WHEN the scale and horror of the October 7 attack on Israel by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas became apparent, I knew that it ought to be a line-in-the-sand moment for the western Left. Scales should have fallen from eyes, as they did for thousands of British communists and their fellow travellers after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956. I also knew that this would not happen, and that an uneasy silence and a bit of special pleading would be the order of the day.