FAN FAVE #5: The Left Needs a Cordon Sanitaire

ICYMI: Progressives need to block pro-pogrom activists at the doors of our movements – not figuratively, but literally.

Palestinians celebrate October 7 with sweets.

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The bodies of Israelis murdered on October 7 were not cold before overseas activists were celebrating the massacres.

“As the Biden admin builds more walls at US borders, the people of the world are rising up & tearing walls down. The Palestinians are a beacon for us all,” wrote an Albany Law School professor.

“How many of you felt it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened?” asked a British commentator. “How many of you felt the euphoria?”

“[T]his is what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like,” wrote one activist on X.

These are just three randomly chosen comments among countless from academics, union leaders, progressive commentators and social justice activists on or shortly after October 7. Similar comments were almost certainly expressed on streets near you.

In my hometown, for example, a college instructor called the attacks “brilliant” and “amazing” while the former head of our local civil liberties association marveled, “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned to fly hang gliders?” (Some of the perpetrators who murdered 360 young people at the music festival on October 7 descended on their victims from the air.)

There has been some reckoning around the jubilation expressed about the mass murder of civilians and the rape, torture, immolation and kidnapping of Jews (and other victims whose Jew-adjacency made them targets). Some academics have lost their jobs or been subject to investigations. Some people when called out have apologized and recanted. But millions of social media and other public comments like these have gone unpunished. So prevalent has been the “solidarity” with the atrocities of October 7 that it would be numerically impossible to address even a fraction of them.

But they must be addressed, no matter how long it takes or how many resources the process consumes. If progressive movements – that broad network of individuals and formal and informal groupings that self-define as leftist, woke, queer, feminist, democratic socialist, progressive, liberal, socialist, anti-capitalist, antiracist and so much more – are to maintain any legitimacy, to survive, thrive and advance the better world we seek, we need to ensure that advocates for atrocities are disqualified from the appearance and reality of influence and leadership in our movements.

Cancel culture? Absolutely!

These are not people who made a bad joke. These are people, many of them leaders in our universities, organizations and society, who have revealed their incompatibility with civilization.

If there were ever a reason for excluding someone from the community it is the depravity of celebrating mass murder, venerating the perpetrators who set live human beings alight and applauding rape as tool of “resistance.” This is what cancellation was made for.

There can be no gray areas, no plausible deniability, among people who explicitly celebrate the inhumanity of October 7.

Even if the war that began that day were not a just war (and that is, frankly, irrelevant to the argument here) it would still not justify expressions of support for what happened that day. Likewise, nothing that happened before that day justifies it either. The bottom line is simply this: people who believe what these people believe, who espouse what these people espouse, have no place in decent society, let alone in a movement that calls itself progressive.

And, no. Contrary to the relentless, paranoiac and probably antisemitic assertion that “Zionists are silencing us,” we are not trying to shut these people up. On the contrary: We should shine a light on their barbarisms and disseminate their ideas widely. We should create searchable databases with their offenses and ensure that any voter, board of directors, potential employer, donor or romantic interest who seeks to advance causes of progress can quickly identify and exclude anyone who views sexual violence as “resistance,” who interprets the immolation of an embracing mother and infant as “brilliant,” or who thinks learning to hang glide in order to commit mass murder is a beautiful example of “the spirit to get free.”

Of course, we have an obligation to call in, before calling out. Some people have recanted their comments. The depth of their authenticity is largely irrelevant. Even if they retracted for self-preservation, the most important thing is that we, as a society, are seen to denounce such ideas.

We also need to be clear that we are not discussing the morality of the people who perpetrated October 7. That should not even be a question. Nor are we addressing the morality of the Israeli military, nor the morality of Israelis or Palestinians.

We are discussing the morality of the people we have been marching with in our movements in Stockholm and Chicago and Cape Town, people who set the agendas for our feminist, queer, antiracist, human rights and other progressive organizations.

This is the moral question that will determine the viability of our movements in future decades the way the left’s approaches to Stalinism tainted our past. If we do not get this right, every good thing we do will be betrayed and debased, and rightly so. If we do not confront these barbarisms and banish these activists, they will become a mushroom cloud over our movements.

