The 'progressive' framework didn’t fail the Jews. It worked as planned.
October 7th did not expose a contradiction in "progressive" ideology. It revealed the ideology operating exactly as designed.
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This is a guest essay by Matt Field, who writes the newsletter, “That Jew.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In January 2024, while Israeli soldiers were still pulling bodies from kibbutz homes, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh addressed a conference of Islamic scholars in Doha.
“We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7th and build upon it,” he said. “Time is on our side.”
He was not being defiant. He was being accurate.
By February 2025, senior Hamas officials were describing October 7th publicly as a “historic success.” By September 2025, another Hamas official told CNN the attack had created a “golden moment” for the Palestinian cause. These were not the claims of an organization in denial about what the war had cost Gaza. They were the assessments of an organization that had run a specific calculation before the attack and was watching that calculation prove correct.
The calculation was not military. Hamas knew the IDF would respond. They knew Gaza would be devastated. They knew their own leadership would be hunted and killed. They planned the attack anyway because they were not running a military calculation. They were running an institutional one.
A document Sinwar wrote by hand in August 2022, more than a year before the attack, captures the calculation precisely. He predicted Israel would be “surprised by the attack and enter into chaos” before responding with “the means and weapons at its disposal.”
He added: “It is possible that it will even use a nuclear bomb.” He proceeded with the plan. The military risk, up to and including nuclear annihilation, was a price he had already decided to pay. The bet he was making was not military. It was institutional.
They had studied Western “progressive” institutions, their ideological architecture, their frameworks, their reflexes — and they concluded that those institutions would convert Jewish death into Israeli guilt, that the human rights infrastructure would perform against Israel on schedule, and that the aftermath would damage Israel more than the attack damaged Hamas.
They were right about all of it. Nearly three years later that is not argument. It is record. The framework that activated within hours of October 7th did not arrive by accident. It was installed.
In 1978, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s notorious book “Orientalism” gave the project its theoretical foundation. Said’s argument had genuine force. It also had a specific intended application, one he pursued explicitly in his parallel work as a political advocate: to embed the Palestinian cause within the emerging academic language of postcolonial theory, which was gaining institutional purchase in universities across the United States and Britain.
The application to Israel was not incidental to the framework. It was the purpose.
From that foundation, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, formalized in 2005, built the institutional campaign. BDS was not merely an economic boycott. It was an explicit effort to install a specific reading of Israel, as “settler-colonial apartheid” state, into the organizations that would matter: universities, student governments, trade unions, professional associations, NGOs. Its architects understood that winning the argument in academic departments was the prerequisite to winning it in the streets.
By 2023, the installation was largely complete. The vocabulary (“settler,” “colonizer,” “apartheid,” “resistance,” indigenous,” “occupied”) had been normalized in exactly the institutions that activated within hours of October 7th. The pathway from Said’s academic argument to the Harvard University statement is not a straight line. It is a line. This is not conspiracy. It is documented history, with identifiable architects and traceable funding.
The project did not stop at universities and NGOs. It moved into electoral politics. The Democratic Socialists of America, which formally endorsed BDS in 2017, spent the years since October 7th hardening that commitment into ideological law. At its 2025 national convention in Chicago, the DSA passed Resolution 22, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” making support for Israel’s right to self-defense a formal expellable offense within the organization. The vote was 675 to 524.
The politician most responsible for DSA’s national electoral relevance, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had her endorsement withdrawn in 2024 for declining to meet the organization’s conditions on BDS. She had become a disciplinary case. DSA now counts over 120,000 dues-paying members and more than 250 elected officials across 40 states. Its endorsed candidate Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoralty in 2025 on an explicitly anti-Zionist platform.
The framework Said built in the academy, BDS institutionalized in NGOs, is now running for office. And it is winning.
Hamas watched this project unfold over decades. They did not build the framework. They read it the way a military planner reads terrain: as fixed infrastructure to be accounted for, planned around, and ultimately used. They needed only to know it was there.
Hamas knew Israel would respond militarily to a massacre of its civilians. They knew Palestinian civilian casualties would follow. They planned for it. The tunnels beneath hospitals, the weapons stored in schools, the command infrastructure embedded in civilian residential areas — these were not concealment failures or the improvised choices of a desperate organization. They were deliberate positioning, designed to ensure that Israeli military action, however precise, would produce images that the pre-installed framework would process as Israeli atrocity.
The calculation was not that Hamas would avoid Palestinian civilian casualties. It was that Palestinian civilian casualties were the mechanism. The suffering of Palestinian civilians was not the cost of the operation. It was the operation.
They also understood, because the record demonstrated across decades of previous attacks, that Jewish suffering occupies a specific position within Western “progressive” institutions. It is the one form of suffering for which context is always immediately and automatically available. There is always a “but.” There is always a history. There is always a framework within which the murdered can be explained as consequences rather than victims.
