Gaza and Left compulsiveness / obsessiveness

George Fish

Platypus Review 189 | September 2026

PRIOR TO OCTOBER 7, 2023, Gaza wasn’t seriously on the Western Left’s radar at all.^[1] It was a non-topic for discussion, as Gaza was quiescent. Hamas, which governed Gaza by force and threat of terror against its civilian population, seethed with anger against Israel, and desired Israel’s elimination and replacement by an Islamic caliphate; but not so much, generally, the Gazan civilian population, which was resigned to the uneasy status quo that kept everything as it was. To be sure, there were the sporadic launches by Hamas of small, poor-quality, and largely inaccurate missiles into Israel, which did little damage. There had also been massive marches previous to that, verbally highly militant and vociferous but largely (though not entirely) nonviolent, again, organized by Hamas. These demonstrations went up to the Gaza-Israel border to angrily and loudly protest, and to get easing of Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. But all of this was minor in terms of attracting Western, including Western Leftist, attention to the Palestinian situation and cause. These protests were held along the Gaza–Israel border from the end of March 2018 to the end of December 2019.^[2] Toward gaining broader Left attention they made barely a ripple.

A much more significant threat for Hamas’s goals was the Abraham Accords, negotiated under the first Trump Administration, which threatened to garner broader Arab recognition for Israel, causing further erosion of the saliency of the Palestinian cause. In other words, the Palestinians were being sidetracked and ignored in what was an uneasy status quo in which Israel remained what it was, a militarily powerful Jewish state, and Palestinians remained what they were, a marginalized “cause” that was also snubbed (except verbally) by its Arab “allies.” What was happening on the West Bank was of more concern, with the expansion of Jewish settlements there, while both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas looked on uneasily, but powerless to change anything about this de facto “truce-not-a-truce” — a stalemate where everything stayed the same.

All that changed, of course, on October 7, 2023, when armed Hamas militants on glider wings entered Israel near the Gazan border and massacred, raped, and mutilated over 1,200 Israelis, including 200-some at a rave festival, and took 250 Israelis hostage, along with some Thai nationals who had been working in Israel. Hamas combat soldiers also killed 45 Druze Arabs, considered traditional enemies of Arab Muslims. While Hamas claimed it had targeted Israeli military targets, that claim is belied by who was killed — overwhelmingly civilians as opposed to Israeli soldiers. Hamas also later claimed it itself hadn’t killed, raped, or mutilated that many Israeli civilians — that many of the murders, rapes, and mutilations had been done by angry Gazan civilians who broke across the Gaza–Israel border in the wake of Hamas’s attack — but that was also belied by the facts.^[3] Ironically, many of the Jews killed by Hamas were for Palestinian rights and were critics of Netanyahu’s policies, and the rave itself had been organized as a demonstration advocating peace, for this area of Israel was a Left-wing enclave, especially when compared to other parts of Israel. But to Hamas, that didn’t matter; they were Jews, and that was all there was to it.

The Hamas attack was initially greeted with jubilation in Gaza among its civilian population, and for the Western Left, Gaza was now on the radar. A rally was scheduled for October 8, 2023, in New York City, organized by the Stalinist Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and endorsed by NYC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). A PSL speaker at the rally crowed that Hamas soldiers on glider wings had “taken out two hundred hipsters” at the rave, which brought cheers of joy from the rally audience.^[4] Later, as the rally moved to another part of the city where Jews had gathered to mourn those killed in the Hamas attack, swastikas were flashed at the Jewish mourners, and they were taunted and jeered at — a clear demonstration of anti-Jewish hate. Black Lives Matter posted on its website a depiction of an armed soldier on glider wings in solidarity with Hamas and what it had just done. Across DSA chapters nationally, the Hamas attack was celebrated, and Israel demonized for its treatment of the Palestinians, which made Hamas’s attack inevitable. Hamas was lauded by the Western Left, both in the U.S. and in Europe, as offering “resistance” to overwhelming oppression carried on by Israel against Palestinians, supposedly since its founding. The Western Left, or certainly its most visible and vocal part, had clearly jumped on the pro-Hamas bandwagon, called what it had done “resistance,” and vociferously condemned Israel. This summarizes what was clearly well-documented by the media: an outpouring of anti-Israel hate and pro-Hamas support by the Western Left that began immediately after word of Hamas’s attack had reached the West.

Exceptions were so few they were almost nonexistent. One such was the small British Trotskyist group, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL);^[5] but from the British Stop the War coalition to the U.S.’s DSA, as well as in Western and Central Europe, the Left united behind Hamas and lauded it for its supposedly incisive act of “resistance.” Left voices that demurred from this were few and far between, and among those that were, many of them were from prominent DSAers in the U.S. who resigned from the organization in protest of the DSA’s official pro-Hamas stance — a stance that was clearly there factually, even if Western Left groups such as the DSA didn’t state it explicitly.^[6]

As for the cause of Hamas’s attack, what allegedly provoked it, the Western Left was clear: Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Israel was illegitimate and had no right to exist, the ideology of calling for a Jewish state, Zionism, was specifically condemned over and over again, and in what might be called a blatant act of chutzpah, Jews in the West and elsewhere were specifically called upon to renounce all Zionism, to sever all ties with Israel. This was also echoed by specifically Jewish groups on the Left such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)^[7] and IfNotNow,^[8] as well as pro-Palestinian groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and the Marxist-Leninist (including Leninist-Trotskyist) and Maoist political parties, none of which tried in the least to distance themselves from Hamas, or being labeled pro-Hamas. The only organized exceptions on the Left this author is aware of is the above-mentioned AWL, and the much-diminished-from-what-it-had-been Socialist Workers Party in the U.S., and the Antideutsch in Germany. But the vast majority of the Western Left was vociferously demonizing Israel and clamorously “pro-Palestinian,” and made no serious attempt to separate that from being outright pro-Hamas, even if much of it did not embrace Hamas openly by name — although some did.^[9]

Gaza was now on the radar of the Western Left. Western Leftist compulsiveness / obsessiveness over Gaza and the alleged Israeli “genocide” of the Gazan people, by its bombing of Gaza from October 8, 2023 on to destroy Hamas, was kicked off in the Left press by an almost complete outpouring of articles solely on these two topics after October 7. This outpouring — with the additional topic of Western Leftist resistance to Israel and Israeli “genocide” — continued throughout 2024 and into the summer of 25. It was slowed only when Trump announced his new “peace plan” for Gaza,^[10] which the mainstream press invidiously dubbed the creation of a “Gaz-a-Lago”^[11]: development of the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort with the Gazan inhabitants largely kicked out and not allowed to return.^[12]

But about this plan the Western Left said essentially nothing. It was the same about the senseless civil war in Sudan at the same time, which was reported on in depth and from eyewitness account by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic.^[13] This senseless war, which according to Applebaum, had cost more lives than Ukraine and Gaza combined, resulted from the rivalrous falling-out of two Sudanese warlords, both with substantial parts of the former Sudanese army under their command. But on this disastrous war the Western Left had nothing to say. There were no reports on Sudan in any of its leading publications.

The same was true of the anti-Hamas mass protests in Gaza by tens of thousands of Gazan civilians in February 2025, where demonstrators risked their lives protesting Hamas rule and the devastation it had caused by provoking massive Israeli military retaliation — and many demonstrators did pay with their lives, as they were shot by Hamas after it regained control of the Gazan streets. Hamas has relied on terror, both soft and hard, to rule.

But on this, and on the Gazan demonstrators taking to the streets, again, no reports in the organs of the Western Left press. The same was true in early 2026, with silence once more from the Western Left press about Trump’s new plan for brokering a peace settlement in Gaza. However, when the Iranian-backed Houthis attacked Western ships from their base in Yemen, when Israel attacked Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and when Iran retaliated in support of its two proxies by firing missiles into Israel, the Western Left press responded gleefully in support of the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran, portraying them as “anti-imperialist” forces. Because, for some on the Left, any force that is anti-U.S., anti-Western, and anti-Israel is automatically “anti-imperialist” and thus “progressive,” even if it is regressive and reactionary — like the mullahs who recently massacred the protesting Iranian people in the streets, as well as the Houthis and Hezbollah, all of whom adhere to Islamism, a reactionary, authoritarian, and regressive form of Islam.^[14] Needless to say, the mass demonstrations in Iran against the continued rule of the mullahs in December 2025 and January 2026 were greeted by silence on the part of the Western Left. And only treated cursorily by the press was the Israeli Left’s indignant cry of concern and appeal to this Western Left on its support of Hamas, who had killed in cold blood their Israeli brethren!

But these are just the Western Left’s “sins of omission.” A serious “sin of commission” came about via U.S. countercultural magazine Yes! when it printed the alleged investigative reporting by Arun Gupta, a longtime Left activist and writer I’ve been aware of since the 1980s.^[15] He claims in Yes! that the stories of mass rape and mutilation were fabrications, though he relies not on direct evidence, but firmly stated innuendos for which there just isn’t any evidence; and although he does quote a lot of sources (none of which he interviewed or reported on firsthand), he limits them to short and often edited quotes, with ellipses indicating words left out. Further, Gupta claims a mass-propaganda, misinformation campaign on the part of the Israeli government that suckered such paragons of reliable investigative reporting as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. — All this supposedly bombshell investigative reporting published by him in an obscure magazine of the countercultural, not overtly political, Left! It seems that Gupta simply took what was already published, and tried to skewer it. Critics have pointed out that Gupta’s approach is reminiscent of the ploy that’s standard use by Holocaust deniers: use lack of direct evidence and allegedly contradictory stories by witnesses to deny the whole thing ever happened! Yes, there was much confusion and chaos at the time of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, but that doesn’t translate into lack of evidence. Gupta is a political activist who’s more interested in exonerating Hamas of the charge of committing atrocities than he is a trained, experienced investigative journalist. Gupta decries the lack of forensic evidence of rape, but even the accounts he relates — many of them obviously edited — indicate that some atrocious things did happen. Because of these criticisms, Gupta’s story was not picked up and spread widely by the Left, and is now largely considered discredited, but it did cause a sensation when it first appeared.^[16]

Another major “sin of commission” is the constant repetition by the Western Left of the charge of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. Even using the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health official statistics belies this. But first, a note on the death statistics, which, from a statistics standpoint, are so dubious as to be worthless, although both mainstream and Left media take them seriously and regard them as accurate.^[17] But the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health death statistics give the number of deaths down to single digits, which is impossible in a wartime situation. Further, these statistics make no attempt to distinguish death from natural causes from death resulting from Israeli military actions, and women and children are overrepresented in the deaths, despite a 50–50 male/female gender split in Gazan society. Last, the statistics do not distinguish between Gazan civilian deaths and deaths of Hamas and Islamic Jihad combatants. All these fatal flaws have been pointed out by professional statisticians in articles in the Jewish press, notably the magazines Fathom and The Tablet. Gaza Ministry of Health statistics are but propaganda designed to make Israel look bad.

But be that as it may, the death statistics themselves give the lie to widespread “genocide” against Gazans at the hands of the Israeli military. Aizenberg, an analyst for the online Jewish media site Honest Reporting, posted the following chart on X:^[18]

The total population of Gaza is 2.1 million people.^[19] Even using the first statistic in the chart, the inflated number given of 71,550 deaths — that’s only 3.4% of the population; a far cry from being a “genocide”! Moreover, calculating the ratio of the total number of collateral-damage civilian deaths given in the chart (36,750) to the total population gives those fatalities as only 1.75% of the population! The message of the math is clear: this is not “genocide,” this is “collateral damage” incurred as a result of the Israeli armed forces going after a legitimate military target, Hamas combatants and infrastructure. Unfortunately, collateral damage, civilians killed because they “get in the way” of pursuing legitimate military targets, is an integral part of modern warfare, especially in urban areas such as Gaza, where Hamas hides itself in civilian structures, often masquerades as civilians, reporters, or doctors, and does exactly what it brags about: using civilians as “human shields” to create “martyrs” for the Hamas cause!

This is precisely what the Western Left, in its loose charge of Israeli “genocide” against Gazan civilians, denies. It should be noted that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians in their pursuit of destroying the Nazis militarily, and the firebombing of Tokyo alone caused 2 million Japanese civilian deaths, yet no one calls this “genocide”! Because it wasn’t; it was unfortunate collateral damage, the unfortunate result of modern warfare. No one accuses the Allies of deliberately targeting civilians. The same can be said of Israel in Gaza: no one can accuse the Israeli military seriously of deliberately targeting Gazan civilians, especially as the Israeli military makes a concerted effort to warn Gazan civilians beforehand to evacuate. No, the charge of Israeli “genocide” is unsubstantiated — Israel, by any realistic standard, is not deliberately, systematically, with intent, targeting Gazan civilians in its military pursuit of Hamas. And it must be remembered: intention to kill off a people, and doing such in a systematic way, are part of the definition of actual genocide in international law now, integrally part of the Genocide Convention. Left charges of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza are just unwarranted hyperbole, we can justly conclude from the arguments above.

It is also a strange “genocide” that kills less than 2% of the population, as shown above. Real genocides kill much larger percentages of the targeted populations than the less than 2% of Gazans killed by Israel.^[20] The Holocaust killed 67% of European Jewry; the Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed 85% of the Tutsi tribe,^[21] and the Turks killed 80% of the Armenians residing in Turkey in 1915–17.^[22] While these were Christians killed by Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians from Serbia killed 100,000 Bosnian (Muslim) and Croatian (Catholic) civilians in 1992–95, 80% of whom were Bosniaks, i.e., Bosnian Muslims.^[23] In Sudan, in the civil wars in Darfur and in the rest of Somalia, 200,000 have died in Darfur alone in 2003–24,^[24] and 400,000 Somalis were killed from 2023–24.^[25]

But just as the Western Left unfortunately is specious on “genocide,” it is also specious on antisemitism. One prominent example of this comes from the U.S. news magazine In These Times, in which authors Dania Rajendra and Rebecca Vilkomerson (former Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace) write this appalling paragraph: “The Hamas attack was not an antisemitic act. Hamas targeted Israelis as oppressors of their people, not as Jews. In fact, non-Jews number substantially among the killed and captured. This distinction does not excuse attacks on civilians, but failing to acknowledge the fundamental difference between the massacres of the Holocaust and the October 7 attacks is a bad-faith argument.”^[26]

But the bad faith is on the part of Rajendra and Vilkomerson. Hamas makes no distinction whatsoever between Jews as such and “oppressors of their people.” In fact, it specifically regards Jews as such as these “oppressors”! One has to be totally ignorant of what Hamas has actually said and written to argue otherwise. This “argument” is akin to arguing that the Holocaust itself was “not an antisemitic act” because others than Jews were also targeted for extermination! The Holocaust claimed 13 million victims of whom “only” 6 million were Jews. The rest of the victims were Roma (gypsies), socialists, communists, the physically handicapped, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, homosexuals, Slavs, and opponents of Nazi rule generally, many of whom were non-Jewish. But by Rajendra and Vilkomerson’s “reasoning,” the Holocaust itself was “not an antisemitic act” because “non-Jews number substantially” among its victims!

Almost immediately after October 8, 2023, when Israel began its reprisals against Hamas, the Western Left was calling for a “ceasefire,” by which it meant a unilateral ceasefire by Israel, with no reciprocity from Hamas. But when there was a negotiated ceasefire and hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, Hamas unilaterally broke it — and bragged about breaking the ceasefire! But not a word from the Western Left about this. Needless to say, calls for a de facto unilateral ceasefire by Israel continued, only to end in June 2025 with Trump’s notorious “peace plan.”

Nor did the Western Left ever address the issue of Left antisemitism, which became blatant in the spring of 2024 with the Gaza enclaves. Numerous incidents of Left antisemitism were reported, ranging all the way from telling U.S. Jews, “Go back to Poland,” “Go back to Berlin,” the truly nefarious “Go back to Auschwitz,” to the enclave at UCLA denying Jewish students access to the university library unless they affirmed that they were not “Zionists.” But all this was ignored by the student activists of the Left and the enclaves, who said that incidents of antisemitism were not caused by the students at the enclaves, but by outsiders (but why weren’t the enclaves better policed?), or that Left antisemitism was either minor or nonexistent; real antisemitism was the province only of the Right.

Adam Louis-Klein, a pro-Israel U.S.-born graduate student at Canada’s McGill University working on his Ph.D. in anthropology has written trenchantly on Left anti-Zionism.^[27] Most notably, Louis-Klein has pointed out that antisemitism is now embracing the Gaza cause — because of Israeli policies in Gaza, all Jews are held culpable and responsible, not just the Israeli government and military leaders. This was much discussed when Emil Rodriguez, the killer of two workers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. and a person with at least former ties to the far-Left PSL, shouted “Free Palestine!” as he murdered them in cold blood. Ironically, both these Israeli Embassy employees were Christians, but it didn’t matter — they were of Jewish origin, and just as it used to be in the segregationist South, “one drop of Negro blood” makes you black, so now it’s the same with “one drop of Jewish blood.”

A retired Left-wing professor of my acquaintance, who holds a Ph.D. in political science and taught courses on the Cold War, said to me notoriously, “While I don’t agree with the tactics, what Hamas did was ‘resistance,’” and “Israel’s policy is creating antisemitism.” But both these statements are blatantly false. What Hamas did on October 7 was atrocity murder, mutilation rape, and the illegal taking of hostages. And Gaza is the pretext for renewed antisemitism, not its cause. It is the demonization of Israel, the refusal to treat Israel as any other nation-state whose policies we may oppose. But the same Western Left that demonizes Israel and denies its right to exist wants to be able to go to North Korea as tourists, and has nothing to say about China’s treatment of Xinjiang Uyghurs, or the people of Tibet and Hong Kong!

Noted Left-wing Middle Eastern scholar Gilbert Achcar claims, in the Trotskyist / Shachtmanist journal New Politics, that while the victims of Hamas numbered 1,200 on the Israeli side, “Many fewer people know about the 1,600 Palestinians who died in this operation.”^[28] This is the first time this author has ever heard this claim, but even if so, those who died were aggressors, either Hamas or Islamic Jihad combatants, or else Gazan civilians who stormed the Gaza–Israel fence determined to kill Israelis, and who were thus killed in legitimate self-defense. Further, although Achcar claims Israel is a colonial-settler state, and that colonial-settler states always engage in genocide, Achcar states, in his book The Arabs and the Holocaust (2009), that the Jewish settlers who came to Palestine and established the state of Israel did not do so as settler-colonialists, but as refugees from the rampant antisemitism of Europe of the 1930s which continued virulently in the immediate aftermath of World War II.^[29] The Jewish settlers just happened, unfortunately, to be European when the emerging anticolonial consciousness of the Third World was turning anti-European. Overwhelmingly, the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Europe would’ve liked to have emigrated to the United States, but that was precluded by racist immigration quotas legislated in 1924 that were not rescinded until 1965. Similarly, they were not fond of emigrating to Britain because of British double-dealing as holder of the Palestinian Mandate in the 1930s, alternately allowing, then forbidding, Jewish immigration to Palestine in the wake of the Nazis having come to power. Palestine, for them, was a last resort.

And while both Jews and Palestinians had blind spots toward the other, the greater blind spot was on the part of the Palestinians and the greater Arab world, which was intransigently unaccepting of the new Jewish immigrants. Also, when the five invading Arab armies attacked to wipe out the new state of Israel,^[30] they did so with the intention of wiping out all the Jewish settlers. It was the same with the Arab saber-rattling on the eve of the 1967 war: extermination of the Jewish communities. Further, although Israel is wrongly called an “apartheid state,” Israeli Arabs have equal political rights with their Jewish counterparts, have full access to schools and universities in Israel, sit in the Knesset, and serve as judges on Israeli courts. Some apartheid! While there is social discrimination against Arabs in Israel, it is more akin to a milder form of Jim Crow than that which, until 1964, was law of the land in the U.S. South.