For decades, the world’s worst tyrants have neutralized their internal opposition by deflecting attention toward Palestine. There’s not much we can do about that (except maybe recognize it for what it is, instead of rewarding it by doing exactly what the dictators know we will). But when activists in our own movements use the same strategy, disguising their own iniquity by inciting ever more hyperbolic panics against Israel, we can call out this behavior and draw a protective red line around our causes.

To be clear: these people have the right to say whatever they want.

They do not, however, have the right to be accepted by progressive, humanitarian individuals and organizations as legitimate voices or leaders within our ranks.

The challenge these people present is not about the freedom of individuals who express hideous ideas – they have that right and they used it. This is about the sustainability of our movements for social, economic and environmental justice.

Until we banish these people from the remotest proximity to power and presence within our causes, our movements are contaminated by their inhumanity. This is not about Israel and Palestine, or anything happening half a world away. This is about the moral legitimacy of the entire left and saving the cherished causes we advance from toxicity that will – and rightly – neutralize our acceptability on every issue we take up.

*

My entire life as an activist, which means most of my life professionally, has been devoted to gay rights, women’s equality, fighting racism, advancing intercultural dialogue and promoting social justice in all its forms.

The fact that this activism has led me to recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination alongside the rights of Palestinian people makes me an apostate in the eyes of plenty of fellow progressives. People who make common cause with the most patriarchal and misogynistic, homophobic, authoritarian and reactionary forces on earth denigrate my progressive credentials, with no apparent cognitive dissonance.

That was preposterous enough on October 6. Since October 7, we are in a new moral universe.

Every reasonable person knows that peace and Palestinian self-determination will come only through a negotiated settlement when the Palestinian people have finally consented to live in coexistence with the settled reality of a Jewish state as a neighbor.

Something that should have been clear all along is that one cannot be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Neither can we be truly pro-Israel while being anti-Palestinian. Compromise and negotiation are the only paths to a resolution of the conflict and so advancing a narrative where one side has to lose so the other can win is a guarantee for continued failure.

Nevertheless, and despite the definition of insanity, overseas activists have one approach: demonize Israel. Decade after decade of this approach has not hastened peace or Palestinian self-determination, so the strategy, wholeheartedly adopted by the global left and never more so than during the current war, is to double down on more of the same. Failure begets failure.

The impact of demonization, obviously, is that no one, least of all Palestinians who have already been indoctrinated with dehumanizing antisemitic hatred, will be able to make a deal with a devil overseas activists have helped invent. “Pro-Palestinians” (the scoff quote are necessary because they inhibit rather than encourage peace and therefore Palestinian self-determination) keep doing more of what has been proven not to work. They just can’t help themselves, despite all evidence that the approach is a calamity.

When a people, in this case Israelis, are demonized to the point of dehumanization – just look at the images at anti-Israel rallies and you will see demonic figures, blood-dripping fangs, a museum archive of familiar imagery from days gone by – it becomes almost inevitable that these debasing words lead to brutalizing deeds. Ultimately, it is the perpetrators who are most dehumanized in this scenario, driven as they are to behave in ways that betray human dignity. When people who did not participate in the bloodthirsty violence of October 7 nevertheless endorse it, their humanity too is degraded. American, Canadian, French and Swedish professors, union leaders, bloggers and activists did not, of course, decapitate, rape, kidnap and mass murder on October 7. But while their enthusiastic celebration does not make them as criminally culpability as the perpetrators, it makes them morally culpable.

Several things make October 7 a turning point. The barbarism, obviously, and the magnitude, among these. That is a statement of the humanity of Palestinian terrorists and collaborators.

For the purposes of overseas leftists and those of us who have warned of the moral catastrophe inevitably stemming from our alignment with those forces, the cataclysms of that day provide an opportunity, as grotesque as it sounds to express this.

We have been in an intellectual and moral tug-of-war for decades over Israel and Palestine. Separate from the conflict itself, this conflict over the conflict has ripped apart friendships, organizations and movements, not least the U.K. Labor Party and, as we are witnessing now, the U.S. Democrats.

Part of this conflict over the conflict has been around the motivations of those who so avidly condemn – hate is by no means too strong a word – Israel. What is their motivation? Having their impulses questioned, especially to imply bias or race bigotry, evidently drives “pro-Palestinian” activists berserk. The demand to engage in introspection, a core tenet of progressive ideology around race, is stridently rejected in the case of our opinions toward Jews. Pointing out that this seems evidence in itself just intensifies the outrage. “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!” they declare, as if that’s that.

