October 7: The Blood, the Lies, and the Betrayal That Followed

Peace will not come through false equivalence or half-hearted resolutions. It demands the strength to name evil for what it is.

October 7, 2023, became the bloodiest day for Jews since the liberation of the camps. Hamas gunmen crossed into Israel and carried out atrocities so depraved that language can scarcely contain them. More than 1,200 people were executed. Mothers were raped before their children. Infants were murdered in their cribs. Young people were gunned down at a music festival devoted to peace. Another 253 men, women, and children were dragged into captivity, vanishing into the tunnels beneath Gaza. The killers filmed themselves. They livestreamed their atrocities. One phoned home mid-massacre to tell his mother he had murdered ten Jews with his own hands. She praised God and told him she was proud.

This was not combat but the deliberate killing of a people—a modern pogrom broadcast to the world.

Israel’s intelligence apparatus had failed catastrophically, but something deeper had shattered. The promise at the heart of the nation’s founding—that Jews would never again face eradication without the means to defend themselves—suddenly seemed uncertain.

Worse still was what came next — not in the Middle East, but in the cities and institutions of the West. Within days, the shock that had briefly united the democratic world began to fade into something far less certain. Governments that had rushed to express solidarity soon began to hedge. The language changed. Suddenly, there was talk of “context,” of “cycles of violence,” of “disproportionate response.” Those who had built entire careers condemning cruelty seemed blind to it when it butchered children and abducted grandmothers from their homes

The United Nations became a theater of the absurd. In the two years following the massacre, the General Assembly passed resolution after resolution condemning Israel, while Hamas—the orchestrator of mass murder—escaped a single word of censure. The Commission accused Israel, the only democracy in the region, of genocide, reducing a word once reserved for humanity’s darkest crimes to a political weapon. The institution founded to prevent another Holocaust had become an instrument for condemning those who survived it.

American and European universities revealed themselves as incubators of hatred dressed in academic language. At Harvard, student groups issued statements holding Israel responsible for the violence inflicted upon it. At Oxford, protesters waved the green flags of Hamas and described the slaughter as liberation. Marches swept through the streets of Western cities. The chant “From the river to the sea” echoed across London, New York, and Paris. Everyone understood its meaning: the erasure of Israel, the elimination of its people. Yet intellectuals insisted it was merely a cry for freedom.

The numbers tell a different story. In the United States, antisemitic incidents rose by more than three hundred percent in the months after October 7. In Britain, over two thousand anti-Jewish hate crimes were recorded, shattering every previous record. Synagogues in Germany required armed guards. In France, Jews were assaulted in broad daylight. The veneer of tolerance—thin to begin with—had finally split. Antisemitism had not returned; it had merely shed its disguise.

Israel was left with no choice but to fight. The alternative was to accept Hamas rule over Gaza indefinitely. To accept that Jewish children would grow up within range of rockets, and that another October 7 was only a matter of time. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began the daunting task of dismantling the infrastructure of terror. More than four hundred miles of tunnels—dug with international aid money—snaked beneath hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings. Israel struck over thirty thousand military targets, crippling Hamas command centers and weapons depots. Even in war, it continued to send food, medicine, and fuel across the border—aid that Hamas routinely seized to feed its fighters and power its war machine.

None of this mattered to Western critics. In their telling, Israel remained the villain and Hamas the victim. Calls for a ceasefire proliferated, as if coexistence could be negotiated with those who see compromise as defeat. The question left unasked was this: how can a ceasefire preserve peace when it also preserves those devoted to your extermination?

Hamas understood something vital about modern warfare: battles are fought not only with bullets but with stories. It learned to weaponize suffering, knowing that Western audiences would respond with emotion before reason. Research later revealed that more than seventy percent of the viral content about Gaza circulating in the weeks after October 7 was false or distorted, showing how deception had become its most reliable strategy. Hamas knew that in an age of instant outrage, truth counts for less than narrative, and that compassion, when stripped of judgment, can be easily swayed.

