Lessons for tomorrow: remembering Oct 7th

"He who watches over Israel will neither slumber not sleep"

A year ago today hundreds of young men prepared for their likely death. I picture them hugging family, joshing with friends, checking guns and grenades, making their peace with god. These young men prepared to commit one of the 21st century’s worst acts of terrorism and the largest murder of innocent Jews since the Holocaust. Piling across the Israel border intent on killing and kidnap, the young men slaughtered young girls, sometimes pausing to rape them first. These young men battered children, some as young as nine months old, to death. And these young men dragged over two hundred men, women, children and babies back into Gaza - hostages intended as sordid bargaining chips, as human shields, as a guarantee of protection. Over 1200 innocent civilians - farmers, kibbutzim, young people dancing at a peace festival - were slaughtered in an unforgivable act of violent terrorism.

The young men believed they were doing the right thing. They were scared, many opted for drugs as a 21st century Dutch courage. The old men with beards, their teachers, mothers, uncles and a relentless torrent of propaganda had trained them well. The young men believed, those who came back still believe, that the people - even the children and young girls - they killed were not innocent. Worse, that these people were not innocent but complicit in a terrible evil. Indeed the people being killed were evil, sub-human, corrupted, their death should not be mourned or venged, they are Jews. 

Tomorrow will witness a memorialising of what these young men did in Israel that day. Some, especially in Jewish communities across the world, will pause to remember the innocents butchered, raped and kidnapped that day. But elsewhere the media will present the events as if they were not an act of grim terror but some act of liberation or resistance. The focus, as it was before the dead were identified and the blood wiped up, will point to Israel. Marches, protests and a billion thoughtless posts on social media will proclaim that, but for Israel, nobody would have died that day. Academics from leading universities will present their arguments about ‘settler-colonialism’, ‘occupation’ and how the problem isn’t Jews but the 95% of Jews who are Zionists. And journalists who imagine themselves as a latter day Lawrence of Arabia will speak about how everything Israel has done since October 7th 2023 is a terrible crime visited on innocent Palestinians. Every statement of sympathy for the victims of the October 7th attacks will carry a call for ceasefire and, often, a not-very-well-veiled hint that the real problem is the Jews.

Within minutes of the first rapes, murders and abductions, people had taken to the streets - remarkably supplied with flags and printed posters - to celebrate those young men terrorising their way through southern Israel. Cakes were handed out, fireworks were set off, people danced. All while those young men dragged girls off to incarceration in tunnels and basements simply for being Jewish. And in the year since those kidnappings, we have been presented with a daily diet of lies, propaganda, misrepresentation and outright racism from people and institutions we expect better of. From the BBC, the United Nations, the EU, the Labour Party. From academics and the universities where they work, from the government in Ireland and Spain, from the mouths of priests, comedians and writers. Everywhere we look there is a soft focus version of Jew-hate, a world where the policing of racist, antisemitic marches almost indulges that jew-hate, where weasel words and a mealy-mouthed ‘both sides’ attitude cover up a relentless attack on the world’s only Jewish majority nation. A place with faults aplenty but still a place with democracy, civil rights and an open media.

Tomorrow ought to be a sombre, sorrowful day where we remember the people murdered by terrorists a year previously. Tomorrow ought to see a renewed call for the release of hostages, not as some sort of deal or as part of a ceasefire that ends up as an Israeli surrender, but because taking innocent people hostage so as to lever a political end is terrorism and we believe terrorism to be wrong. Tomorrow we ought to take time out to stand in silent remembering. That we won’t do this remembering, or worse that acts of sombre sorrow get branded as politics, is the biggest indication that we have forgotten, that Jews as a problem has returned, that the memory of the Holocaust has faded, and that we are institutionally, and many people are personally, antisemitic.

But still Am Israel Chai. We were at synagogue seeing my wife’s cousin made life vice-president and they sang this psalm:

“I lift up my eyes to the hills; where does my help come from?

My help comes from the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth

He will not let your foot slip; he watches over you and will not slumber

Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep”