Free Republic

On the morning of 7 October 2023, the militant Palestinian group Hamas orchestrated a multi-pronged assault against Israel from the Gaza Strip. Their fighters breached the heavily fortified border and murdered more than 1,400 Israeli civilians, including young children. Here in the West, the political discourse surrounding these brutal events and the war that has come in their wake has been coloured by a misguided transposition of Western identity politics onto the Middle East, which collapses all nuance and reduces a complex situation into a simple binary of oppressor versus oppressed. Leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestinians (including...