It’s been three years since the October 7 attacks, in which a group of innocent concertgoers was killed, leaving more than 1,200 Jews dead, including 46 Americans. The terrorists, who recorded their murders and rapes with the pubescent glee of ululating streamers, took more than 250 hostages – the oldest was 86 years old, the youngest just nine months. Neither saw their families again.
Three years on, the lesson of that attack is clear: it worked.
October 7 was meant to break the status quo asunder. It targeted the Jews most sympathetic to the plight of Gazans, most liberal in their views, and slaughtered them like the soft targets they were. It was a blood-red flashpoint smeared across the face of Israel and its allies. It aimed at killing as many Jews as possible while undoing years of advancement under Donald Trump’s diplomacy to achieve a new normalcy for relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nations across the Middle East.
Instead of joining the fight against the side that murdered innocents, nations clambered over each other to recognize for the first time a Palestinian state – including Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. As an ally to Israel, the United States truly stands alone.
October 7 was a call for the West to answer, done with a demonic confidence that the West would overwhelmingly fail the test… and fail we did.
My friend Douglas Murray has used this line about that day: “Sometimes in life a flare goes up, and you get to see where everyone is standing.” Yes – and in this instance, it helped those who hate Jews discover new ways to find each other.
It turns out there are far more of them than many people imagined. It turns out that rather than stop with horror to look at the images, still unseen by the vast majority of people, that were broadcast by a demonic group of murderers, many people in the West responded instead by deploying the famed Norm Macdonald tweet as if it were a piece of wise counsel instead of trenchant mockery.
So here we are in 2026, a time when people regularly tell their millions of followers that America deserved 9/11, the Jews deserved October 7, Hitler wasn’t a villain, and then dance right up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, another Holocaust would be a good thing.
This may sound like exaggeration, but it isn’t.
Before October 7, the majority of Americans had favorable views of Israel – now, six in 10 have unfavorable views, and the number with extremely unfavorable views has nearly tripled to 28%. This includes a majority of Republicans 18-49, 70% of Independents, and as high as 84% of Democrats in the same age range.
It is now a solidly bipartisan position in America to dislike Israel. Given the trajectory, and the blame ascribed to Israel over the Iran war, it may soon be a bipartisan position to hate it.
For younger citizens of the West, this deep-seated inhuman hate has learned the power of a smiling face. It comes now clad in athleisure wear, speaks the language of Ivy League colonialists with eloquent charm, and sheds the unsightly vestiges of the cruelest antisemitism for propaganda designed to resemble harmless influencer banter. It is a curated form of the oldest hatred, hidden within a seemingly innocuous message indistinguishable from the socialist instincts that animate the 21st-century Left.
Come for the Medicare-for-All. Stay to learn which billionaires need to bleed.
In retrospect, the revelry of the October 7 attackers was their celebration of the end of the world – a world they destroyed with every life they ended. We live in that world now. And how America responds to that evil – whether we have the courage to do what is necessary even if the Jew haters at home and abroad shriek, even if the whole world hates us for it – is the moral leadership test of our time.
People want to forget. America has to remember.
Related:
The New York Times: For Twin Brothers Abducted in the Oct. 7 Attacks, Adjusting to Freedom Is a New Challenge
The Wall Street Journal: The Young Americans Who Moved to Israel After Oct. 7
New York Post: Jew-hating radicals are celebrating the horrors of Oct. 7 and organizing parades full of monsters
New York Post: NYC Mayor Mamdani Uses 3rd Anniversary of Oct. 7 Atrocity to Attack Israel for Ongoing Genocide
New York Post: Oct. 7 Survivors Struggling With Joblessness and PTSD
The Washington Post: Three Years After Oct. 7, Israeli Strikes in Gaza Grind On and Deaths Climb
The Free Press: Israelis Who Never Left October 7: Hostages, Survivors, Survivors’ Families
🪶 Quote
“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?... I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing; but the man who lives the span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning — that, I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
— Chaim Potok