Reflections a Year After 10/7
Where do we go from here?
I went to a Jewish day school where I learned the word “pogrom” in 4th grade. We were taught about the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Cossacks, the Spanish, and of course the Nazis. We learned how they went door to door killing and kidnapping Jews with impunity because they were Jewish. The word “pogrom” was coined specifically for the Jewish massacres of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, but has since been applied to any such massacre of Jews. As a young boy, I struggled to comprehend how or why these things could happen, and even more confounding was how they could repeat in such a similar way in different places with different perpetrators. My childhood imagination ran wild conjuring up these scenes of tall white ogurs with pitchforks and fire torches, wondering what I would do if I were alive then.
But now thanks to Hamas and their Go Pros we don’t need to imagine what a 21st-century pogrom looks like. They proudly filmed it for the whole world to see. Knowing the rhetoric and past behavior of Hamas, the atrocities of 10/7 did not surprise me. What surprised me were the IDF's failure to prevent it and the world’s failure to unequivocally condemn it.
The blood-stained concrete walls of Kibbutz Kfar Azza and the blood-soaked dance floor of the Nova music festival turned out to be a real-world Rorschach test for antisemitism. So many so-called liberal institutions and individuals dismally failed, and continue failing. Instead of condemning the criminals, they blamed the victims for their rape, kidnapping, or murder.
When a person is not willing or able to condemn entire families getting burned alive, or the rape, mutilation, and murder of a young woman dancing at a music festival, there is something else going on besides moral confusion.
Antisemitism has always been this weird shape-shifting virus that followed the Jews wherever they went. They hated us because we were communists and capitalists, too powerful and too weak, superhuman and sub-human. They invented blood libels and conspiracies to justify their viral hatred.
Today’s anti-Semitic gospel on the right is the Great Replacement Theory, which tells the fake narrative that holocaust survivor George Soros and his fellow “globalists” (read: Jews) have formed a cabal whose primary goal is to control the world and open the flood gates to immigrants who are coming to replace the real (read: white) Americans or Europeans.
And now gaining traction at an alarming rate since 10/7 is the newest blood libel from the left that I’ll call the Israel Mini Evil Empire Theory (need a more catchy name), which spreads the bogus story that Israel is the big bad wolf of the Middle East, a colonial presence spilling innocent Arab and Muslim blood to conquer more and more land, backed by a larger evil empire, the United States.
This conspiracy is what has taken hold of the minds of college students and freelance bigots around the US, spread on social media like a contagion. This has been a tough year for the truth.
Now I don’t consider Israel perfect before or after 10/7. I believe the Netanyahu government was complicit in the growth of Hamas by allowing millions of dollars into Gaza from Qatar which was used to buy the weapons and build the infrastructure used by Hamas. I am critical of the Israeli government’s condoning of settler expansion and violence in the West Bank for the last two decades. I question the Israeli government’s heavy heavy-handed military response that has killed so many innocent Gazans. I’m weary of the Israeli government’s apparent prioritization of a miraculous total military victory at the expense of a diplomatic solution that would save the hostages’ lives, as well as countless innocent Palestinian civilians’ lives. As I’ve said in the past, we are living in a 1 state-solution world with a right-wing Israeli government in charge and no exit strategy in sight.
These critiques I believe are fair and legitimate, and of course debatable.
But what is not up for debate is that Israel didn’t want or ask for this war in the first place. It was attacked preemptively and relentlessly from all sides by vicious enemies with an explicit goal to destroy the world’s only Jewish state and everyone in it. And in case 10/7 wasn’t enough proof, Hamas leaders said they would do it again and again. Israel, like any other country on Earth, has every right to defend itself.
The entire world should be clear-eyed in their understanding of this reality. But vaulted liberal institutions like the U.N., Harvard University, and countless faux intellectuals, the latest being Ta-Nehisi Coates (who spent all of 10 days in Israel/Palestine and became an Insta expert), who parrot or condone the anti-semitic narrative I spell out above. To suggest that what we all witnessed on 10/7 is rightful “resistance” is not just a perversion of truth, but a moral stain on humanity.
Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are Islamo fascists who deplore liberal values as much as they hate Israel. They hate gays, free speech, and just everything we hold dear in the civilized world. They murdered Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims that day because they were all living or working in the “Zionist (read: Jewish) entity.” They praised Allah while they butchered children.