Rockets fired at Israeli civilians became responses to “occupation.” Suicide bombings became products of desperation. The pattern had held after every previous Hamas attack, at progressively larger scales. Hamas concluded it would hold at the scale of October 7th: the Nova music festival, Kibbutz Be’eri, the families murdered in their beds — all of it would be explained within a narrative in which the murdered bore some structural responsibility for their own deaths.
What about the human rights infrastructure? It had been rehearsing for years. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories had already addressed a conference of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders and told them they had the right to resist “occupation.” She had described the United States as subjugated by the Jewish lobby. She held her position.
The International Criminal Court had been building toward Israeli “prosecutions” years before October 7th. The UN Human Rights Council had more standing agenda items on Israel than on every other country on earth, combined. Hamas read the institutional record and concluded the machinery would fire on schedule.
And “progressive” movements with no shared values would march anyway. Hamas governs a territory where LGBTQ people are imprisoned or killed, where women have no legal equality, where political opposition is crushed, where free speech does not exist. The “progressives” who would march for Hamas the day after October 7th and thereafter would be executed for their identities in any territory Hamas controls. Hamas understood this and found it strategically irrelevant. What mattered was immediate political cover while the bodies were still warm.
This was not a hope. It was a calculation. And every point of it was correct.
The proof arrived on schedule. On October 7th, within hours of the attack, 34 student organizations at Harvard University, including the Amnesty International affiliate, signed the statement: Israel entirely responsible, apartheid regime, the only one to blame, no condemnation of Hamas, no acknowledgment of the hostages, no mention of the 1,200 murdered civilians — all before the bodies were counted.
On October 10th, the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter celebrated the paragliders. The weapon used to murder 260 people at a music festival became a symbol of “resistance” on the social media account of America’s most prominent racial justice organization. Their subsequent statement was not an apology, saying: “We stand with Palestine and the people who will do what they must to live free.” The people who will do what they must had filmed themselves raping women in a field.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories, responded to French President Emmanuel Macron’s description of October 7th as the largest antisemitic massacre of the century with a single post: “The victims of October 7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.” The UN’s appointed human rights monitor decided, in a sentence, that 1,200 murdered Jews were not victims of antisemitism but consequences of Israeli policy.
At a UN press conference in September 2025, she claimed the real death toll in Gaza was 680,000, including 380,000 infants under the age of 5 years old. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics records only 341,790 children under five living in the Gaza Strip in total. When this was pointed out, Albanese admitted she had used the figures deliberately, saying she mentioned them “in a provocative way” because it “had the effect I wanted.”
The UN’s appointed human rights monitor fabricated statistics by her own admission. She was not fired and not censured, but confirmed for a second term. She later compared her treatment by American sanctions to that of Osama bin Laden. The institution that appointed her, and keeps her, is the institution Hamas read as a signal.
Amnesty International took more than two years to produce its first report on Hamas’ crimes on October 7th. When it arrived, in December 2025, it found that Hamas had committed crimes against humanity. It also found, after two years and 70 interviews, documented evidence of sexual violence, the same sexual violence the organization had declined to confirm in the immediate aftermath.
What the report did not find was a reason to release it sooner. Former members of Amnesty’s own Israeli chapter later revealed the report had been withheld over concerns about its “perception.” The organization that condemned Israel within days suppressed its own members’ findings about Hamas for perception management reasons, while listing Israel’s actions in Gaza alongside Russia’s crimes against humanity in Ukraine as among the defining atrocities of 2025.
The same organization whose Harvard University affiliate signed the statement within hours of the massacre needed 795 days to say Hamas committed crimes against humanity. Hamas had read that organization correctly too.
Hamas had not hoped for this. They had planned for it.
“The framework failed.” That is what people say. It was captured, corrupted, hijacked by forces hostile to its founding values. Fix the institutions, reclaim the movement, and it will work as designed — but it was working as designed. That is the argument nobody wants to make and the only one that explains what happened.
The decolonization framework, as it has been applied in Western “progressive” institutions for four decades, was never universal. It was always a sorting mechanism. It divided the world into “colonizers” and “colonized,” “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “settlers” and indigenous peoples, and assigned moral weight based on the category rather than the act.
Within that system, Jews have a fixed position. We are not a people who can be colonized. We cannot be indigenous, despite representing the oldest continuously documented indigenous presence in the land the framework disputes. We are, within the framework’s internal logic, always already the oppressor, whatever the context, whatever the history, whatever is actually happening on the ground.
This is not a bug in the architecture. It is the architecture.
Jewish suffering cannot be absorbed without the whole structure collapsing, because Jewish suffering under Arab nationalism, under Soviet antisemitism, under European fascism, does not fit the assigned categories.
