The Moral Catastrophe of the post-7/10 Left

The shame of a moral rot which must be torn out by its roots

I think my first post on this Substack has to start here: with the catastrophic moral implosion of the Western Left in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist slaughter on 7th October 2023. For a long time prior to that, I had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the left on a range of topics, in particular I’ve grown skeptical that its attachment to a value-neutral social liberalism is capable of reproducing the conditions which make social democracy possible. I’d also come to the more general view that large parts of the radical or ‘revolutionary’ left had in fact given up on any real attempt at a meaningful transformation of the economic systems in which we live, instead devolving into a mixture of online LARPing and post-modern pick-and-choose political identity construction; that they were increasingly obsessed with discourse and identities, and outright hostile to the views and beliefs of actual working people struggling every day to put food on the table for their families. So it’s fair to say I was already feeling pretty disillusioned with many of the ideas, thinkers, and activists with which I had spent so long surrounding myself.

And then October 7th happened. What took place on that day was the most horrifying, depraved orgy of violence in modern history, and has to be understood in its proper context: as the most lethal day of Jew-killing since the Holocaust. It was systematic, as Hamas death-squads moved from house to house with military precision, timings and locations planned weeks and months in advance (thanks to the help of the Gazan Palestinians the Kibbutzim had hired and even invited into their homes), killing, maiming, torturing and raping every person they found. Grenades used to blow children to pieces, mothers raped and tortured in front of their children, bound with wire to their babies and set on fire. Hundreds of Israelis - men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled - kidnapped, taken back to Gaza, beaten, paraded through the streets to jeering mobs, only to be taken into the tunnels beneath the city.

And the left laughed. It cheered. It howled with joy as the Jews (uh, sorry, ‘Zionists’) ‘finally got what was coming to them.’ They delighted at the sight of hundreds of teenagers at a music festival celebrating peace and love running for their lives, gunned down as they fled, hunted down in the forests, butchered as they hid in portcabins, in freezers. Gang raped. After all, “this is what decolonization looks like.”

Something in me snapped that day. The left is supposed to stand for peace, justice, solidarity with the victims of violence and hate, and who in 1936 stood shoulder to shoulder with British Jews and chased out Oswald Mosley and his blackshirt fascists. And at the sight of Jews slaughtered in their homes, much of the left celebrated. Before Israel had retaliated, before the pogrom had even finished, they were marching down the streets of London to wave Palestinian flags outside the Israeli embassy. I’ve heard it said that “people love dead Jews”; well, the bodies of these dead weren’t even cold when the activist left spat on them.

What this has exposed is a deeply and fundamental moral rot at the heart of the current activist left. This was not a ‘strategic’ failure or just ‘bad optics’, it was a conclusive symptom of a complete lack of moral clarity. It’s something I had glimpsed before under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. I saw first-hand the atmosphere of outright hostility and hatred his leadership cultivated towards Jews and the Jewish state. Perhaps naively, over the past few years I thought that much of this had been addressed under Keir Starmer’s leadership; and at least within the Labour Party, I think it mostly has. The problem is the left is much bigger than any one party, and even if they’re expelled from it, that doesn’t stop them marching in the streets or applying pressure from outside and through the ballot box.

It is an ideology which seems to begin from a single premise with a long history: Jews are powerful. Perhaps this is because there are now generations of activists who (like me) never lived through the six-day war of 1967; who didn’t see the scenes of battle during the Yom Kippur War; and who never experienced or heard about the havoc and horror of the Second Intifada, which incited waves of terrorist attacks perhaps most notable for the unique innovation of utilising child suicide-bombers. Certainly we never lived through the Second World War and the Holocaust, and perhaps now that’s regarded as just a distant memory.

But it is also a prejudice which runs deep in European history. And when you combine this with the often implied and unconscious framework of contemporary ‘progressive’ ideology in which groups and individuals are either oppressor or oppressed, filtered through a post-colonial lens of ‘settler-colonialism’, you end up with a toxic ideology which explicitly endorses the violent slaughter of Jews in ways comparable only to the deathcamps of Nazi Germany. Only this time it’s okay, apparently, because although they happen to be Jews, the real problem is that they’re Zionist Jews.

‘After all,’ says the left, ‘oppressors are ontologically evil and there is no act against them which is wrong.’

October 7th was, perhaps, just an ‘act of resistance’. I’ve seen young Muslim Brits holding placards with the slogan ‘You can’t tell us how to resist.’ Well, yes, we can, actually. And many of us are utterly horrified at the sick, warped ideology people like you hold.

Sam Kriss, whose writing I deeply admire and which gave me enormous comfort during those weeks, wrote shortly after that horrible day,

If you affirm this massacre, if you claim that gunning down defenceless people is an acceptable mode of resistance, then what are you saying to the Palestinians who maintain that it is not? There are a lot of ways to resist. There are people who follow the occupation forces with cameras, who protest at checkpoints, who strike, who put themselves in front of Israeli guns and clubs, without any weapons of their own, because they’re committed to nonviolence—but you think they should have avoided all that. You know the correct way of resisting Israel, and it’s to mow down teenagers at a music festival. Even those Hamas fighters who fought the IDF but decided not to murder helpless people—as soon as you trot out your bullshit line about not telling Palestinians how to resist, you’re saying they should have pulled the trigger.

What I’m seeing on the activist left today isn’t about socialism. Now they’re out on marches chanting in support of the Houthis (who reinstated slavery and sex-trafficking in Yemen), calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses, simultaneously calling for a ceasefire and to ‘globalise the intifada.’ These scenes doesn’t express a desire for a fairer, more equal society. This is not about redressing injustices, ensuring that everyone, no matter their starting-point in life, is entitled to a decent and humane standard of living. This is the virus of antisemitism expressing itself again, as it has done century after century after century. This time it merely cloaks itself in a different guise: ‘progressivism.’

And so all the same ancient ideas which many of us in the west had thought (or hoped) long-buried flood to the surface: Jews as controlling the media; Jews pulling the strings behind foreign governments; Jews as infiltrating a country from within, making it their own; Jews as pretend-victims, crying crocodile tears for the naive real victims.

And the sheer lack of humiliry or self-awareness on their part is shocking. Black academics screaming at and condemning The Auschwitz Memorial Museum on Twitter for ‘condoning genocide’. Here’s a rule of thumb for evaluating your moral position on any given issue, because ethics can often be a complicated and messy thing: if you find yourself screaming condemnations at The Auschwitz Memorial Museum, it might in fact be a moment to take a huge fucking step back and re-evaluate whose side you’re on.

But no. Of course not. When it comes to Jews, there’s no need to engage in ‘self-criticism.’ After all, you’re a campaigner against racism; how could you be racist yourself?

It has occurred to me that what we are now also seeing is the development in real-time of a new mode of Holocaust denial. The denial of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th match precisely the form taken by the deniers of what took place in deathcamps and work camps under the Nazi regime: ‘the numbers were exaggerated’, ‘the eyewitnesses are fake/untrustworthy’, ‘the Jews are just saying this for their own interests’, ‘the Jews deserved it.’ This isn’t helped by TikTok, which appears to be radicalising a new generation of David Irvings.

I feel ashamed that it has taken me so long to see this. I feel ashamed that I have, in all likelihood, been a participant in cultivating an atmosphere in which these vile, vicious ideas could take hold, despite my efforts over the years to fight against antisemitism within my own political party.

We on the left have failed, badly. In the moment in which the Jewish people needed the support of everyone, to wrap our arms around them and support them in this moment of the most profound grief and trauma, to come together to show solidarity with them, to remind each other what ‘never again’ meant, one group decided that what justice required was instead to dance upon the infant bodybags of Ashdod and celebrate ‘liberation.’ If this is what ‘liberation’ and ‘decolonization’ look like, then count me out.

And I feel ashamed that we now know that, if the fascists returned to the Jews of Cable Street today, we would have to ask the question in full seriousness: on which side would the activist left stand?

I’m angry. I’m disappointed. I’m ashamed. We have to do better. I am determined that we can and will do better than this. This cannot be allowed to stand.