Three Years Later

Reflections on the world created by October 7.

View of cars destroyed by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre, at a field near the Israel-Gaza border, January 4, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It’s Wednesday, October 7, and today at 6:29 a.m. the post-October 7 world entered its fourth year. This new era was ushered in not by fireworks but by a massive barrage of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, and baptized not in water but in the blood of 1,200 people. It was a moment as decisive as it was abominable. Three years on, the one thing we can say with certainty is that Israel and the world have never been the same.

In truth, there is no single post-October 7 world. There are two. Both were born at 6:29 a.m. One rose from the ashes of southern Israel. The other spilled into the streets of Western capitals.

The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.

This world is ostensibly new, but it is intimately familiar. On October 7, Israel was forcibly evicted from the new Middle East of normalization and globalization and sent back to the old one, where it was once again an isolated villa in the jungle. To fit its old role, Israel reflexively grew younger, from pragmatic, diplomatic middle age to impulsive, uncompromising draft age. Three years later, it is still 18.

The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians. But this world departs furthest from reality not in what it claims but in what it leaves out. In this world, Hamas does not exist.

Slowly at first, then all too quickly, this narrative took hold. Endless repetition, a receptive audience and Israel’s impotence at public diplomacy imposed it on the conflict. Soon every public figure was expected to pay obeisance to it: to adopt its vocabulary and to swear, against the testimony of their own eyes, that this was genocide and that Israel was a unique evil that deserved international isolation.

These two narratives have developed as mirror images of one another. The stronger Israel became and the further Hamas fell, the louder the accusations grew. Where Israelis saw recovery and strength, the other world saw its own victory, summed up in a single, endlessly repeated description: “more isolated than ever.”

Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.

The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.

That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.

The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.

Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.

The silence that wrapped the kibbutz’s green lawns will not deceive us. This is not the silence of tranquility. It is the silence after a storm. Everything is quiet. There aren’t even birds. [...]

One single question runs through our heads: what in God’s name happened here?! The first encounter with the massacre threw us 80 years back. Is this a Holocaust? [...]

In the house there are no longer walls or doors, only one large void. Only the door of the safe room still stands, blackened, bent and riddled with bullets, as if asking us to let it guard the loss inside forever. [...] The children lie on the small beds: blonde twin girls with wavy hair that is still soft. On the second bed lies their little brother, the bud of his life withered all at once. They look as if they are sleeping. But the soot on their faces tells of eternal sleep. The parents lie on the floor. They were shot, it seems, by the bullets that pierced the heavy door as they blocked it with their bodies so the murderers could not get in. A beautiful family, a family of the people of Israel.

We carried them out and laid them close to one another, so they would not be parted, on the lawn where they had played and built their family, in faith. Faith in the people of Israel. We covered them with blankets from their home and stood before them in silence. [...] After all, this is only the first house.

This was our first hour in Kibbutz Nir Oz. The first hour of 36. [...]

At dawn, a pillar of fire rose to the heavens. A blaze the murderers had set hours earlier in the kibbutz’s old factory came back to life and darkened the sunrise, as if to say: this is not a day of sunlight. [...]

This is a mission you don’t read about in books, don’t learn in training, don’t drill in exercises. Not on this scale. [...] From south to north, through every house we had marked the night before, we gathered them all. Parents and children. Brother beside sister. Young couples and older couples. An old man who shielded his wife with his body at the entrance to the safe room, though she too lay inside without the breath of life. An old man who never made it to the safe room from his mobility scooter. Another old man, and another. They spared no one. We gathered them all.

Forgive us, Tamar, Yonatan, Arbel, Shahar and Omer of the Kedem Siman Tov family, and the dear residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Forgive us for not reaching you in time.

We will not forget and we will not forgive.

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English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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