The Jews expelled from Iraq and Egypt and Libya (nearly a million people) cannot be indigenous refugees within a system that assigns them permanent colonizer status. The Jews murdered at the Nova festival cannot be victims of racial hatred within a project that defines their people as the racial oppressor. So it excludes us. Jews are European when the argument requires them to be European. We are colonizers when the argument requires us to be colonizers. These conclusions are not the product of capture or corruption. They are what the categories were built to produce.
What this means for the people inside the “progressive” movement who believe the framework can be reclaimed for Jewish safety is this: They are misdiagnosing the problem. The question is not how to make the decolonization framework work for Jews. The question is whether a framework that structurally excludes an entire people from the category of the protectable deserves the institutional authority it has been granted.
Hamas answered that question operationally. They concluded the exclusion was structural rather than correctable, that no reclamation project would change what the framework was built to do. They were right. On October 7th, the framework did not break under pressure. It sorted. It placed actors into categories, assigned moral weight by category rather than act, and produced its intended output: Jewish victims assigned to the category of the unprotectable.
Nearly three years after October 7th, Hamas’ calculation has been validated not just in the immediate aftermath but in the full arc of what followed. The ceasefire took effect in October 2025. Hamas survived. They are re-emerging in parts of Gaza from which the IDF has withdrawn. And the Western institutions whose response Hamas had predicted with operational precision are now constructing the peace.
In September 2025, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and Portugal formally recognized Palestinian statehood, joining more than 145 nations in doing so without requiring Hamas disarmament as a precondition. Israel’s government stated plainly that recognition without disarmament rewards Hamas. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said recognition “in no way” legitimizes or rewards terrorism. France’s Emmanuel Macron called it necessary to establish sustainable peace.
The same framework that processed Jewish death as Israeli guilt in October 2023 is now processing Hamas’ survival as a basis for diplomatic progress. The categories did not change. The application did.
This is what Hamas understood that almost no one in the West was willing to say. The framework was not going to hold them accountable. It was going to rehabilitate them. The institutions that activated within hours to condemn Israel were the same institutions that would eventually sit across tables discussing Palestinian statehood, reconstruction funding, and governance arrangements that include or implicitly legitimize the organization that murdered 1,200 people and held 251 hostage for 738 days.
Not because those institutions love Hamas. Because the framework produces this outcome. The sorting mechanism that places Jews in the category of the unprotectable places Hamas in the category of the resistance. Resistance gets rehabilitated. That is not a policy failure. It is the policy.
Ismail Haniyeh said time was on their side. Nearly three years later, the countries that condemned Israel within days of the massacre are recognizing Palestinian statehood without conditions. The framework is not receding. It is advancing.
There is a lesson in this that is older than October 7th and older than the decolonization framework and older than the State of Israel. It is the lesson that Jewish history has delivered in every century, in different languages, through different mechanisms, with different perpetrators. There is no international architecture, no human rights framework, no “progressive” coalition that will reliably protect Jewish lives when protecting Jewish lives conflicts with the ideological commitments of the people running those institutions.
What it demands is clarity about where protection actually comes from and what it actually requires.
The people who believe the decolonization framework can be reclaimed, that the right conversations and the right pressure and the right solidarity work can make it function for Jewish safety, are not wrong because they lack good intentions. They are wrong because they are attempting to fix something that is not broken.
The framework is doing what it was built to do. It sorts. It assigns. The people it was designed to protect are being protected. The people it was designed to exclude are being excluded. Changing the people inside the institutions does not change the architecture of the institutions. And the architecture, as Hamas correctly identified, does not have a place for Jews in the category of the protectable.
The question October 7th poses to every Jewish institution, every Jewish community, every Jew who has organized their political life around the belief that “progressive” alliances provide meaningful protection, is not rhetorical. It is direct. If an Islamist terror organization in Gaza understood the ideological infrastructure of Western progressivism with sufficient precision to use it as a military asset, what does that tell you about the infrastructure? And what does it tell you about the cost of continuing to trust institutions that have demonstrated, with precision, exactly what they will do when Jewish lives are the ones at stake?
Hamas planned the attack. The institutions planned the response. Only one of them knew what the other was going to do.
Matt, your article really upset me—not because it isn't excellent, because it is, but because it raises a question that continually bothers me: where is the accountability?
Israel is investigating the failures that led to October 7. Why isn't there an equally serious reckoning among our large, well-funded Jewish organizations? When did they recognize what was happening on university campuses? Why were so many caught unprepared for the propaganda war that followed October 7? Why was the response so ineffective when, as your article argues, the ideological groundwork had been developing for years?
These organizations raise enormous amounts of money. Where does it go, what results are they producing, and who is held responsible when they fail? I don't want another conference, another committee or another fundraising campaign. I want an independent examination that asks the leadership hard questions and publishes the answers.
We demand accountability from Israel for October 7. We should be willing to demand accountability from our own Jewish institutions for what happened afterward.