A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.
Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.
The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.
There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.
Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.
To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.
No doubt many people pushing identity politics are motivated by good intentions, though some, of course, are pure grifters. I initially assumed that a fear of being called racist had lobotomised them, so they were unable to see the obvious idiocies of this ideology. (Is a poor white man in Glamorgan really more privileged than an extremely wealthy black man in Nairobi?) But the more identity politics took hold, the more I understood that a lot of people on the Left just want a very simple way of looking at the world, and they crave a group they can hate with impunity.
One of the biggest problems with this framework is its inability to accommodate competing rights, and the idea that two groups can both be right. I got a glimpse of this in 2015, when I started to write about gender ideology, which argues that trans women should be accorded all the rights biological women have, such as access to female single-sex spaces. The problems seemed glaring to me, but as I quickly learned, asking any questions sparked furious accusations of transphobia from the progressive Left.
Identity politics, you see, is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad. So, in the case of gender ideology, trans people are all good, and women who are anxious about the erosion of their rights are evil. And so identity politics gave Left-wing men a self-righteous cover so they could deride women like me, and feel morally superior for doing so.
It’s a similar story with the progressive Left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the Left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews. This comparison between how women and Jews are discussed in identity politics is not new. In February, Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet magazine that, thanks to the energetic efforts of gender ideologue and anti-Israel academic Judith Butler, antisemitism has been “queered”, meaning anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist is seen as analogous to a bigot who hates trans people. Only trans people and Palestinians are seen as oppressed, and never women or Jews.
In Jews Don’t Count, published two years before October 7, David Baddiel addresses why the Left is so antipathetic to the idea of Jews being oppressed. He memorably describes Jews as “Schrödinger’s whites”, meaning their whiteness depends on the politics of the observer. The far-Right sees them as suspicious, foreign and not white, whereas the Left sees them as extremely white because they can pass as non-Jews.
Since October 7, this perception of Jews and Israelis has been especially popular. “You’re either on the ‘white’ or ‘right’ side of history,” one popular march placard has it, with images of the Israeli, British, American and French flags on one side, and the flags for Palestine, East Turkestan, the DRC and Sudan on the other. Never mind that around half of Israelis are Mizrahi, meaning they have roots in North Africa and all over the Middle East, and are descended from the Jews who were kicked out of those regions in 1948. So, very much not white.
Another of the central tenets of identity politics is that all oppressions are linked, so LGBTQ+ rights are the same as Palestinian rights, and so on (never mind that same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Gaza). This is why so many Western activists see the Palestinians as akin to black slaves and the Israelis as plantation owners, with a total lack of embarrassment about their historical ignorance. Israel and Palestine have nothing in common with the gay rights movement in the US or the desegregation of the American South, and while stupidity plays a big part in why so many people in the West believe otherwise, there are other issues, too. For some people online with big followings, there’s a lot of brand-building going on here, as they loudly reassure their followers that Palestine and Israel are a simple matter of good versus evil. Few things attract more followers than reassuring them that they’re good and this other group is bad.
But the enthusiasm with which the West has taken up this idea suggests something else, too: how better to absolve your guilt about your own country’s historical wrongs than by dumping them on other countries now? The sheer volume of comparisons between anti-black racism and Israel’s behaviour strongly hints that there is more than a little displacement going on. It is, I think, no coincidence that it was South Africa that accused Israel of genocide. In a gruesome twist of irony, only a week beforehand, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, welcomed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a Sudanese warlord whose militia is accused of genocide in Darfur. Still, what better way to cleanse oneself of uncomfortable accusations than to point the finger at someone else?
It has been an especially strange time to be a Jewish woman on the Left. When we explain why we might not want trans women in our single-sex spaces, referring to past experiences of male violence, we are accused of “weaponising our trauma”. When we talk about our fear of Hamas, because Jews have some experience when it comes to genocidal fascist groups, we’re accused of “weaponising the Holocaust”. Women in general — like Jews — tend not to be believed when they describe violence committed against them; according to a recent annual report from the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, only 5% of reported rapes result in charges being brought, never mind convictions. So, when stories started to emerge fairly soon after October 7 that Hamas had committed horrific sexual violence during the pogrom, I knew the reaction would be bad.
The October 7 rapes of Israeli women and men were so brutal that Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said it was “the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen”. One woman was found with a knife in her vagina and her internal organs removed. Others were shot in the vagina and breasts. Witnesses reported a woman begging to be killed as she was passed between Hamas fighters, a woman being stabbed in the back while she was raped, terrorists cutting off a woman’s breast and playing with it in the road.
And yet, it took UN Women 50 days even to acknowledge that these sexual assaults had happened. When Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was asked why, she reportedly replied that the evidence of rape was “not solid”, even though there was video footage of Israeli women with blood-sodden crotches and reports from witnesses about dead Israeli women’s mutilated vaginas. On October 30, almost 150 “scholars in feminist, queer and trans studies” signed an open letter implying that to support Israeli women was to endorse “colonial feminism”. Not a single UK charity that purports to protect women from violence condemned Hamas’s brutality — except Jewish Women’s Aid. Southall Black Sisters expressed sympathy for people killed in Gaza and Israel, but overlooked Hamas’s taking of hostages when calling out contraventions of international law. Sisters Uncut, which was formed in reaction to the UK’s government’s cuts to services for victims of domestic violence, staged a sit-in at Liverpool Street Station demanding an Israeli ceasefire. After I wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle asking how this fitted in with their feminist credentials, they replied with a statement saying that the reports of Israeli women being raped were merely “the Islamophobic and racist weaponisation of sexual violence that presents it as an Arab, as opposed to a global, problem”.
In an attempt to make people believe what had actually happened, the IDF compiled and edited the footage they had from Hamas’s GoPro cameras, made it into a film, called Bearing Witness, and took it around the world to show small, carefully selected audiences. Most journalists who watched it wrote about how traumatising they found it. Others had different reactions.
The far-Left activist Owen Jones, The Guardian’s most high-profile journalist, went to a screening and afterwards posted a 25-minute video review. He claimed that “the purpose of the film was made very clear: that we were to ‘bear witness’, as it was repeatedly put, to the horrors committed by Hamas and also make the PR case for Israel’s onslaught against Gaza”. Others who attended the screening told me that no one said any such thing — the purpose was to provide video footage of the pogrom. “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera,” Jones added, apparently unaware that the IDF had already said it only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed. The body of a burnt woman with no underwear on “is not what you consider conclusive evidence of rape”, he asserted.
Jones’s trajectory is typical of the modern far-Left. After making a name for himself by writing about social class, by the mid-2010s he was focusing increasingly on identity politics, especially trans issues. Now, he tweets primarily about Palestine and calls anyone who disagrees with him a defender of genocide. Questioning the rapes of Israeli women was the perfect crescendo.
Still, when progressive-Left identity politics takes you to a place where you are jazz handsing away the rapes of Israelis, maybe you should ask yourself if this movement has outlived its purpose. It reveals such vanity, but also such bankrupt intelligence, this desire to outsource any critical thinking to an external, prefabricated ideology. Perhaps the thing that surprises me the most about human nature, even in my mature middle age, is how enduring this desire is.
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This an extract from Blindness: October 7 and the Left, an essay published by Jewish Quarterly.
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