7 October was a mask-off moment for the left

In the days after Hamas’s 7 October mass murder, rape, mutilation and massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, many of them young, women and children, there was a moment in which it was still possible to believe that the global left would stand with the victims of one of the most heinous acts we had seen in our lifetimes. It was the starkest contrast of good versus evil imaginable, which the evil side had helpfully filmed so as to erase any ambiguity about their actions or intentions. But we all know what happened next: the left chose evil.

What followed 7 October was a preponderance of celebrations, justifications, obfuscations and what Brendan O’Neill has so aptly called ‘moral inversion’, in his unmissable new jeremiad, After the Pogrom. In it, O’Neill painstakingly lays out how the left came to be Hamas’s great champions. How feminists denied the mass rape of Israeli women. How faculty members cheered on the slaughter of Israeli children. How millions marched in the streets under the banner of ‘From the river to the sea’, even before Israel began its offensive in Gaza to bring back its hostages and eliminate its enemy. How they accused Israel of genocide – for wishing to prevent genocide.

For many progressive Jews, watching their fellow leftists proudly proclaim their lust for Jewish blood was horrifying. But for those of us who have been trying to describe what was hiding under the thinly veiled mask of intersectional doublespeak all this time, the mask-off moment represented a different emotion, albeit surprising in its own right.

I first noticed it about three weeks after the massacre, though at first, I was so shocked by the feeling that it took me a while to admit it was real. Yet there it was, in between fits of grief and rage – something else making itself known: a creeping sense of euphoria.

Crazy, right? After the greatest Jewish bloodletting since the Holocaust in acts of depraved barbarism we had thought this Earth rid of, I was feeling a sense of elation.

It wasn’t, God forbid, about Hamas’s massacre or Israel’s response. No, I was feeling the euphoria of being in a fight of good versus evil after a life wrestling with moral ambiguity. It was the high of seeing the truth so clearly bellowed from the rooftops by one’s enemies – rather than masked with dissembling language about ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. It was the joy of being released from the gaslighting, the pretence that the left is more moral, more compassionate, more good – on the ‘right side of history’.

In ripping off the mask and going all in on their support of ‘resistance by any means necessary’, the left made itself morally irrelevant. In condoning calls for the genocide of the Jews, elite universities in the US made themselves objects of mockery for generations to come. In becoming Hamas’s cheering section, the left has made its claim to be the side of morality patently and obviously false. It was the largest act of moral self-marginalisation that I can ever recall witnessing.

After all, who cares what someone’s take on transgender medical treatments is when they cheer for Hamas? Who cares what someone’s take on women’s rights is when they deny the mass rape of Israeli women? Who cares what someone thinks about abortion when they don’t condemn the murder of Israeli babies? Who cares what someone thinks about the war in Ukraine when they can’t tell who is an ally and who an enemy? Who cares who someone is voting for when they can’t condemn the genocide of the Jews?

Indeed, anti-Semitism is not an accidental wrong turn for today’s left. The woke worldview replaces the foundation of Western civilisation – a worldview based on the distinction of right vs wrong, virtue vs evil – with the binary of powerful vs powerless, and then superimposes race on to that binary. Identitarians ascribe inherent virtue to those they see as powerless and evil to those they see as powerful. This is the source of 21st-century leftist anti-Semitism: every Jew is coded as white and is thus a powerful oppressor, and every Palestinian is coded as a ‘person of colour’ and thus is oppressed and inherently virtuous. Crucially, to the woke, the powerless have no moral agency and thus no moral responsibilities, and this includes Hamas. Abjection is the only virtue the left recognises, and this even applies for terrorists. Hence, by any means necessary.

If you’re an American, you have to have a college degree to believe this crap, although TikTok has been instrumental in popularising this ideology. In using the highfalutin justifications of the woke ideology to cheerlead Hamas, the global left has managed to reveal its thought process to be inherently, irredeemably flawed. And in so doing, it has released the rest of us from having to pretend the left matters.

This is the euphoria of the post-7 October world: it is a world in which the left’s moral badgering isn’t just irrelevant – it’s a joke.

No longer must we pretend this nonsense about the real threat coming from the right. No longer must we pretend that weakness is virtue and strength is vice. No longer must we absolve people of moral responsibility based on their skin colour. These views cannot be untangled from the hatred of Jews that permeates the left so deeply.

The good news is, we now know who our enemies are, which makes them much easier to fight.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is a spiked columnist and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.