If [Marx] had stuck to his ideological guns, he might very well have framed it as an assault by religious fanatics on the collective settlements of the working class.

After all, what is Hamas but a group of religious extremists, and Marx had no use for religion – it was, as he famously said, the "opiate" of the masses. On the other hand, the kibbutzim of Be'eri, Nahal Oz, Re'im, Kfar Azza, Nirim, Zikim and Holot bore the brunt of the attack. Although they are not the products of the violent revolution Marx looked forward to, in many respects they are in microcosm the kind of society he envisioned.

A recent essay by Alan Johnson in the online journal Fathom describes how the left made the transformation from class to racial warfare. Part of this, he says, is due to Islamist and postmodern/identitarian ideas, but a major element is what he calls "post-Trotsky Trotskyism." At various times these substitutes were Stalinism itself, a vast array of anti-Western governments ranging from Maoist China to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Third World liberation movements. They were all deemed "progressive" no matter what they preached or practiced in what Johnson calls an "increasingly bizarre substitutionism when it came to the identification of and support for 'objectively revolutionary' agencies." Johnson doesn't mention this, but class warfare, which was supposed to cut across racial differences, was pushed to the side. Race, ethnicity and even gender became the be-all and end-all of progressive politics.