This indignation over accusations of anti-Jewish bias might be justified if Palestinianism in any substantive way reflected the larger values we claim to advance. Instead, something has driven vast proportions of progressives, feminists, queers, radicals and others to endorse a nationalist movement that aims to create a country almost entirely at odds with everything we claim to believe in. Not only this, but we have turned Palestine into the foremost – practically the only – foreign policy priority of our unions, our dyke marches, our political parties, our wine-tasting clubs.

Excuse me for suggesting something irrational is at play.

There is something illogical about the leftist alliance with Palestinian extremism – and extremism is the mainstream Palestinian position, to be clear. Whether we imagine ourselves supporting Hamas (as some explicitly have done) or the Palestinian Authority, we are allied by any measure with autocratic, repressive forces bearing no likeness to progressive values. Even, it must be said, if we self-righteously claim we only support “the Palestinian people,” our associations are ideologically suspect. Public opinion polls indicate that the average Palestinian, put mildly, does not share our approaches to nonviolence, intercultural harmony, women’s equality or gay rights. One poll indicated that more Palestinians believe it is morally acceptable to kill a homosexual than to be a homosexual. More recently, a vast majority – more than 2 in 3 Palestinians, apparently believes the attacks of October 7 were a good thing.

Progressives have chosen, from among the countless just causes crying out for attention in the world, many of them greater in scope by any standard or measure, the one perhaps most disconnected from our values. Feminists have made common cause with the most misogynistic forces on the planet, gays with the most homophobic, democratic socialists with the most autocratic and fascistic regimes.

Code Pink and Queers for Palestine are the most unintentionally comical examples of this misguided, self-destructive activism – enthusiastically aligning as they do with movements that throw people like us off roofs and murder women for the “crime” of being raped – but these are the most visibly ludicrous tips of an irrational ideological iceberg. The entire movement that self-defines as “pro-Palestinian” is riven with self-defeating and hypocritical ideology. The fact that it has been adopted uncritically by the broader left indicts all of us in their faults.

The fringiest activists sometimes seem like teenagers (indeed, some of them are) who see how far they can rile their elders with their pushing of boundaries. In avant-activism, we call this transgressiveness. Does the American regime hate the ayatollahs? Then we’re for them! Are the Israelis under attack from the Houthis? Yay Houthis! Are Palestinian terror groups raping Ziofems? Go rapists! MAGA activists may be willing to defend the outrageous just to “own the libs” but anti-Zionists have one-upped even that snotty, anti-intellectual motivation.

The only way Palestinianism and progressivism can coexist is in the morally dubious realm where the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The bulk of the Palestinian movement, while wearing the language of “human rights” like a skin suit, demonstrates precisely no commitment to equality for women, or rights for sexual, religious, ethnic or any other minorities. The advancement of human rights, in the way Western activists understand the term, is simply nonexistent in the Palestinian movement (in Palestine or overseas) and movements for anything other than base nationalism are almost entirely absent in Palestinian society. Palestinianism is an authoritarian nationalist movement that, if successful, would almost certainly usher in a state that is among one of the world’s worst violators of human rights and a dystopia for women, queers and, really, every citizen.

Given 75 years and billions of dollars in international aid, the Palestinians have refused to create the infrastructures of a functional proto-state that would have a chance of success were a “free Palestine” to become a reality tomorrow.

The larger issue is that there is simply no reason to believe that such a place would be “free” for anyone. For all the resources, activism, battles and obsession that Palestinianism has extracted from progressive movements worldwide, there is not a whiff of evidence that an independent Palestine would be anything but another kleptocratic, repressive Middle Eastern dictatorship. “Progressive” is probably the last thing that would describe a “free Palestine.”

The progressive fixation on Palestine, despite this ideological incompatibility with our values, might be excusable if overseas “pro-Palestinian” activists attempted to inculcate these values into the Palestinian movement. Palestinian leaders and the broader Palestinian society seem almost entirely united against progress around women’s and minority rights, liberal values, basic freedoms and the other things we claim to seek for ourselves and others. That is their right. But if we are genuine in our own beliefs, we would respond one of two ways: attempt to inculcate our values in the groups with which we make common cause, or stop making common cause.

