The well-lived life and foul murder of Vivian Silver encapsulate the hopelessness of Israel-Hamas war and the bad faith that drives the world’s reactions to it. You could see the bad faith on display in the hours after her death. It inspired a gruesome social media pile-on.

Maybe it was just a mistake by an underpaid intern. Maybe, as conservatives were to claim, the liberal media was revealing its deep biases. But, intentionally or not, a tweet on X from the Canadian broadcaster CTV News appeared to be yet another example of the wilful refusal by progressives to condemn or even acknowledge the existence of theocratic terror.

If something better does emerge from the conflict it will be because of the work of campaigners like Vivian Silver

‘Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died’ CTV announced on 13 November. ‘Has died?’ cried thousands of unforgiving Twitter users. WTAF?

How sedate, how genteel those words sound. Like a notice in a newspaper announcing a beloved grandmother has passed away in her sleep.

But poor Vivian Silver did not just die. She was at her home in the Be’eri kibbutz, a few miles from the border between Israel and the Gaza strip. On 7 October about 70 Hamas terrorists attacked on motorbikes. They executed 130 residents and kidnaped others.

‘We heard them going house to house and spraying the people with gunfire,’ a member of the Kibbutz security team told Reuters. ‘We heard them talking, shouting “Allahu akbar,” laughing. There was the sound of endless automatic gunfire, fires burning, kibbutz residents screaming.’

Her family thought Hamas had taken her hostage. But, five weeks after the attack, pathologists identified her remains.

Vivian Silver was 74-years-old when Hamas murdered her. She was a Canadian, who moved from Winnipeg to Israel to promote peace. She was also a rarity in the Middle-East: an authentic leftist.

To find out how rare, I spoke to Shlomo Sand, emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv university a few days ago. I was about to describe Sand as one of Israel’s leading socialist thinkers. But it would be more accurate to say that he is one of Israel’s only socialist thinkers. His view is that nowhere in the world had the collapse of the left been more complete than in Israel/Palestine. The usual factors were at play: the decline of the organised industrial working class and globalisation being the most prominent. But on top of that was the triumph of religious fanaticism and ultra-nationalism on both sides of the conflict.

Go back to the 1960s and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a large force in the Palestinian liberation movement. David Ben Gurion’s Workers’ party of the Land of Israel dominated Israeli politics after independence in 1948. Meanwhile the Kibbutz movement was a utopian attempt to establish primitive communism on collective farms.

Now Islam and Judaism have replaced the old socialist religion. Hamas dreams of driving every Jew out of Israel from the river to the sea because they are Jews. Meanwhile Netanyahu’s partners in religious Zionism wants to expel all Arabs from the river to sea because they are Arabs.

Anshel Pfeffer of Haaretz, the closest Israel has to a liberal newspaper, says the key thing you need to realise about the Israeli left is that ‘it doesn’t exist’. The Israeli opposition is centrist, even conservative in parts. Its main concern before 7 October was Bibi Netanyahu’s Orbanesque threats to the independence of the judiciary rather than the need for a peaceful settlement with Palestinians.

I have no wish to romanticise the old left, which was perfectly capable of initiating crimes against humanity of its own. But you might have thought that Western progressives would have welcomed Vivian Silver’s work. It upheld the finest traditions of the left by promoting secularism, and did what so many other Israelis were not prepared to do, by thinking about what a peaceful settlement would look like. Some elements did: current and former lawmakers, Reform and Orthodox Jewish leaders, international and local media and activists attended her funeral on Friday.

But the representatives of the dominant voices on the global left denounced her because, like the Israeli right, they could tolerate no compromise. Silver helped build Women Wage Peace, a campaign group dedicated to persuading the Israeli government to reach an agreement with Palestinians. Women Wage Peace wanted to restrain the Israeli armed forces by changing the law to compel the government to ‘consider political options on an ongoing basis before initiating a military operation, thereby radically changing the way in which life-and-death decisions are taken in our country’.

Its ‘concern for the future of our children and the deep understanding that the time has come for women to become leaders’ led it to work with Women of the Sun, an independent Palestinian organisation. Inevitably, the theocrats of Hamas and pro-settler parties of the Israeli right would not work with either organisation.

Indeed, they despised Women Wage Peace, as they showed in October 2017 when about 8,000 women marched through the occupied West Bank and into Jerusalem demanding a resumption of peace talks. The Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas had welcomed the Women Wage Peace marchers, but tellingly the extremists turned on them. Long before Hamas murdered Vivian Silver it was denouncing her and her allies.

In an official statement in 2017, Hamas and the Palestinian branch of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, both accused Palestinians participating in the march of ‘normalising’ relations with Israel. Specifically, BDS activists accused Silver of running a ‘feminist normalisation march’ and called for a boycott and ‘peaceful sabotage’ of her initiative.

Their use of ‘normalisation’ takes us to the heart of the hopelessness of the conflict. In the minds of Hamas and the BDS campaign negotiation was collaboration. Compromise was treason.

The ban on normalisation means any discussion or talks with Israelis is forbidden. This is the language of a war to the death, waged from the river to the sea. Or as the BDS campaign told Vivian Silver and her marching women in 2017:

Normalisation is an Israeli weapon designed not only to colonise our minds but also to undermine the BDS movement as it grows steadily and achieves successes in isolating Israel academically, culturally and to a lesser degree economically.

The march – and similar coexistence initiatives – were, it said, ‘not only an illusion and a deception but a first way to enable the occupation to penetrate our society and distort national consciousness’.

Anyone paying attention since 7 October will recognise that tone of voice. The language of the global left is all or nothing now, a maximalist approach which has led the Palestinian cause to disaster. This language has allowed the supporters of Netanyahu to say with a wolfish grin that because there are no credible partners for peace on the Palestinian side they can carry on building as many settlements as they wish.

It is perfectly possible that the mass murders of 7 October will send Israelis off into extremism, while Israel’s turning of Gaza into a modern Carthage will have the same effect on Palestinians. No one ever lost money betting against hope in the Middle East.

But if something better does emerge it will be because of the work of campaigners like Vivian Silver. May this be her epitaph: she had all the right enemies.