But none of this is given recognition by the “pro-Palestinian” Western Left. Same as it doesn’t recognize Left antisemitism, even when it is blatant, and someone as Right-wing as Tucker Carlson demonizes Israel and Jews with talking points borrowed from the Left. Moreover, as the new Constitution that recently emerged from the Palestinian Authority indicates (as of February 2026), a Palestinian state would not be a secular, democratic one, but an Islamist one instead, with Sharia enshrined as law of the land. And while Christians are mentioned, Jews are excluded from all mention, as the new Constitution declares this hypothetical Palestinian state to be against “settler-colonialism” and “genocide,” both clearly code words for being anti-Jewish. Israel-Palestine remains what it has been now for decades — a proverbial open can of worms! Further, for this author, the whole conundrum resembles a classic Greek tragedy, where both peoples have legitimate but conflicting claims to the same land, both are equally intransigent on denying the claim of the other, and impersonal Fate dominates against the wishes and will of either party.

In conclusion, we of the Left can certainly oppose the policies of the Netanyahu government, and the murderous activities of the fanatical West Bank Jewish settlers: we must, and we can do so without demonizing the state of Israel, by simply treating it as any other nation-state with which we have profound policy disagreements. We of the Western Left can also look to the Israeli Left (yes, it does exist!) for guidance and mentoring, and urge reason and conscience, not to mention good will toward the other, to prevail over both Israelis and Palestinians. But we certainly don’t do this by being pro-Hamas, which is not a movement of the Left at all, but a movement of the Islamist Right, an Islamofascist movement that wishes to establish an authoritarian caliphate over the whole Middle East where only the Islamist version of Islam will prevail. But certainly, the Left shows no moral high ground whatsoever when it demonizes, rather than properly criticizes, Israel, and is notably silent on Hamas. |P

[1] While this article limits itself to the broad Western Left, in this writer’s opinion the Eastern Left and the global Southern Left has shown themselves to be no better. Unfortunately, what I accuse the Western Left of here clearly applies to the other Lefts as well.

[2] See Huthifa Fayyad, “Gaza’s Great March of Return protests explained,” Al Jazeera (March 30, 2019), <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/30/gazas-great-march-of-return-protests-explained>.

[3] See “Hamas says October 7 attack was a ‘necessary step’, admits to ‘some faults,’” Al Jazeera (January 21, 2024), <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/21/hamas-says-october-7-attack-was-a-necessary-step-admits-to-some-faults>.

[4] See Alexander Nazaryan, “Socialist rally in Times Square praising Hamas terror attack draws widespread condemnation,” Yahoo! News (October 9, 2023), <https://www.yahoo.com/news/socialist-rally-in-times-square-praising-hamas-terror-attack-draws-widespread-condemnation-204123785.html>; and David Weigel, “A rift over Israel threatens the left’s fragile gains,” Semafor (October 13, 2023), <https://www.semafor.com/article/10/13/2023/a-rift-over-israel-threatens-the-lefts-fragile-gains>.

[5] See “The war in Israel/Palestine,” Workers’ Liberty (October 8, 2023), <https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2023-10-08/war-israelpalestine>.

[6] See Maurice Isserman, “Why I Just Quit DSA,” The Nation (October 23, 2023), <https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/>; and Tom Canel, “Sins of the fathers? DSA and anti-Zionism,” Platypus Review 146 (May 2022), <https://platypus1917.org/2022/05/04/sins-of-the-fathers-dsa-and-anti-zionism/>.

[7] I refer sardonically to JVP as Jewish Voice for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and Islamism.

[8] Founded during the 2014 Gaza War.

[9] See Sasha Abramsky, “The Catastrophic Moral Failing of Those Who Won’t Condemn Hamas,” The Nation (October 12, 2023), <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/left-response-hamas/>. Abramsky’s is the only article like this that I’ve seen coming from the Left press.

[10] See “Read Trump’s 20-point proposal to end the war in Gaza,” PBS (September 29, 2023) <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-trumps-20-point-proposal-to-end-the-war-in-gaza>.

[11] After Mar-a-Lago, the name of a resort owned by Trump in Palm Beach, Florida.

[12] See Yair Rosenberg, “Nobody Wants Gaz-a-Lago,” The Atlantic (February 5, 2025), <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/trump-gaza-takeover/681576/>.