Instead, we have chosen the most illiberal, irrational approach: Make no effort to liberalize Palestinianism, but make unapologetic and all-embracing common cause with it nonetheless.

Why has the left so fanatically, almost unanimously and irrationally joined this cause? The world is sadly abounding with injustices. For activists seeking just causes, it’s a buyer’s market. And yet this conflict edges out almost every other cause on the planet – even though the side we have chosen betrays everything we claim to support.

More damning, “pro-Palestinians” are deeply selective in condemning oppression of Palestinians. The atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians by Palestinian leaders and the larger Arab world, including the penning up and denaturalizing of Palestinian refugees for most of a century, evokes barely a whisper of concern. Clearly, progressives seem perfectly happy to see Palestinians oppressed. They just hate it when Jews do it.

Genuine progressives, and people who are actually pro-Palestinian, would be howling outrage at Palestinian dictators and terrorists with at least the vehemence they reserve for Israel.

If we want a “free” Palestine, we would be demanding the prerequisites for Palestinian freedom. Yet the only people doing this are usually self-declared Zionists, whose activism is dismissed as a sideshow to the necessary objective of freeing Palestine from Israel and so the rhetorical cycle continues, our concerns about actual Palestinian human rights dismissed as whataboutery.

If we want to be pro-Palestinian, we need to be pro-Palestinian. It’s a silly tautology, yet it must be said. If we do not advance solutions that will lead to peace and Palestinian self-determination, we have no right to call ourselves pro-Palestinian.

Since the only way that these two objectives will ever be realized is through a negotiated settlement, the hysterical anti-Israel rhetoric and uncritical endorsement of a one-sided, intolerant narrative pushes that goal further away. Palestinian leaders cannot make a deal with the devil (and survive), therefore painting Israel as satanic, as weirdly euphoric as that seems to make many activists, does nothing to make Palestinians freer or safer. It helps ensure they remain stateless, enraged, and at war, probably for years or generations to come.

The binary most progressives have signed onto needs to be rejected. We cannot be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Nor can we be pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian. The only hope for peace and Palestinian self-determination is to be pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel.

Despite this transparently obvious fact, most progressives today are vocally anti-Israel. We are also, not unrelatedly, substantively anti-Palestinian. Given the chance to take a position that improves the well-being of two peoples, we have instead taken a position that harms both. What sort of derangement could lead intelligent, well-intentioned people down such a disastrous path, a path that is not only useless for Palestinians but an abrogation of our every value?

How, if not by some force as irrational as ethnic animus, could huge swaths of intelligent, ostensibly progressive people sign onto an ideology so at odds with everything we stand for? This was the question progressives like me were asking for years. This is not to say we oppose Palestinian self-determination – unlike the so-called pro-Palestinian activists, I support a Palestinian nationalism that would make Palestinian people better off, not worse, than they are today.

The Mugabe argument is inevitably invoked here. Progressives have largely adopted the depressing idea that people have the right to be oppressed by indigenous thugs, rather than by endogenous oppressors. Fine. But why, if this is the tragic endpoint we resign ourselves to, has such a debased objective unreservedly become the chief foreign policy priority of leftists worldwide?

There is only one constructive solution to this conflict: the Palestinian acceptance of coexistence and a negotiated settlement where neither side gets everything it wants. The fact that this entirely obvious approach is anathema to “pro-Palestinians” indicates that peace and Palestinian self-determination are not, at root, what is driving that movement.

Of course, bias and bigotry are not provable. So for years we have been at an impasse. Some Jews and their allies warn that antisemitism is an accelerant that enflames the anti-Zionist movement. “Pro-Palestinians” indignantly accuse us of smears. Neither side can prove anything.

Then came October 7.

*

When anti-Israel activists don their presumed suit of armor by declaring “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” they assume Jewish people and their allies are making the case that anti-Zionists hate Jews therefore they hate Israel.

If they would stop chanting long enough to listen for once, they would learn it is slightly more subtle. Anti-Zionism stands on the shoulders of antisemitism in many ways, including through confirmation bias. When we hear Israel depicted as satanic – as literally the incarnation of the devil, as we see in the horned imagery at “pro-Palestinian” rallies – it comports with what our devout ancestors believed.

