The 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel, when several thousand Hamas militants set out to kill and rape as many Jews as possible, seemed to energise bourgeois leftists across the West. They seemed thrilled by what they eagerly portrayed as an act of ‘resistance’. Excited by what they conceived as a righteous uprising by Palestinians against ‘settler-colonial’ Israelis. Charged by what they painted as a radical blow against an outpost of Western imperialism.
It proved to be a pivotal moment. The left had long flirted with anti-Semitic Islamists and other Islamic activists, but 7 October truly solidified it. Since then, this grim Islamo-leftist coupling has become a prominent feature of the Western political landscape.
