Oct. 7 was the first blow in a wider struggle to define the Jewish story

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is writing a book about the meaning of Jewish survival.

Already a year? Only a year?

Since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, many Israelis have felt unmoored in time. I rarely know the date; sometimes I forget the month. “It’s one long day,” said Danny Elgarat, whose brother, Itzik, was taken as a hostage in Gaza. Or rather, one long fitful night.

New details and footage of the massacre continue to rivet us, as if the horrors were still happening. Everyone seems to be in mourning – for a relative or friend murdered on Oct. 7, for a hostage murdered in Gaza, for a soldier killed at the front. Memorial stickers, each commemorating a fallen soldier and accompanied by his favourite quote, are seemingly everywhere. “Don’t forget to smile,” reads one, showing the soldier’s smiling face.

In a Tel Aviv square, someone mounted a large blank sheet and invited passersby to write the names of a loved one lost since Oct. 7. Within minutes the sheet was crowded with names. More blank posters were displayed, and those too quickly filled.

Perhaps the deepest layer of trauma over this past year was the loss of our collective certainties. On Oct. 7 our military deterrence was shattered: The most devastating blow in our history was delivered by our weakest enemy. No less than the horrors of Oct. 7, we’ve struggled to absorb our failure to prevent them. Why was the border left exposed? Why did it take the army so long to reach the communities seized by terrorists? Where was our government? How could this have happened?

Israel’s recent, stunning successes against the Lebanese terrorist army, Hezbollah – the mass but pinpointed beeper attacks on its operatives, followed by the targeted group assassination of its leading field commanders and culminating in the assassination of leader Hassan Nasrallah – have gone a long way to restoring our deterrence. Those attacks severely undermined Hezbollah’s operational abilities, reminding our enemies that, despite the debacle of Oct. 7, Israel remains capable of daring feats in its self-defence.

Israelis respond with contempt to the international outcry against IDF “escalation” and “aggression.” We far prefer condemnation for striking at our enemies than pity when they massacre us. Even Israelis who detest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government knew that, like the war against Hamas, war with Hezbollah was unavoidable. Despite the international focus on the Palestinian tragedy, this has always been a regional conflict. In Israel’s formative decades, it was the Sunni-Israeli war; now, the radical Shiite alliance threatens to destroy the Jewish state. However terrible, Gaza is only one front in the war between Israel and Iran that began on Oct. 7.

The Hamas massacre taught us that we cannot co-exist with terror entities on our borders. We imagined we could continue living next door to enemies who constantly threatened to destroy us, simply by deterring them. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar urged rioters massed along the Gaza border to slaughter Israelis and “tear out their hearts,” but we dismissed the threat as rhetoric. That was one of the few atrocities Hamas terrorists did not commit on Oct. 7.

When Hezbollah began bombarding towns and villages in northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas, tens of thousands of Israelis fled their homes. One of the hotels transformed into relocation centres is in my neighbourhood. Most of its residents are working-class families who have endured years of rocket attacks; some no longer have homes to return to. A social worker assigned to the hotel told me that, behind the four-star façade, families are disintegrating.

Israel was founded both to fulfill a people’s longing to return home and to end the vulnerability of homelessness. Ensuring the ability of Israelis to live in their homes is a test for the Israeli promise of creating a safe refuge for the Jewish people.

Perhaps the most important psychological achievement of our success against Hezbollah is helping to restore our faith in that promise.

One friend, who was planning to buy a pistol, told me after the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah that he’d changed his mind. “I trust the IDF again to protect me,” he said.

Still, the Iranian-Israeli War is only beginning. IDF commanders call this a seven-front war – the first time Israel has faced so many enemies simultaneously since the 1948 War of Independence. Tens of thousands of missiles and rockets are aimed at our cities and capable of hitting anywhere in Israel. Missiles have been fired against Tel Aviv not only from Lebanon, Iran and Gaza, but from Iraq and Yemen.

Not even the Iron Dome anti-missile system, which has largely protected civilian Israel against the limited arsenal of Hamas, can adequately protect us from the massive barrage that Iran and its allies are still capable of inflicting. The latest Iranian missile barrage on Oct. 1 that was aimed at Israeli cities – and which was successfully destroyed before doing substantial damage – is still only a fraction of the deadly capabilities of the Iranian axis.