[13] Anne Applebaum, “The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth,” The Atlantic (August 6, 2025), <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/>.

[14] Noted Left feminist Judith Butler even went so far as to call Hezbollah “part of the Left” several years ago, when it obviously isn’t. See “Judith Butler on being Jewish and criticizing Israel,” Columbia University Press Blog (August 29, 2012), <https://cupblog.org/2012/08/29/judith-butler-on-being-jewish-and-criticizing-israel/>.

[15] Arun Gupta, “Claims of Mass Rape by Hamas Unravel Upon Investigation,” Yes! (March 5, 2024), <https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/03/05/israel-hamas-oct7-report-gaza>. Gupta worked as an editor at the U.S. Left newsweekly newspaper The Guardian, now defunct, when I wrote for it in the 1980s. The Guardian’s forte was not original journalism or investigative reporting, but rather rehashes of current news from a radical Left perspective and interpretive essays on Marxism and socialist politics, of which I wrote several that were published. (I was more of a “far Leftist” than I am now; at present, I consider myself a traditional democratic socialist, i.e., a social democrat.)

[16] See also Arun Gupta, “American Media Keep citing Zaka—Though Its October 7 Atrocity Stories Are Discredited in Israel,” The Intercept (February 27, 2024), <https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/>. The Intercept is justly regarded as sympathetic to Hamas. It certainly is hostile to Israel.

[17] Self-disclosure: I have a university degree in economics, so, naturally, I took a statistics course; I’m also somewhat of a math nerd, and have been since childhood. So much of our society today, and that certainly includes the Left, are mathematically and statistically illiterate or only semi-literate.

[18] Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55), “Gaza Fatality Update Jan 2026 . . .,” X (January 26, 2026), <https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/2015814807337775342>. The analysis in this table is also supported by an article in the conservative Jewish magazine, Commentary, by its military analyst, Seth Mandel: “Hamas Debunks the ‘Genocide’ Narrative,” Commentary (February 19, 2026), <https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/hamas-debunks-the-genocide-narrative/>. Notably, the conservative and pro-Israel Jewish press published valuable and reliable information on the Middle East that the Left press doesn’t publish for obviously ideological reasons. In this hyper-partisan world of the press, one has to be attuned to multiple sources to get reliable information. Here I am indebted to an email sent me by my friend and comrade Barry Finger (January 27, 2026).

[19] It is now given as 2.4 million. How does a population increase when it is allegedly the victim of “genocide”?

[20] Barry Finger, in correspondence with the author (February 5, 2026).

[21] See “Rwandan Genocide,” History (October 14, 2009), <https://www.history.com/articles/rwandan-genocide>.

[22] See Bruce Clark, “Turkey’s Killing Fields,” New York Times (April 23, 2019).

[23] See “Bosnian Genocide,” History (October 14, 2009), <https://www.history.com/articles/bosnian-genocide>.

[24] See Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, “‘History is Repeating Itself in Darfur in the Worst Way Possible’: Halting Genocide in Sudan” (January 2025), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, <https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/countries/sudan/halting-genocide-in-sudan>.

[25] See Abigael Sidi, “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: The History and Future of Genocide in Africa,” The Science Survey (July 10, 2024), <https://thesciencesurvey.com/news/2024/07/10/yesterday-today-and-tomorrow-the-history-and-future-of-genocide-in-africa/>.

[26] Dania Rajendra and Rebecca Vilkomerson, “Don’t Let the Flailing Center Box Out the Left’s Powerful Possibilities,” In These Times (December 20, 2023), <https://inthesetimes.com/article/jvp-jfrej-jews-left-gaza-israel-palestine-progressive-path-forward>.

[27] See Adam Louis-Klein, “The Holiest Hatred,” Tablet (August 20, 2025), <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/holiest-hatred-antisemitism>.

[28] Gilbert Achcar, “The Gaza Genocide in World-Historical Perspective: Book Launch at the School of Oriental and African Studies,” New Politics 20, no. 4 (Winter 2026), <https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-gaza-genocide-in-world-historical-perspective/>, which was for the publication of Gilbert Achcar, The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025).

[29] Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 9, passim.

[30] The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which ended with the establishment of the Green Line.