Oct. 7 Isn’t Over – Opinion

Antisemitism has endured through the centuries, but the Jews have endured, too.

By Fiamma Nirenstein, JNS

When the Hamas terrorists broke through the fence to enter Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the strategic message they were meant to carry out was clear.

Then-Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar had set out the plan in his own handwriting, in small, careful Arabic script.

The message was, “Go and destroy the Jews.” In doing so, you will not win the war, but you will win history.

You will destroy Israel; the Islamic umma, dar al-salam, will devour dar al-harb.

And this first conquest will precede the destruction of Jewish history and, with it, the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that it generated.

There are two chapters to the history of Oct. 7: the unprecedented events of that day and the subsequent expansion of antisemitism into the intellectual and moral centers of power in Europe and America.

It is the construction of a collective psychosis, a breach in the moral system built over centuries—in the principle of cause and effect, in the ability to read history and in our concepts of good and justice.

It is this worldwide revolution that we are dealing with when we speak of Oct. 7, in addition to tears, mutilated bodies, and war.

We should also remember how antisemitism has repeatedly been the harbinger of crises in the civilizations that produced it, including the destruction of Europe in World War II.

The tears and the blood

But we must begin with the tears and blood that hundreds of thousands of Israelis still shed, having lost loved ones in the massacre and in the war.

It is the form, the method, and the purpose of the Oct. 7 massacre that we had not seen before, except 80 years ago in Hitler’s Germany and, until 1953, in the Soviet Union.

On Oct. 4, 1943, in Posen, Heinrich Himmler explained to 90 SS leaders that Jewish children also had to be exterminated because he could not, “for moral reasons,” avoid extending to them the death sentence that their parents “deserved”; otherwise, the future of his people and of the world would be threatened by their revenge.

Thus, for “moral reasons,” the Palestinians coldly decided to burn alive, dismember, rape, and murder Jewish families in the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

The purpose of their conquering political Islam is a final solution, total destruction, pursued in the name of an ideology and a religion that is intrinsically political as well, without humanitarian objections.

For Hamas, Iran, and many other actors now active throughout the world, humanitarianism itself becomes part of the execution.

It is the intention that has driven antisemitism through the centuries: to cleanse the earth of Jews, and therefore today, first and foremost, of Israel, and turn it into the kingdom of the chosen ethic—the one pursued by the Hamas charter and demanded by Shi’ite Iran.

On Oct. 7, the Islamist imperative to erase and subjugate revealed itself in its naked form.

A war on seven fronts

Jewish resistance to this turning point in the history of persecution has this time taken the form of the war on seven fronts that Israel has fought since that day.

As the daily news shows, this war has not ended—not against Hamas, not in Judea and Samaria, not in the north against Hezbollah, and certainly not against the greatest puppeteer of hatred against Israel and the Jews, Iran.

Meanwhile, other dangerous fronts are opening, such as Turkey, while Qatar remains the greatest financier of organized hatred in the form of information and culture.

At the same time, large-scale intifadas—the largest in France, with Spain and Britain close behind—are setting Europe ablaze, while New York, through free elections, becomes Mamdani’s city.

And everywhere, Oct. 7 is celebrated as a festival of the genocide of the Jews.

The campaign to erase the Jews

Alongside the bestial massacre, an antisemitic flood of denial immediately developed, one in which Europe, too, is immersed up to its neck.

In this continuation of Oct. 7, the disappearance of the Jews means driving them out of the social world.

It means making them disappear from universities and cinemas, sporting competitions and literary prizes, politics and soccer championships—terrorizing and humiliating them until they are expelled everywhere.

Erase them. Terrorize families and children at school. Put students in a position where they cannot attend university.

Expel from talk shows every Jewish commentator and every friend of the Jews.

It is a Shoah. The Jew disappears.

This is happening through the success of a vast network of lies, from the word “genocide” to “ethnic cleansing” to “famine,” all the way to the most classic antisemitic formulas, now accepted as commonplace: the blood libel of the slaughter of innocents; the pursuit of money and power; the targeting of children and civilians; and the murderous rampage of crazed soldiers thirsting for revenge.

And then there is the image of a monstrous supreme leader, Nazi-fascist and imperialist—a cinematic transfiguration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turned into a puppet of public discourse with no relationship to reality.

The inversion of reality

Logic, knowledge, culture, and reason—even the principle of cause and effect upon which, since ancient Greece, the examination of facts has been constructed—have been hollowed out through a rejection of our social structure and of liberal democracy.

In its place comes a universalist culture that denies history, apologizes for a distorted and denigrated Western past, and kneels before a totalitarian world that persecutes dissidents, women, and homosexuals, even to the point of death.

A particular historical conjunction has allowed a Western society gripped by profound moral and intellectual confusion to find a partner ready to forge an unprecedented alliance: militant and supremacist Islam, much of it immigrant, another part still in its countries of origin, which sees messianism as its political rationale.

Palestinism has provided the ideal common cause for this convergence. It has become the magical vessel into which culture, good intentions, and human rights can be poured.

It has become the battlefield between oppressors and oppressed, between freedom and imperialism, between universalism and racism.

In reverse.

When decent people drive from a stage a mother who wants to testify about the murder of her entire family by Hamas on Oct. 7 because they want to watch “Naza,” telling her, “Go away, you should be ashamed,” they no longer possess any knowledge of reality, nor do they wish to know it.

To them, the woman is a “colonialist,” and the punishment for her guilt “did not happen in a vacuum,” as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in commenting on Oct. 7, assuming a responsibility equal to that of those who slit throats.

He thus inaugurated the era of the hunt for the Jew, licensed by international legality.

The answer cannot be lamentation

The conclusion, however, cannot be lamentation nor the tears that we are forced to swallow.

The Jewish people have never had either the time or the desire to shed too many of them, as can be seen from the history of the incredible reconstruction of their homeland, repopulated in the aftermath of the Shoah.

They have work to do.

Who could have been more grief-stricken than the men and women who set to work even as they were already being attacked once again?

It is incredible that in less than 80 years, the only country in the Middle East without oil—so democratic that it suffers internal divisions at every turn, so courageous that it has prevailed on every front after trying to share its tiny land and receiving in return a bite at the jugular—is today full of children and projects.

Its per capita GDP is higher than the GDPs of France, Italy, and Britain. Its inventions help the entire world in science, agriculture, technological innovation, medicine, and defense.

Its intelligence services save the Western world from terrorism; its rescue teams know how to dig through the ruins of enormous earthquakes.

Its joy of life is woven together with a desire for peace that, although repeatedly rejected, is part of the fundamental culture taught in its schools.

Israel knows how to win.

And so today, still in the fire of the post-Oct. 7 world, responsibility for every antisemitic accusation must always and only remain with the antisemites.

Faced with every piece of nonsense, every criminal fantasy about Israel and the Jews, those who respect themselves have no choice but to look the enemy and the fool in the eye, without allowing themselves to be influenced by feelings of guilt.

If I explain how the Israeli army fights while trying to safeguard civilian lives even as the enemy systematically uses them as human shields, and if I show once again that the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties is 1 to 1.2, the lowest of any urban warfare situation in the world, it must not be to answer Palestinian propaganda.

Nor should it be to convince those who refuse to be convinced.

It does not work.

Antisemitism has endured through the centuries, but the Jews have endured, too.

The difference today lies in the certainty that Israel knows how to win wars.

The entire West can win with Israel if it still wants to and still can.

That is no small thing. On this third anniversary of Oct. 7, the confrontation is still underway, and it is fierce.