The history of the October 7 attack is still being written.
The history of the October 7 attack is still being written.
O ne year ago this morning, Americans woke up to some of the most horrific images ever captured in the age of ubiquitous handheld cameras. We saw charred bodies; children’s beds drenched in blood; women stripped down, abducted, paraded through cheering crowds in the streets of Gaza.
An army of Hamas terrorists had flooded into Israel from Gaza under the cover of thousands of rockets. They butchered babies, they raped women, they burned homes to the ground, they massacred attendees of a music festival, and they took hostages ranging from a nine-month-old baby to an 86-year-old man. It took days to realize the scope of the horror — 1,200 dead and 251 taken hostage. Roughly 100 remain in captivity, with dozens of them believed dead (their loved ones denied the ability to properly grieve).
To the outside world — both to its haters and its champions — Israel is defined by its fight for survival amid hostile neighbors. But the best way to understand its national personality is to think of the country as one giant family. Israelis will bicker and argue and mock each other over just about anything, and yet during a crisis, they have a way of coming together. A friend recalled a visit to Israel during which he had a flat tire on his rental car. Almost immediately, somebody pulled over to put on a spare tire for him, only to spend the entire time making fun of my friend for not being able to change his own tire. That is Israel, in a nutshell.
In such an intimate nation, there is not a single person who was not personally affected by the October 7 attacks or their aftermath. If Israelis didn’t know somebody who was killed or taken hostage on that day, there is a good chance they know one of the roughly 100,000 citizens who were displaced from the communities surrounding Gaza or from those in the north, where residents have been under constant bombardment from Hezbollah rockets. Or, given the nation’s military-service requirements, they almost certainly have a friend or family member who has been called up from the reserves, if they haven’t been themselves. And just about every Israeli, at some point, has had to take cover when rocket sirens blare.
In the weeks before October 7, Israel was tearing itself apart over a proposed overhaul to its judicial system, with massive protests and counter-protests and somber warnings that the nation could be on the brink of a civil war. When the call came to serve, many of those who had been protesting on opposite sides were fighting alongside each other.
In terms of the nation’s self-perception, the Hamas attack was the most significant blow to the Israeli psyche since at least the 1973 Yom Kippur War, if not in its entire history. The vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus had failed to identify the capability and determination of Hamas to pull off such a large-scale attack in general, and had missed the signs pointing to a major attack on that day in particular. The massacre also exposed an inexcusably porous border with Gaza and a stunning breakdown in military mobilization that allowed Hamas terrorists to roam free and terrorize southern Israeli communities for hours. In a nation that was founded on the premise of “Never Again,” an enemy was able to perpetrate the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
While it can never bring back those who were lost, Israel is regaining, step by step, its sense of confidence. After a year of fighting, Hamas has been greatly degraded, and Hezbollah’s top leadership has been eliminated. These achievements required a series of operations that were jaw-dropping in both their boldness and their ingenuity — including killing off Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by planting a bomb inside a Tehran guest house where the Israelis knew he would be staying, and wounding thousands of Hezbollah fighters by blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies.
Throughout it all, Israelis have had to operate in a hostile global community. They have been constantly lectured by the United Nations to show restraint in the face of unrelenting attacks from Iran and its proxies — accused of genocide and war crimes despite going to great lengths to protect civilians. The organization, with its long history of coddling autocratic regimes and terrorists, has now been exposed for having as employees of UNRWA members of Hamas who directly participated in the October 7 attacks.
The media have not done much better. Less than two weeks after the October 7 attacks, major media outlets promoted as top news a story that an Israeli strike on a hospital had killed 500 Palestinians — accepting without the least bit of skepticism a claim by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Pretty soon it became clear that, in reality, the blast was caused by an errant terrorist rocket, which caused significantly less damage and far fewer deaths than originally claimed. This episode, though deeply embarrassing, did not stop the media from continuing to uncritically report casualty figures from Hamas, despite those figures’ being greatly inflated and not differentiating between civilians and terrorists.