These prejudices are baked into our civilization and are subconscious, just as many forms of racism are, perhaps even more insidiously.

As white privilege stands on the shoulders of white supremacy, anti-Zionism stands on the shoulders of antisemitism. Not every white person demonstrates racism, just as not every anti-Zionist is defiled by immutable antisemitism. In both cases, though, they belong to social groups that are permeated with these biases.

For decades, we have been having a fruitless debate over the role of antisemitism in anti-Zionism. The reiterated default that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” has always been problematic, not least because it bars the introspection we are called to engage in when confronted with even the potential for prejudice in ourselves or our movements, an absolute refusal to, as we say in every other such instance, “do the work.”

The refusal to interrogate the potential for racism in oneself is a leftist sin almost on par with the racism itself. So there is a provable moral failure occurring every time someone utters “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

But that debate is now superseded by an even more urgent one. We haven’t resolved that other problem, but our attentions are now needed on a perilous new front.

We are no longer in a battle between our stated values and anti-Jewish racism (though we necessarily must come back to that). The battle upon us now is a defense of the most sacred values not only of progressivism or leftism, but of basic humanity, and whether they still hold primacy for leftists. Unconvinced readers will roll eyes or dismiss what follows as purple or McCarthyist or hysterical. But we are in a civilizational battle around our most basic beliefs of right and wrong. A great many leftists, whose causes are presumed to advance a better world, are engaged in behaviors that undermine even our imperfect civilization, that do not make the world better but poison what is good in it.

Holding (or refusing to challenge) anti-Jewish ideas is an atrocious affront to progressive values, notwithstanding the following corollary. But antisemitism has a long history both on the left and in our society more broadly. Being an antisemite may be distasteful in many quarters (though clearly not in all), but that is not to say it doesn’t put one in abundant company. What we have seen on and since October 7 among a great number of leftists is something more foundational: a celebration of basic human evil.

Even if we believe, as many of the perpetrators do, that evil is embodied not in the terrorists but in Israel, and that therefore Israel must be confronted “by any means necessary” – effectively, that evil in the service of fighting evil is not evil – it should be obvious there is an insurmountable moral problem with this logic.

By definition, rape, beheadings, immolations, torture, kidnapping and mass murder certainly count as “any means necessary.” But even if Israel were, as the mostly fictionalized narrative has it, the embodiment of evil (which is the very definition of demonization), contesting humanity’s greatest evil would still not justify acts of humanity’s greatest evil. It should not need to be said, especially to progressive people, that nothing justifies or could ever justify rape, beheadings, setting humans on fire and other torturous means of murder as the “any means necessary” by which anything good can emerge. We should not even need to have this conversation.

But the additional hard facts of the case are that Israel is not, by any preposterous stretch of the malevolent imagination, the imaginary bogeyman these voices depict. Israel is, and for 75 years has been, engaged in defensive policies and actions against enemies that recognize no rules of engagement, who spit on the Geneva Conventions.

Necessarily responding to these enemies has resulted in tragic outcomes, occasional overreach and some grievous realities. Condemn these. Demand justice. Advocate for lasting peace. But rejoicing in rape, applauding the mass murder of dancing young people, praising the fact that mothers holding babies were set on fire, elation at the abduction of entire families for political ends (even if we agree with those ends) … this is no longer an issue of whether those who praise this violence carry antisemitic ideas.

The issue now is whether these people possess elemental humanity.

I happen to detest the “canary in the coalmine” motif, which is itself ironically dehumanizing and also simplistic. But there is no question that history proves that when a civilization has a serious problem with Jews, it has serious problems of more universal kinds.

Toxic ideas about Jews (call them Zionists, call them whatever) have so permeated the “pro-Palestinian” cause that these ideas have impaired the essential humanity of many people in our movements and they have compromised our causes.

Anti-Zionism has so universalized the dehumanization of Jews in the past quarter-century – Jews (again: call them Zionists, call them whatever your conscience demands; we know who you are talking about) are routinely depicted as blood-soaked vampires, baby-eaters, monsters of every shape and form. This language and imagery in North America and Europe mirrors parallel language and imagery that has permeated Palestinian culture and broader Arab and Muslim societies for more than 75 years. Not incidentally, it is also typical of Western, Christian societies a couple of generations ago and we give ourselves far too much credit if we believe we are immune from these once-pervasive superstitions.