And then they hid behind THEIR OWN children as the Israeli army sought retribution.
Hamas is in fact holding every single innocent person in the region hostage.
The Israeli government decimated Gaza because Hamas attacked Israel and then cowardly hid behind their people. If there was no Hamas, there would not have been a single Gaza War since Israel completely withdrew from the territory in 2005. Same in Lebanon. If there was no Hezbollah, there would be no need for Israel to invade Lebanon after withdrawing their forces in 2000. This is now the 3rd major war between Hamas and Israel. Ditto for Hezbollah and Israel. The root cause of all this death and destruction is Hamas, Hezbollah, and their common benefactor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As Rachel Goldberg Polin told me off camera when I spoke with her in Jerusalem a few months ago while her son Hersh was still alive, “I can’t tell you what I really want to say because my son is in the mouth of the dragon.” This is what this year has felt like for Israelis and Palestinians. The year of the dragon that could turn on a moments notice, fire and violence swirling all around like leaves in the wind on an autumn day.
Despite this very bleak situation, it is my nature to remain hopeful. I remain steadfast in my belief that this is a fight between fanatics and moderates, not Israelis and Palestinians. 14 million people live between the river and the sea. We are all cousins, proven by genetic studies. Neither tribe is going anywhere. We can’t keep killing each other forever, right?
The peace activist Vivian Silver, murdered by Hamas on 10/7, proves that one can be a Zionist AND pro-Palestinian. There is no contradiction here. The fact that she was murdered by a fanatic doesn’t negate the meaning of her life’s work. On the contrary, it validates her life work. The problem is that in this part of the world, there are too few Vivian Silver’s. There are very few peace activists in Israel, and there are almost none in Gaza, West Bank, or Lebanon.
The formula for peace hasn’t changed since 10/7. When I asked Liora Eilon, resident of Kibbutz Kfar Azza whose son Tal was murdered if she still believes in peace, she said, “Yes, absolutely. I have not changed my position.” She now attends an Israeli-Palestinian bereaved parents group and told me, “Re-education and change of government, on both sides, is the only way.” This is true. The question is, “How?”
It turns out that making peace is much harder and more complicated work than waging war. And it doesn’t serve the agenda of the extremists. Palestinians should not be given a state right after the atrocities of 10/7. They should earn it over time through acts of goodwill and trust-building with their neighbors. Maybe the Sunni Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, will get involved to help here. Re-education is going to be a major challenge in a Palestinian society that is not free and in which so many children have been taught to hate Israelis and Jews. What gives me some hope here is that the Saudis have been able to pull off the improbable. Their madrassas were hotbeds for extremists, producing the likes of Bin Laden and the 19 suicide bombers who perpetrated 9/11. Now the Saudis are considering a historic accord with Israel and buying golf tournaments.
Israel must rein in the violent settlers in the West Bank and stop arresting innocent Palestinians with no rights of habeas corpus. The occupation of millions of people must end, but it will only end in parallel with an end to Palestinian violence that historically only tightens the noose around their necks. Maybe Netanyahu will surprise us all and pursue a historic diplomatic solution with Saudi Arabia, setting the stage for a 2-state solution once certain milestones are met. As part of this, we will need a truth and reconciliation commission, like in South Africa, where the two sides can talk about their collective and shared traumas.
Either way, a truly strategic Israel would apply its vast resources and creativity towards ed-tech and bridge-building initiatives with its neighbors. If Israel’s public and private sectors put a few hundred million shekels a year towards creative educational initiatives with bridge-building KPI’s like # of conversations between Israelis and Palestinians or # of online games played by Israelis and Iranians, it could only do good for Israel’s place in the region, and world.
I won’t hold my breath. But I hope that 10/7 is a jolt to everyone’s senses and that even if the wars don’t deliver any meaningful diplomatic impasse, the people will come to their senses and re-claim their destiny for the sake of future generations.
In the next decades, 10/7 will either be seen as a major slide towards a death spiral for so many innocent people in the region, or a tipping point where the peoples of the region rise against Iranian-backed extremism and choose a different path. The fanatics on both sides will undoubtedly try and keep the wars going. The moderates on each side must resist their fanatics in their tracks. The world must condemn racism that comes in any shape or form, including the latest anti-Semitic narrative going viral against the world’s only Jewish state. May 10/7/23 be the last pogrom.