In the nauseating demonstrations celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis, one hears repeated, again and again, the refrain that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” — and therefore, in the catechism inculcated in universities in recent decades, oppressors not deserving of mercy or sympathy when tortured and murdered by those who deemed themselves the oppressed.

A long generation ago, the categories of oppressor and oppressed were economically determined. Vulgar Marxists labeled the capitalists as oppressors and categorized laborers — the virtuous proletariat — as the oppressed.