Descending into the subway station at 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem, on Sunday afternoon, I spied a poster emblazoned with the words “From Harlem to Gaza - We Are All Palestinians.”

The grittier neighborhoods of New York City are not the only places where you will encounter this slogan. At the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, advocates of a comprehensive boycott of Israel were distributing T-Shirts declaring “I am a Palestinian.”

In an essay I published almost five years ago, I noted the following:

Indeed, the delegitimisation offensive against Israel presently pursued by sections of the anti-globalisation movement, the far Left and certain periodicals of the moderate Left - many of whose themes are shared by Islamists and parts of the far right - can reasonably be said to have begun in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It was then that the difference between the anti-Zionism of the ancien Left and that espoused by its new incarnation was established. As Robert Wistrich has argued, in becoming a ‘code word for the forces of reaction in general,’ Zionism assumed a global importance for the contemporary Left that not even Marx and Lenin could have foreseen. Consequently, ‘[t]he extreme Left in western societies not only denigrates Israel and Zionism in a systematic manner, but its irrational hostility frequently spills over into contempt or antipathy towards Jews and Judaism as such.’

In 2009, the term “Palestinian” has become globalized. In the lexicon of oppression, to be a Palestinian is to embody, better than anything or anyone else, the pain of a world marked by injustice. It therefore follows that the term “Zionism” represents, perhaps better than the words “capitalism” or “Nazism” even, the source of that injustice. What was for many years a staple of third-worldist agitation - the grouping together of Imperialism, Racism, Apartheid and Zionism - is now embedded and extended in the discourse of the western left.

This elevation of a local conflict into a global one - what Alan Hart, a broadcaster for the Iranian Holocaust denial outfit and bogus news outlet Press TV, calls “the cancer at the heart of international affairs” - is what unites the movement to boycott Israel with the thugs who vandalized a synagogue in Caracas and the advocates of a boycott of Jewish-owned business in countries as far apart as Italy, South Africa and Argentina. At least we know now, more so than at any other time during the last decade, what it is that we are dealing with - and how poisonous it is.