Only in this context of dehumanization could anyone – no matter how desensitized to a world of violence and inhumanity – react to October 7 with anything but revulsion and nausea. What kind of people could not just justify but celebrate that?

The dehumanization of Jews that could lead people – progressive people who genuinely believe they are the arbiters of human goodness – to exult in the events of October 7 says we have a problem with Jews. But, more than at any moment since leftists experienced the slow dawning that Stalinism was not the utopian vision we had hoped, we are now at a moment of moral choice.

The problem we have is no longer just about Jews.

As detestable as the canary in the coalmine motif may be, that canary is dead. The poison now is not “just” antisemitism (which plenty of people seem capable of overlooking). We now face the imminent loss of the left’s claim not only as the voice of conscience in human civilization, but our very membership in that civilization.

*

The jubilation we have seen among far, far too many activists since October 7 is what we might call “applied antisemitism.”

While human motivations are impossible to prove, our actions are less ambiguous. We’re no longer talking just about the sorts of distasteful views that drunk uncles utter at Thanksgiving tables. Since October 7, we’re faced now with people – including leading voices on the left – who are openly and triumphantly supporting the rape, kidnapping, beheading and mass murder of Jews.

Now hold on, some voices are right now responding, we’re talking about Israelis, not Jews.

OK, let’s give them that one free. They are openly and triumphantly supporting the rape, kidnapping, beheading and mass murder of Israelis. All good now?

What kind of a movement not only justifies but celebrates rape, kidnappings, beheadings and mass murders of anyone? Ultimately, whether this is antisemitism by strict definition is a heap of rhetorical dirt against the charred remains of Jewish (or any other) babies.

Sadly, this reaction exists on a continuum of dehumanization that has only gained strength over the past 25 years. However, though on the same continuum, it represents a morally calamitous new benchmark of heinousness. This inhumanity and hatred has always existed – indeed, it has been called “the oldest hatred” – but this is the first time in the 21^st century we have been able to see it so baldly and gleefully celebrated by people who consider themselves authorities on justice and morality. We now have a tangible stick with which to measure human decency. The theoretical arguments over the presence of antisemitism in our movements are, for now, over.

We have lost this battle primarily because the response from the vast majority of activists – not the perpetrators of antisemitism but the bystanders – is nonchalance. Many or most progressive activists who are not antisemitic have demonstrated with their feet that they are prepared to keep marching with those who are. So be it, they say, as long as this cadre of enormously enthusiastic activists breathe life into our causes.

There should be a term for this sort of accommodation with racism, but we’ll leave that for another day.

What we face now is sort of the “Yes, and …” that follows the “So be it.”

In the aftermath of October 7 – indeed, on October 7, before any plausible deniability was granted by the Israeli military’s response to the pogrom – voices worldwide, almost all of them probably self-described “progressives,” were justifying and celebrating the atrocities.

But the Palestinian movement is a big tent. The “left” is even bigger – so big, in fact, that there is not even a single term to encompass it. We are talking about people who belong to movements and self-identify as variously as progressive, liberal, radical, socialist, social democratic, democratic socialist, the list goes on.

The time has come, though, to sort ourselves into just two distinct groups, whatever other nomenclature we use. We are either for October 7 or against it. There is no middle ground.

This is cut-and-dried. We either condemn what happened on October 7 – and further, any inhumane worldview that allows it to happen or justifies it post facto – or we support it. Those are our two choices. And the evidence is on the record (or not) in the case of every single activist, leader and aspirant for office. Unlike our record on antisemitism, which comes down to I said/you said, this is instantly provable. We either vociferously denounce October 7 or we exclude ourselves from civilized society.

Any person not on record condemning October 7 should be disqualified from every progressive space, exiled from our union locals, banned from membership in our social justice organizations, barred at the door from our conferences and deplatformed in any and every venue that expects to be accepted as a reasonable voice in our movements and society.