The war against Hamas, Israel’s longest by far since its War of Independence, remains inconclusive: After a year of fighting, Hamas has been severely weakened but not destroyed. Most of all this grim reality remains unchanged: With Oct. 7, Israel became the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew.

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In recent decades, as Israelis began to take their nation’s survival for granted, the Holocaust gradually receded from political discourse.

Though Prime Minister Netanyahu repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in his warnings about a nuclear Iran, most Israelis tended to avoid Holocaust rhetoric. One indication of the change was a 2017 speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day by former president Ruvi Rivlin, himself a right-winger, who warned against comparing the Holocaust to security threats against Israel.

But since Oct. 7, the Holocaust has become a frame of reference for trying to understand this moment. Israelis describe Oct. 7 as the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. A more apt description would be: the greatest number of Israelis (they included Arab Israelis) killed on any day in a century of Arab-Israeli conflict. By invoking the Holocaust, Israelis are saying: We failed to defeat the Jewish past.

One telling sign of the new mood is the constant repetition of the slogan, Am Yisrael Chai: the people of Israel live. That expression was popular among diaspora Jews who needed reassurance after the Holocaust that the Jewish people had indeed survived.

Israelis never adopted the slogan, whose defiance revealed an anxiety we thought we had overcome. Of course the people of Israel live; that was the whole point of a Jewish state. Now, though, the slogan appears on highway signs and in newspaper ads and in popular songs. Suddenly demonstrative defiance seems very Israeli.

Even more than Hamas’s atrocities, the defencelessness of the victims torments us with Holocaust imagery. This is not about revelling in self-pity but the opposite: We dread the identity of victim, antithetical to the Israeli enterprise.

Our inability to free the Israeli hostages being held in suffocating spaces in Gaza is a constant taunt, reminding us of the failure of Oct. 7. In 1976, the IDF rescued a hundred Israeli hostages whose plane had been hijacked to Entebbe airport in Uganda. The Entebbe rescue became the symbol of the post-Holocaust era of Jewish resilience. (That the hostages were being held by far-left German terrorists made the symbolism of Entebbe even more potent.)

Now, though, the IDF, which is operating within shouting distance of our hostages, has managed to free only eight out of the dozens estimated to still be alive. This is Israel’s anti-Entebbe moment.

Speaking at a demonstration for the hostages, Meirav Cohen, an opposition member of parliament, said: “The state of Israel was founded so that there would not be another Holocaust. [When Israeli] citizens are being held in tunnels, starved and abused and then executed by Nazis, this government has totally failed.”

She wasn’t speaking about an operational failure to save the hostages, but a failure of political will. According to his own hostage negotiators, Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged a deal, fearful that his far-right coalition partners, who reject any deal that would keep Hamas in power, might topple the government. Demonstrations against the government, sparsely attended in the first months of the war, have drawn hundreds of thousands in recent weeks.

The defining Jewish ethos of the post-Holocaust era was solidarity: When Jews were in crisis anywhere in the world, fellow Jews everywhere did what they could to help. The great expression of that commitment was the international movement to free the three million Jews trapped in the Soviet Union – a 25-year struggle that culminated in mass emigration.

The notion that the Prime Minister of the Jewish state would place his political needs ahead of the lives of Jewish captives betrays our defining ethos.

The combination of unprecedented security threats along with the moral collapse of our leadership has led to profound demoralization. According to a recent poll, one-third of Israelis are no longer sure this is the best place to raise their children and grandchildren.

The post-Holocaust era was defined by optimism about the Jewish future. However improbably, the Jews had emerged, seemingly stronger than ever, from the event intended to destroy them. But Oct. 7 ended the post-Holocaust era, replacing it with a new era of terrifying uncertainty.

Through 2,000 years of exile, the Jewish people were sustained by two dreams. The first – considered so fantastic that it was relegated to messianic times – was that a dispersed and powerless people would somehow reclaim its ancient homeland. The second was that, in the long interim before the coming of the Messiah, Jews would find a welcoming haven in the diaspora.

