The massacre did not create a new anti-Israel politics. It exposed one that was already there.

With the recent elections in New York City, we may be witnessing not the birth of a new leftward turn, but the unveiling of one that has been underway for some time. What this portends for familiar notions of American exceptionalism, for the political center—if that term still has stable meaning—and for Jews, Israel, and their supporters is not yet clear. But one thing no longer seems theoretical. A change many had feared is here.

What interests me most is not simply the fact of that change, but its speed—and its eerie coherence. Its ideas did not emerge gradually through persuasion or patient argument. They seemed ready-made, awaiting a rupture through which they could suddenly pour. And once they did, they did not remain confined to New York, or even to the United States. Given the strange symmetry of protests across the globe—in the streets, on campuses, in city councils, and at the United Nations—one begins to wonder what, exactly, had been lying in wait.

The first date that comes to my mind is October 7.

Some will say this is my Jewish myopia: why are you still harping on October 7? Was it not, in the larger story of global politics, merely a footnote? A terrible one, perhaps, but still a footnote.

I do not believe chronology permits that dismissal.

Because whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, Zionism, colonialism, or the moral vocabulary that now dominates so much of public discourse, it is worth asking what changed after October 7—and what did not. It is worth asking why the massacre of Jews in Israel did not merely provoke condemnation, grief, or even political dispute, but instead seemed to unlock a pre-assembled worldview: one in which the dead could be absorbed almost instantly into an argument against the Jewish state; one in which the oldest hatreds, dressed in the language of liberation, could present themselves as moral sophistication; one in which a pogrom did not interrupt the narrative, but served it well.

That, to me, is what felt new. Or perhaps not new, but newly visible.

Within hours of the slaughter, before Israel had mounted the military response that would become the subject of global outrage, the anti-colonial script was already in hand. The massacre was then contextualized, translated, metabolized. The rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and murder of civilians could not be allowed to stand as an obscenity. It had to be folded back into a prior story, one in which Israel was already cast as the oppressor, the colonizer, the uniquely guilty party, and in which even the butchery of its civilians could be made to serve as a footnote to its own indictment.

That chronology remains relevant to me. Not because timing alone resolves every ethical dilemma, but because it reveals what was already loaded in the chamber.

One of the clearest signs of this came from institutions that, in theory, should have been least capable of averting their eyes. Consider the long delay—and in some cases the near-silence—of major women’s organizations, including UN bodies ostensibly dedicated to the protection of women, in acknowledging the rapes, mutilations, and sexual torture committed against Israeli women on October 7. One need not be a champion of Israel to recognize the significance of that failure. It was not mere diplomatic caution or simple bureaucratic inertia. It suggested something deeper and uglier: that within our reigning moral framework, even sexual violence against women may cease to register as fully real when the women in question belong to the wrong side of the ideological ledger.

That ledger is by now familiar. The world is divided between oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized, the powerful and the powerless. Once those roles are assigned, ethical perception itself begins to warp. Strength becomes evidence of guilt, while suffering is filtered through prior political judgment. Some victims are granted immediate humanity. Others are treated as inconvenient complications in a story whose conclusion has already........

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