We can be a big tent – but our tent cannot be so big as to include those who view October 7 and the fanaticism and inhumanity that inspired it as tolerable. To welcome a single such person is to poison our entire movement.

Of course, the evidence that we are willing to save our movements by cutting out this ideological cancer is not good. From London to Lusaka, from Sanaa to San Francisco, millions of activists are perfectly OK being associated with the most repellent strains in the global body politic if (by some magic it hasn’t yet succeeded in doing over 75 years) their anti-Jewish racism and the merciless violence that stems from it helps free Palestine.

Millions of activists who were not sufficiently turned off by antisemitism in our movements are now faced with marching alongside those who endorse mass rape as a tool of resistance. They are not put off by being part of a cause that endorses burning babies alive to free Palestine. They are unbothered by their membership in an undertaking that kidnaps toddlers and pregnant women and holds them in underground tunnels for months as political prisoners.

And, again, no: it doesn’t matter what Israel has done, is doing or may do. That is whataboutery. This is about taking responsibility for our own actions, our own movements, our own morality. No one who responds to October 7 with “But Israel ….” has the right to call themselves progressive. We who are progressive need to block these voices and their ideas at the doors of our movements – not figuratively, but literally.

If “by any means necessary” means what we saw October 7, anyone still marching under that banner needs to be cancelled.

The left needs a cordon sanitaire to protect the rightness of our causes from the toxicity of the violence and inhumanity of those who do anything short of denounce October 7.

Before being given any platform in progressive spaces, every D-list academic, every radical blogger, every street activist and anyone with the remotest claim to inclusion in the broad movement we call the left should have their public record scoured for evidence of approval for this depraved strain of inhumanity. To be considered appropriate and acceptable to march alongside, every individual should be forced as the price of admission to disavow the events of October 7 and condemn and cancel any and every person who does not.

Will it happen? Almost certainly not. If the inmates are not entirely in charge of the asylum, the sentinels are at least looking the other way.

This is not about people holding political views with which we might agree or disagree. This is about people who embody a worldview so lacking in compassion, humanity and decency that they can celebrate predations almost beyond human imagining.

The broader left can tolerate anti-Zionists – indeed, we have welcomed them wholeheartedly, despite the moral compromises this involves around women’s equality, queer rights and everything we deem progressive.

But this is not about Zionism or anti-Zionism. This is about humanity and barbarousness.

And so far the left has done a disastrous job responding. We have chosen to view the pogrom enthusiasts not as the social pariahs they should be but rather as people perhaps a tad outside the mainstream but worthy no less of our respect as members of the Rape-Endorsing Community.

To do anything but flush from our movements and our midst these sorts of people puts in jeopardy everything we believe and everything we have built. If we do not condemn and shun these people, we deserve to be condemned and spurned by society. Not only should pro-pogromists be quarantined from our quarters, but everyone seeking any position of authority or respect must unequivocally denounce the pro-pogromists, without employing the word “but,” or be treated as one of them.

The challenge is that decent people on the left may view these crank ideologists as a lunatic fringe best ignored. They are lunatics, we can agree. But are they a fringe? We’d better make sure that they are – because if our movements are seen as defined by these figures and their obscene ideas, our entire cause will become peripheral. The dead canary will be proof not only of antisemitism in our movements but of toxins that will poison our advocacy for climate change responses, women’s rights, queer equality and every other cause, especially antiracism.

If we allow these extremists to shift the left’s Overton window, we are done – and so we should be.

If a person’s views on rape, kidnapping and mass murder would make a civilized person’s skin crawl, people who self-define as progressive shouldn’t be marching with them. We who devote ourselves to legitimately progressive causes deserve to know if the ones marching beside us are pro- or anti-immolation, pro- or anti-beheading babies.

This internal discussion is a sort of primary season for our legitimacy. The path we choose will move on to the general. The public, as much as plenty of progressives disdain the popular voice, will determine whether we are legitimate voices for the progressive values of inclusion and human decency we claim to stand for.

The right is already having a field day deriding Defund the Police, Critical Race Theory and a range of leftist approaches. Imagine the wedge they will have if the left can accurately be portrayed applauding the mutilation of human remains, rejoicing in rape, hailing mass murder as justifiable homicide and praising beheadings as “anti-colonialism.”

This is the challenge we face. The choice should be obvious.