When the Left Stops Arguing: The Crisis Exposed After October 7

Ideological crises do not begin at the ballot box. They begin the moment a political camp stops listening to the critical voices rising from within it. Perhaps the most important paragraph in the farewell letter of French journalist Jean Quatremer from the newspaper 'Libération' is not about Israel at all. It is about the culture of debate.

Quatremer, who left the newspaper after more than forty years, does not open his letter with the war in Gaza or Middle Eastern politics. He returns specifically to the eighties, to the days when the 'Libération' editorial board was a place where people argued incessantly. They shouted at each other, leveled sharp criticism, fought over ideas, and at the end of the day sat down together to drink a glass of wine. The disagreement was not perceived as a threat to the camp; it was evidence that it was alive.

Only later does the discussion about Israel arrive. One can agree with Quatremer or disagree with him, but it is hard to ignore the deep feeling arising from his letter: he is mourning not only a newspaper that has changed, but an entire political culture. In his view, the Left he knew today struggles to contain internal criticism. Instead of debate, delegitimization has been created. Instead of an attempt to persuade, there is a quick division of the world into the righteous and the wrong.

When I read his words, I thought of another book written almost twenty years earlier — 'Returning to Reims' by French sociologist Didier Eribon. Eribon also wrote out of pain. He did not seek to explain the rise of the far-right in France, but to understand how his father, who was a worker, a communist, a Stalinist, and a man of the Left all his life, came to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front.

Through his father's story, Eribon sought to understand how an entire public, which for generations had been the backbone of the French Left, moved away from it. His answer was poignant: the Left stopped speaking to the people in whose name it sought to act. It moved away from the working class, gradually adopted a new language of identities, recognition, and representation, and lost the connection with those who were previously its power base.

The tragedy, from Eribon's perspective, was not that his father had changed. The tragedy was that the Left had changed, and therefore his father no longer felt he belonged to it. Quatremer describes a different crisis, but it seems he belongs to the same story. If Eribon described the moment when the Left lost the working class, Quatremer describes the moment when it begins to lose the ability to argue with itself.

And then came October 7th. No, it did not create this crisis — it exposed it. For years, a theoretical debate had been taking place in the West about post-colonialism, about identity politics, and about the relations between oppressors and oppressed. For many, these were academic discussions. The Hamas attack on the communities of the South turned them overnight into a moral test.

In the days and weeks after the massacre, it became clear that the question is not only how Israel will respond, but how those who for years presented themselves as the standard-bearers of universalism will respond. In leading campuses in the United States and Europe, demonstrations were held where calls were sometimes heard that were perceived by many as legitimization of violence or as a denial of Israel's very existence. Lecturers, journalists, and social activists argued sharply not only about the war in Gaza, but also about the question of whether it is possible to condemn the Hamas massacre unequivocally without being suspected of abandoning the progressive camp. Suddenly it became clear that the disagreement is no longer between Right and Left, but also within the Left itself.

Is it possible to unequivocally condemn a deliberate massacre of civilians, and in the same breath also recognize the suffering of the citizens of Gaza? Is it possible to defend the right of the Palestinians to freedom and independence, and at the same time recognize the right of Israel to exist in security? Is it possible to fight against antisemitism and Islamophobia with the same degree of commitment, without making one of them secondary in relation to the other?

It seems that precisely at this moment, the tensions that already existed within parts of the European Left were sharpened. In campuses, in media outlets, in civil society organizations, and in intellectual spaces, it became clear how difficult it is to hold complexity when reality does not fit into the simple division into oppressors and oppressed. Suddenly it became clear that not every conflict can be explained using the same categories, and that not every moral question allows for an automatic answer.

At the same time, Jews in many countries in Europe reported an increase in antisemitic incidents and a sense of insecurity. Here too, the reactions within the liberal camp were not always uniform. There were clear voices that condemned the phenomenon, and there were also those who were perceived as struggling to give it the same attention they gave to other forms of racism.

This is also the reason why the testimony of Dr. Halima Begum aroused so much interest. Begum, a British Muslim who served as CEO of Oxfam UK, claimed after the end of her tenure that during the war, a culture had developed, in her words, that allowed for antisemitic expressions and exerted pressure around the way of relating to Israel. The Oxfam management rejected her claims, and it is not the purpose of this article to decide the dispute. However, the very fact that the criticism was heard from within one of the most important human rights organizations in the world, and from someone who came from the same value-based camp, teaches that these questions do not come only from the outside — they also arise from within.

Precisely because Begum is not identified with the Right, is not Israeli, and is not Jewish, but comes from the same humanistic tradition in whose name the organization she headed also spoke, her testimony aroused a wide echo. She demonstrated that the debate is not only between Israel and its critics, but also within the liberal community itself.

This is, in my view, the thread connecting Eribon, Quatremer, and Begum. All three do not attack the camp from which they came. Precisely for this reason, it is so difficult to dismiss their words as just another criticism from the outside. All three seek to warn it: Eribon warned against the disconnect from the working class; Quatremer warns against the loss of the culture of debate; Begum warns against the possibility that even human rights organizations will lose their commitment to moral consistency when they face the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I do not write these things out of schadenfreude towards the European Left. On the contrary. For years, I saw in its intellectual tradition a source of inspiration: commitment to universalism, to freedom of speech, to self-criticism, and to the belief that even a political opponent deserves to be heard. Precisely for this reason, I find it difficult to ignore the feeling that something of this tradition has cracked. I am not afraid of a Left that criticizes Israel; criticism is an inseparable part of any democratic society. I am afraid of a Left that struggles to contain criticism of itself.

Perhaps this is why Eribon's book returns to me again and again. He sought to understand how his father, a communist and Stalinist all his life, came to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen. Almost twenty years later, it seems that Quatremer is asking a different question: not what happened to the working class, but what happened to the Left itself.

It is possible that this is the great lesson that Eribon, Quatremer, and October 7th leave behind. Not every criticism is a betrayal. Sometimes, the best way to save a political camp is not to defend it from its critics, but to listen to them.

Perhaps this is a lesson that is not intended only for the European Left. The Israeli Left, too, precisely in a period of deep polarization, can find inspiration in the Jewish tradition of debate, which saw in disagreement not a threat but a way to clarify the truth. After all, for thousands of years, Jewish culture has existed through disagreements — not despite them, but because of them.

Because the moment a political camp stops seeing disagreement as a source of learning, and begins to see it as a threat to its identity, it does not only lose its opponents. It begins to lose itself as well.

The author is a sociologist, a senior lecturer, and head of the master's program in the Department of Communications at Sapir Academic College.