October 7 Did Not Create the Red-Green Alliance

October 7 did not create the alliance between the progressive left and political Islam, but it did put the alliance’s indictment of Israel on the record. Before that morning, the convergence lived mostly in slogans, coalitions, and campus demonstrations. By October 8, Hamas’s massacre of Israelis was being carried as “resistance,” and the victimhood script took over. What mattered was not who attacked, but a frame already built in the online and public-relations world. The massacre did not have to be justified. It had to be filed as “liberation.”

That reclassification is the argument of my forthcoming book, When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in Defense of the West, which launches next week. The Red-Green alliance is a strategic convergence of Leftist revolutionaries and Islamist radicals, aimed at the West and at the U.S.-Israel partnership. While Israel is not geographically West, it is Western-aligned, and functionally part of the West, because it is a developed liberal democracy. For decades it has been a primary target of the alliance. After Hamas’s attack it became the singular issue that defines the soft war – a fight over ideas and institutions, now abutting an actual war.

The date people reach for regarding the origin of the Red-Green alliance is 1979, when parts of the Western left greeted the Islamic Revolution in Iran as an anti-imperial blow. That embrace was a marker, but it was not the beginning, and the role assigned to Israel was already set. Marx divided history into “oppressor” and “oppressed” and the Bolsheviks turned that division into a global political movement. Hassan al-Banna built the Muslim Brotherhood, in the late 1920s, as a transnational political project rather than a piety movement. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism and Cold War Third Worldism supplied the common enemy – the U.S., with Israel as its outpost. Mao’s Cultural Revolution added the habit of treating politics as purification. Applied later, it made Zionism something to be purged. By the time Western radicals found a use for Khomeini, the categories were in place and the Jewish state had been assigned its role. Iran still says it. America is the Great Satan. Israel is the Little Satan.

What changed after 1979 was the route into Western institutions, and the respectability was spent on Israel. Academia was the entry point. Several key theorists show how that entry was made. Antonio Gramsci described culture as the battlefield and hegemony as a war of position, won in schools, the media, and civil society before it is won at the ballot box. Frantz Fanon supplied the rationale – violence against the “settler” cleanses the “colonized.” Edward Said made the scholar’s stance a political one, with Israel as the example to be exposed. Later curricula added the rest of the stack – critical race theory, a hierarchy of injury, white supremacy (from which Jews benefit), and “Islamophobia” as a term that collapses criticism of political agendas into a hatred of a people. Campuses were the frontline of the soft war. Classrooms were the second front. The charge that arrived in them was colonial, apartheid, genocidal. These terms set aside millennia of Jewish ties to the land and treats Israel’s Arab citizens – who vote, sit in the Knesset, and hold rights no Arab state matches – as a footnote to the indictment.

October 7 repeated a strategy others had already identified. David Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left caught the 2003 version – an anti-war frame that moved Islamist movements into respectable company. This time the fact was worse – a massacre of civilians – which had to be reclassified. “From the river to the sea” moved from a fringe chant to a commencement slogan, widely understood as a call for Israel’s destruction and explained by elected officials as an aspiration for coexistence. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace blamed Israel, not Hamas, and called Israel the source of the violence. On a Paris campus library the graffiti dropped the euphemism – “Death to Israel, Death to the Jews.” The nakba, framed by the alliance only as expulsion, omits the war Arab states launched in 1948 against the Jews and the new Israeli state, after the Jews had accepted the United Nations partition. Antisemitism here is not incidental. It is how this politics reaches a Jewish student on a Western campus.

The Red-Green alliance is now a political problem for Israel, not only an academic one. Zohran Mamdani is not the origin of anything. He is merely the current form of the alliance. The sharpest line is Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Mamdani has refused that recognition, carried a long commitment to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and on his first day as mayor revoked executive orders that had restricted the boycott apparatus in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. He draws on a progressive electorate taught an oppression ranking in which Palestinians and Muslims sit low and are therefore owed support, and in which Jews and the Jewish state sit on the other side of the spectrum. The red side thinks in terms of that ranking. The green side does not have to share its commitments on religion, sex, gender roles, or speech in order to use it against Zionism.

Criticism of an Israeli government is not the threat. Political Islam aimed at the Jewish state is. A candidate or an organization fails a plain test if it treats Hamas as “resistance” rather than as a terrorist group that murdered Israeli civilians; if it places Zionists outside the moral circle deserving protection; if it answers criticism with “Islamophobia”; and if it treats the extension of sharia as a civil-rights demand while denying Israel the national existence it grants to every other people.

The Red-Green alliance is likely to hold in the short term because the shared enemy is intact. The divisive hinge is still the U.S.-Israel partnership. Israel is the only liberal democracy in a region short of them, a security partner that does not require American troops on its soil, and a forward position against the westward spread of Islamism. Losing that partnership would not end the soft war, but it would signal that the partnership is vulnerable.

The alliance will not hold forever. Islamists want a religious order. The left wants a secular one. Hegemonic Islam can discard the partners who were useful against the Jewish state once they are no longer useful. Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance is the practical conclusion. A tolerant society is not required to tolerate the project aimed at ending the Jewish state, or at making Jewish life in the West conditional on renouncing it. It is time to stop treating Brotherhood-linked groups as civil-rights partners when their program is the erasure of Israel.