After the Holocaust, both dreams were fulfilled. Two great centres of Jewish life emerged – a sovereign Israel and a self-confident North American Jewry, the most successful diaspora in history. Together, Israel and North America contain close to 90 per cent of the world’s Jews. These two centres presided over the post-Holocaust renewal of the Jewish people – which moved from its lowest-ever moment to the peak of its military, economic and political power.

Nothing like this had ever happened to the Jews – or perhaps to any other people. The transition from brokenness to power was so abrupt and decisive that some Jews concluded this must be the messianic era.

Each community reacted to its particular circumstances with the wisdom of Jewish adaptability. For Israelis, that meant military deterrence in a region that sought to destroy them. For Jews in the diaspora, and especially in North America, that meant responding with “soft power” – lobbying, philanthropy and alliance-building with other minorities – in societies that embraced them.

The promise of the post-Holocaust era was that humanity, shamed into contrition, would finally be cured of its Jewish obsession. Jews would no longer be turned into a symbol for whatever a given civilization regarded as the ultimate evil – Christ-killer for Christianity, money-grubbing capitalist for Marxism, race polluter for Nazism.

To be sure, large parts of the world never signed up for the penitence program. The Arab world tried to destroy the newborn Jewish state barely three years after the Holocaust. The Soviet Union promoted an aggressive antisemitic campaign barely disguised as “anti-Zionism.” And in Western Europe, Jews have been violently targeted by radical Islamists.

But in North America, the promise of Jewish safety took root.

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In recent years, there were warning signs that the atmosphere was shifting. The 2018 murder of 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the worst massacre in American Jewish history. Synagogues became the only houses of worship requiring round-the-clock security. And anti-Zionism, the ideology that defines the existence of a Jewish state as a crime, penetrated humanities departments across academia.

Still, nothing quite prepared American and Canadian Jews for the post-Oct. 7 shift – in effect, the Europeanization of North American Jewish life.

In recent travels through North American Jewish communities, I encountered a level of fear I’d never experienced before. Some wondered whether there was a future in the diaspora for Jewish life. Some even evoked the Germany of the 1920s. “Now I know what my grandparents were trying to warn me about,” a friend said to me. I suspect that North American Jews who compare their situation to pre-Holocaust Europe know the analogy is absurd, but reaching into our darkest experience is a way of signalling the shock of their new reality.

Fear for the future is especially acute among Jews in Canada, where anti-Jewish incidents have included arson and shooting attacks against Jewish schools and synagogues. During the Trump years, Jewish friends in the U.S. told me that Canada was their back-up option should American democracy unravel. But now the Canadian option seems far less appealing.

In speaking to North American Jewish audiences, I’ve noted that, while Israel had become the most dangerous country for Jews physically, it had also become the safest country for Jews psychologically – the one place you could be certain your neighbours shared your horror of Oct. 7. No one challenged that assessment.

This is the first time that Israelis and North American Jews are experiencing a shared sense of vulnerability. In the past, when Israel was at war, the diaspora rallied to its support. Now, many diaspora Jews seem to be worrying no less about their future than ours.

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Statistics tracking the rise in antisemitic attacks around the world since Oct. 7 tell only part of the story. The deeper trauma for diaspora Jews is psychological: the sense that their acceptance in society – from universities to the political system to the streets – is eroding.

The great post-Holocaust achievement of North American Jews was the gradual end of their conditional acceptance into general society. Until then, Jews understood that social advance depended on toning down one’s Jewishness. Many Jews accepted the trade-off, even changing their family names.

By the 1970s, anti-Jewish discrimination – from university quotas to “restricted” neighbourhoods and law firms – had largely ended. For the first time in the diaspora, Jews felt fully accepted.

The mainstreaming of anti-Zionism in universities and other progressive spaces has restored the era of conditional acceptance. Anti-Zionists point to a fundamental flaw in Jewish identity that must be corrected as the admission price into the progressive equivalent of “polite society.” We will accept you among us, anti-Zionists tell young Jews on campus, and you may even hold Shabbat prayers and Passover seders at our tent encampments. On one condition: that you expunge Israel from your identity – a commitment that binds the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews.

For all practical purposes, the debate over whether anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism is irrelevant. Anti-Zionism is a threat to Jewish well-being – ironically, far more in the diaspora than in Israel, where we are largely immune to its impact. One immediate consequence of the anti-Zionist mood is to instill in Jews a profound sense of insecurity. Since Oct. 7, according to a poll, more than a third of Jewish students on American campuses feel impelled to hide their Jewishness.

Last spring I met with Jewish students at Northwestern University near Chicago. I attended Northwestern in the 1970s, shortly after anti-Jewish quotas had been removed. My experience as a student there was exhilarating: Growing up in a Holocaust survivor family, where the non-Jewish world was seen as intrinsically hostile, I discovered a level of acceptance my parents couldn’t have imagined. That experience laid the foundation for my commitment to interfaith dialogue.

The Jewish reality I encountered at Northwestern in 2024 was the opposite of my own. Jewish students who refuse to repudiate Israel tend to experience social exclusion and socialize mostly with each other.

The experience of Jewish students I met around the country varies from campus to campus. Still, there is a shared concern that anti-Zionism is poisoning a generation. As one student put it: What hurts most are the hateful comments of students who aren’t especially political but have absorbed the anti-Zionist atmosphere.

Israelis and their diaspora supporters feel they are living in an inverted reality. The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” became mainstream on campuses just after Oct. 7 – precisely when Hamas revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications. At a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration in Toronto, an updated version was unveiled: “From Palestine to Lebanon, Isra-el will soon be gone!”

Despite Hamas’s genocidal intentions, it is Israel that is accused of genocide. That judgment requires erasing the conditions in which the IDF fights – against terrorists without uniforms who operate from within a civilian population, in mosques and hospitals, in hundreds of kilometres of tunnels and in thousands of booby-trapped apartments. Erasing the Israeli narrative of the war extends to how most of the media cite Gaza casualty rates – without noting how many of the dead are Hamas fighters. (Out of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s current estimate of 41,000 dead, the IDF says close to 18,000 are terrorists – a combatant-to-civilian ratio well within the norm of other asymmetrical conflicts of this century, and under far more difficult circumstances than other armies have faced.)

Anti-Zionists apply that pattern of erasure to the entire story of the Jewish return home. Turning Zionism into a criminal expression of European colonialism requires erasing the 4,000-year Jewish connection to their land. Reducing the story of Israel’s founding to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians requires playing down the war of destruction Arab leaders declared against the newborn Jewish state and the postwar expulsion of nearly a million Jews from their ancient communities in the Arab world. Turning Israel into the occupier and aggressor requires omitting the history of Israeli peace offers and of Palestinian rejectionism.

The deeper war that began on Oct. 7 is ideological. Long after the fighting stops on Israel’s borders, the war for the legitimacy of the Jewish story will continue. Winning that war requires resolve against those who seek to turn the Jewish state into our generation’s symbol of the evil Jew – once again embodying humanity’s most detestable traits.

At the same time, Jews need to fight to preserve a decent and democratic Israel. The growing far right – which seeks to annex the West Bank and expel Palestinians, and supports settler violence against them – intends to turn us into the criminals our enemies say we are. Preserving our moral credibility is a prerequisite for winning the war for the Jewish story.

With the end of the post-Holocaust era, Jews need to adjust to radical ambiguity. That means both a realistic assessment of threats and also of our ability to respond to them.

Once again Israel is fighting for survival; yet as recent days prove, we still possess the will and the means to defend ourselves. North American Jewry no longer enjoys unconditional acceptance; yet its communities remain the most fortunate in diaspora history. The “Jewish problem” – as Jewish existence was once defined in pre-Holocaust Europe – has been replaced by the “Jewish state problem.” But Israel is not alone in a hostile world, even if it sometimes feels that way.

The other day in Jerusalem, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “Our story will have a good ending.” Those words were spoken by Sarit Zussman at the funeral of her son, Ben, a soldier who fell in Gaza. Once that sentiment would have seemed to Israelis self-evident. Now it has the poignancy of a prayer.

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