Just as the past year was a wake-up call for Israelis, it has been the same for American Jews, most of whom had not encountered antisemitism prior to October 7. Many Jews in the United States have been shocked to discover not only how widespread antisemitism is in general but specifically by how virulent it is on the left. Leftists have for decades been laundering their hatred of Jews by claiming they only had objections to the Israeli government. But that becomes much harder to argue when crowds regularly chant genocidal slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which would mean killing or displacing nearly half of the world’s Jewish population — or “Globalize the intifada” — which would involve murdering Jews throughout the world.
The protests and attacks have not merely been directed at explicitly Israeli targets (such as, say, embassy buildings). A Jewish man in California was killed by an anti-Israel protester. Jews have been attacked for attending synagogue and threatened when observing their holidays. They have had their businesses vandalized and cemeteries defaced. Elite universities that once welcomed Jews have been taken over by antisemitic students and faculty members who peddle age-old conspiracy theories about nefarious Jewish control of the world and harass identifiably Jewish students, while university administrators cower before the mobs and fail to enforce their own rules.
As disturbing as these developments have been, for many American Jews, the last year has been one in which to reconnect with their religion and their communities and to learn who their actual friends are. (Hint: It isn’t the people who peddle bromides about diversity, equity, and inclusion.)
Sadly, under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has been a less than reliable ally of Israel and has proven a disappointment to American Jews hoping for a stronger stand against the Jew-haters within the Democratic Party. In the wake of the attacks, Biden admirably flew to Israel and pledged that he had the nation’s back in its fight to destroy Hamas. But as the anti-Israel and antisemitic voices within his own party grew louder, and Israel’s fight against an enemy that hides behind civilians produced inevitable casualties despite Israel’s best efforts, Biden has wavered. He has joined the media and the U.N. in uncritically parroting Hamas civilian-casualty claims, and he has portrayed Israel as not allowing enough flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza rather than criticize Hamas for stealing it. He paused weapons deliveries to Israel to hold it back from pursuing Hamas everywhere it needs to. For months he has pestered Israel to make concessions to Hamas in pursuit of a cease-fire deal; then, with Hamas rejecting proposal after proposal, he has pushed Israel to make yet more concessions. Biden has tried to draw a distinction between “ironclad” support for Israel’s defense and supporting offensive measures. As an example, in April, the U.S. helped Israel shoot down hundreds of projectiles lobbed at its cities from Iran, but Biden then urged Israel to stand down and “take a win” so as not to risk a regional war. Predictably, Iran didn’t get the message to “de-escalate” and last week decided to lob 180 ballistic missiles at Israel.
Meanwhile, Biden and Harris have both gone out of their way to try to appease antisemitic protesters. Harris has said the student protesters were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.” As protesters in Chicago burned American flags and waved Hezbollah ones, Biden declared from the stage of the Democratic National Convention, “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point.”
At this stage, it is difficult to assess the long-term outcome of Israel’s military response to October 7. There has been a tension all along between the imperative to destroy Hamas and the imperative to get all the hostages back. Getting bogged down in Gaza also distracts from Israel’s campaign against the greater threats from Hezbollah and Iran. There’s no doubt that, as compared with one year ago, Hamas is in a much weaker position to pull off a major terrorist assault and that Hezbollah’s capabilities have been degraded. And the weakening of Iranian proxy groups will make it harder for the regime to respond to any Israeli retaliation to the most recent ballistic-missile attack.
That said, we don’t yet know whether enough of Hamas will be left intact to allow it to rebuild once the current campaign is over, or if there is any entity that could run Gaza that is capable of preventing Hamas — or a similar terrorist group — from retaking control of the territory after enough time passes. The campaign against Hezbollah and Iran is in an even earlier stage, and the nightmare scenario of a nuclear-armed ballistic missile being fired from Iran to Israel still remains very much in play.
The full history of the October 7 attack remains to be written. For now, we should remember those who lost their lives in this unconscionable act of evil, pray for the return of those who remain in captivity, and support Israel’s efforts to make sure it can never happen again.