A pretty good column today from Michelle Goldberg who takes a look at people in her own social circles, i.e. fellow left-wing progressives, many of whom seem determined to try and justify the mass murder of Israelis by Hamas.

On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel. Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.

…the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.

An editor at the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents told Goldberg, “I’m trying to hold on, personally, to my commitments, my values, which now feel in conflict, in a way, with the political community that I lived alongside in the United States for basically my whole adult life.” He added, “It certainly has begun to feel like a breaking point.”

As always, Goldberg is conscious of how all of this will look to people on the right.

Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary.

She’s right about the first part. If you’re a left wing Jew watching your friends celebrate mass murder this week then you have my sympathy, but the case that you were naïve is pretty self-evident at this point. It’s not like the sympathies of the Squad or the leaders of the Women’s March or various BDS campus group have been a closely guarded secret.

On Thursday, Students for Justice in Palestine, a network of pro-Palestinian campus groups, is holding Day of Resistance demonstrations across the United States and Canada. A planning document the group posted online refers to all of Israel as a “settler colony” and says, “Settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.”

Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty…Che Guevara didn’t become a dorm room icon only for his motorcycle and rakish beret.

This may be the first time I’ve heard anyone on the left say a critical word about Che. He’s generally treated like a saint.

On social media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.

We’ve just spent a year arguing about wokeness, identity politics and other big leftist ideas which have been trickling down from campus radicals and academics into the public sphere for the past 7-8 years. As the right complains about some of the real life outcomes of these ideas, the left and the media have, for the most part, dismissed all of it as part of a right-wing plot.

But reality has a funny way of intruding on partisan wishcasting. So it appears we’re going to end the year with a bunch of shocked leftists realizing that colonialism and decolonization literally mean giving a high five to people murdering Jewish civilians. Again, my sympathies, but if you’re shocked by this turn of events it’s probably because you haven’t been paying attention.

As is often the case, there are some good comments:

Hamas wants innocent people in Gaza to die because it powers the rage that enables them to thrive. That was the plan all along. For decades money that should have been spent on schools and healthcare and economic development has been channeled into the creation of more radical militants. This is indeed a tragedy for the everyday people in Gaza who aren’t Hamas, and a 911 moment for the people of Israel.

A person who calls himself “Liberal” writes:

The Palestinian massacre of Israeli civilians last week was a black and white moment. There can be no excuse for the intentional massacre of over a 1000 civilians and those that accept or celebrate it either have no moral compass or do not accept the victims as human beings.

The celebration of this massacre has been a clarifying moment for me. I consider those who are celebrate or try to excuse it to be fundamentally immoral and I will not intentionally stand with or support them on any issue where I can avoid it. I am as “right” as I ever have been.

There are some folks on the other side but they don’t seem to be arguing that the behavior of US leftists is justifiable in this case.