October 7 did not invent antisemitism. It merely exposed how close to the surface it remained. Jews in Sydney, Berlin, and New York discovered that acceptance was conditional. The new antisemitism arrives wearing different clothes: the academic’s tweed, the activist’s keffiyeh, the journalist’s byline. But its essence is ancient — the belief that Jewish blood is cheap, that Jewish suffering is secondary, that Jewish survival is still subject to permission.

Yet despite it all, Israel’s recovery has been remarkable. The technology sector hums again with energy and invention. The Abraham Accords, expected to buckle under the pressure of the atrocity of October 7, have instead held firm. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have drawn closer to Jerusalem, and even Saudi Arabia now accepts that Israel’s strength—not her weakness—is the surest path to regional stability.

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Still, danger remains. Iran’s power may have weakened and its nuclear ambitions stalled, but its web of proxies remains battered yet unbroken. Hezbollah stirs along the northern border. The Houthis disrupt key trade routes. That is why Israel still needs her allies—those who know her survival is tied to the security of the wider world. But even among those allies, certainty has begun to waver.

Heads of state who only two years ago walked through the ruins of the kibbutzim and the music festival, who saw the blood on the walls and the ashes of tents, soon softened their words. The vows of unconditional support they made amid the smoke of slaughter were quietly qualified within weeks. What began as solidarity soon dissolved into hesitation. The same delusions that have long haunted Western diplomacy re-emerged. In foreign ministries and conference halls, diplomats once again reached for the old formulas, speaking of “two-state solutions.” Australia, Britain, France, and other European nations went even further by recognizing a Palestinian state and thereby granting legitimacy to terror. This reflex—to seek compromise with those who recognize none—remains the West’s oldest and most dangerous flaw. It appeared in Munich when Chamberlain mistook deceit for diplomacy. It resurfaced in Tehran when negotiators accepted Iranian lies as good faith. And it appears again now, as officials urge Israel to yield to those who still dream of her absolute destruction.

The West stands at a defining crossroads. One direction leads toward moral clarity and renewed conviction. The other leads toward confusion, decline, and eventual irrelevance. You can see the fork in university classrooms where students romanticize jihad as justice. In newsrooms where murder is repackaged as resistance. In parliaments where expedience passes for statesmanship and conviction has grown scarce.

Let me be clear: This is not Israel’s struggle alone. It belongs to all who believe that civilization is more than stone and statutes, more than comfort or custom. It belongs to those who know that some distinctions are absolute: between the defense of life and its desecration. When Israel defends itself, it upholds the very principles the West once considered sacred. To abandon Israel is to abandon those principles. And in doing so, we abandon ourselves.

As I write this, Israel and Hamas have entered indirect talks in Egypt under a peace plan advanced by President Trump. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are leading the American effort. Both sides claim to support the framework, yet whether Hamas—whose charter calls for Israel’s obliteration—can enter any negotiation sincerely remains doubtful.

An Israeli victory would mean more than the security of the Jewish state; it would open the door to renewal for Palestinians who have known only indoctrination and despair under Hamas rule. When that regime falls, Gazans may at last have the chance to build lives grounded in hope rather than hatred, to teach their children peace instead of martyrdom. Such a future can exist only when tyranny is broken and brutality disarmed.

Peace will not come through false equivalence or half-hearted resolutions. It demands the strength to name evil for what it is.

We must stand with Israel. Not because it is flawless, but because its survival safeguards the very idea of order and conscience in the world. When Israel stands, it affirms that decency is worth defending, that human life is not expendable. If it falls, the darkness that follows will not stop at her borders.

My hope rests with Israel’s endurance after October 7, and with Western leaders like President Trump who understand that peace is not born of concession but of strength. Where hope endures, appeasement must end. Israel must never be asked to bargain with those who would see it erased.