes, this was exactly what the speaker meant as he explained (when asked to) that “holders of left-wing views must not be given legitimacy, because terrorism smells the weakness that exists in the nation and therefore continues to attack.”

I was surprised, even though the direction was already clear even before that. The left has starred in rightist nationalist propaganda for a long time in the familiar role of the Jew in classic anti-Semitic propaganda. The parallel is almost precise.

It starts with the image of left-wingers as the “knife in the back of the nation,” who in order to placate the nations of the world are prepared to be traitors to their own people. It continues with the assumption that even though “the nation” kicks them out time after time, the leftists still manage to run the state through behind-the-scenes manipulations (like their economic power and the fact that they control the organs of governance, the judiciary and the media — echoing the slanderous charges made against American Jews in the book "The Turner Diaries" by William Luther Pearce). And it includes portraying us as viruses that weaken the body of the nation and invite attacks and disease.

This depiction closely resembles the Nazi propaganda, according to which “the Jew is a bug that provokes social decay,” and therefore “if even one country decides to allow a single Jewish family to live in peace, it will become the focal point of the bugs that cause the rot.”

About the only thing missing was a revelation of “The Protocols of the Elders of the Left.” Maybe that’s being reserved for the next stage in the delegitimization drive, which will come.

It’s enough to follow the relatively sizable group of right-wing columnists in the mainstream media who devote most of their “journalistic” work to exposing “the truth about the hypocritical, treacherous nature of the Jewish left,” the result of which is a “catch the lefty” competition between them. In other words: Who will be the first to scrutinize the response of some leftist in order to score a success by proving that the leftist isn’t really mourning the deaths of Jews killed in a terrorist attack. Such a victory will of course earn the writer endless virtual kudos and impassioned comments, the most refined of which sends us back to the incinerators of Europe.

It’s easy to shrug in the face of such propaganda and disregard its importance (so somebody said something — what’s the big deal?). But the bloody experience that we Jews have acquired through history teaches us what happens if we ignore the possibility that such slurs proliferate. Does anyone really need to be reminded of the terrible results?

So this time we did not shut up, and probably because of that, when the meeting ended, one of the participants approached me and asked to apologize, noting that “not all leftists are the same. You are actually okay.” I didn’t bother telling him that that was exactly the reaction of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the television program in which it was claimed that Ariel Sharon drinks the blood of Arab children.