More than 40,000 dead and counting, many among them children, whole districts razed, millions displaced, and the conflict spiralling into a wider war engulfing the Middle East – this is what Israel's "right to self-defence", invoked since Hamas' dramatic incursion of 7 October, has meant in practical terms. For many critics of Israel on both the right and left of capital, Zionism – the expression of a nationalist ideology and movement for the creation and preservation of a Jewish state – is to blame.