Reflections on the October 7 Massacre
Reflections on the October 7 Massacre
Following the one-year anniversary of the October 7th massacre, we share a compilation of articles, podcasts, and commentaries looking back on that day and the ensuing events.
Bari Weiss, A Year of Revelations (The Free Press, October 7, 2024)
Bari Weiss: “We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.”
People often ask me why The Free Press has covered this story with such intensity and relentlessness. This is the answer.
Since the earliest hours of October 7, 2023, we have published more than 150 reports, features, essays, podcasts, and videos, many from on the ground in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and more recently, Lebanon and Syria.
Today we wanted to present all of them to you in one place as a resource, a historical record, and a reminder of the kind of journalism you are supporting when you support The Free Press.
Our reporting on this topic has always had one goal: the pursuit of truth. In the course of that aim, it has also led to congressional hearings, House report citations, new laws, and pressure on Hamas to release an imam in Gaza who refused to toe the line.
The October 7 Attack (Shoah Foundation)
The USC Shoah Foundation has been sharing the voices and experiences of Holocaust survivors for 30 years. Our archive is the world’s largest video repository of Holocaust survivor testimony, a living history that can help shape responses to prejudice, hatred, and violence.
We are now witnessing a resurgence in antisemitism that demonstrates that the malicious attitudes and behaviors that led to the Holocaust continue to fester today.
Since the October 7 massacres in Israel, we have been working with partners on the ground to record hundreds of interviews with survivors and witnesses of the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust.
These testimonies, available below, are part of our ongoing initiative to expand our Contemporary Antisemitism Collection focused on victims of antisemitism since 1945.
Our core Holocaust Collection and our Contemporary Antisemitism Collection—though vastly different in scope and content—together offer a stark testament to the persistence and destructiveness of antisemitism, a virulent belief system that defies the passage of time and the lessons of history.
Today, we stand with survivors from all generations with renewed determination to preserve their stories and to fight against the age-old plague of antisemitism.
My Journey From a Jerusalem of Ghosts to the Living Jerusalem, Niall Ferguson, The Free Press (October 7, 2024)
To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius.
That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.
It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.
To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies….
I believe there is not a person living in Israel—from the most left-wing journalists of Tel Aviv to the ultra-Orthodox of Jerusalem to the mystics of Tzfat—who did not see what I saw. October 7 was not just another terrorist attack. It was the prelude to Shoah II. That was why, when I traveled to Israel in February, I was not wholly surprised to encounter a people who, despite their compulsive political quarrels, were united in their resolve to do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening.
I met no one who dissented from the proposition that Hamas should be destroyed. I met many whose only caveat was that Hezbollah—a bigger threat in military terms—should be destroyed first. I found few takers for the idea that Israel’s security would be enhanced by the creation of an independent Palestinian state. And I can recall nobody—not a single person—who opposed military action to defend Israel against its enemies, even if it meant putting themselves or their sons and daughters on the front line.
Antisemitism Since 1945 (Shoah Foundation)
Today, in the face of the most alarming resurgence of antisemitism since the Holocaust, we are more focused than ever on understanding and countering this deadly scourge through innovative programming, research, and education.
To anchor our work, we are significantly expanding our Contemporary Antisemitism Collection, an unparalleled and comprehensive effort to chronicle antisemitic violence.
Along with our Core Holocaust Collection, these new testimonies will power our work and offer an invaluable resource in the fight against antisemitism – a threat to Jews, non-Jews, and democratic values everywhere.
Our work is guided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism, which begins with a core definition:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The IHRA definition, which has been adopted by 43 nations and many local governments and NGOs, lists eleven examples of how antisemitism manifests, including Holocaust denial or distortion and criticism of Israel that demonizes, delegitimizes, or holds Israel to a double standard.
Combating Antisemitism Post October 7th (SPME)
A podcast featuring Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism.
Israel’s 9/11: October 2023 (SPME)
A podcast with Brigadier General (Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of the Research Division of the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps, as well as the Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
The Women of 7 October (Quillette, Iona Italia)
I can’t stop thinking about them: the women and girls of the Israeli kibbutzim, who were raped on 7 October, less than 8 weeks ago. Raped so brutally and so repeatedly that in some cases their pelvises broke from the weight of so many men. And then their throats were slit or they were shot in the forehead. I can’t forget the semi-naked corpse of Shani Louk, paraded around Gaza on the flatbed of a truck, as hordes of men cheered on her rapists and crowded around the jeep to spit on her body. I can’t forget the young woman, arms bound behind her back, hobbling from a slit Achilles tendon, a large bloodstain blossoming across her jeans where she was bleeding profusely from her vagina and anus, being led away, a prisoner of her rapists.
I’m still in mourning for them.It shouldn’t matter how you feel about the causes or course of this conflict. It shouldn’t matter how much you care about the Palestinian cause, how unjust you feel the situation is in Gaza, how strongly you blame Israel. It shouldn’t matter what other victims arouse your compassion or how much horror you feel as you watch a Palestinian mother screaming in anguish as her child is unearthed from the rubble of a bomb site. It shouldn’t matter whether the flag you fly is cerulean and white or green and black, whether it bears a triangle or a star. None of that made any difference to the suffering those women endured on that day and that those who were taken hostage still endure.
Personal Reflections (Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement)
Headhunters: How Anthropology Helps Us Understand the Oct. 7 Massacres and the People Who Committed Them (Tablet, Alex Joffe)
I have a theory that Neolithic farmers occasionally took part in headhunting: the ritual practice of severing and preserving human heads. At various sites in Syria and the Levant, like Jericho, archaeologists found plastered and otherwise decorated skulls. Whereas most scholars believe that the skulls belonged to venerated ancestors, I and a few other archaeologists believe that these were victims of headhunting expeditions—ritualized violence. As in much later cultures, the skulls were artifacts of magic and power collected by deeply violent societies.
So here’s the thing: Hamas are headhunters….
You could conclude from the Oct. 7 video that the slaughter was a religious act: not a form of extremism, but absolutely routine hatred that has nothing to do with land and everything to do with Jews. The cosmic affront to the attackers’ orthodoxy posed by Jews with dignity, sovereignty, and power, causes them to cry out in pain and, at the moment of their triumph, in celebration, constantly, as if it were the only phrase they know: Allahu akbar—the most frequently heard term throughout the video. The Jew’s magical power has not only been conquered, but absorbed.
Or you could conclude it’s culture: habitual behavior and violence. The routineness of the exercise leads them to casually or even with annoyance, instruct each other to get on with it and shoot women hiding in a room. In the head, they repeat, in the head. Or to kill a man with a grenade and take a bottle from the refrigerator while his two sons shriek in the same room, close the refrigerator door—because that is what one does with a refrigerator door—and then walk out. And the radioed instructions to crucify victims in order for crowds to abuse their bodies, simply part of the job. They are playing with the head, the radio voices report. Routine….
As practiced in Gaza, headhunting as ritual violence entails enacting, preferably for the camera, multiple deaths, one of the living Jew and another of the dead Jew. Humiliating the individual and, by broadcasting those deaths at home and to others as part of continuing celebrations, targeting the Jewish collective; by holding, torturing and finally killing hostages, and hiding their bodies for the possibility of later exchange, prolonging death.
We Must Become October 8 Jews (Jerusalem Post, Asaf Romirowsky)
The Hamas massacre of October 7 shattered many myths and conceptions. One of them is the liberal progressive dream of Zionism being rooted in a shared sense of social justice.
However, instead of waking up to the falsehoods they have been telling themselves, that their liberal allies would stand with them because of a common devotion to liberalism, these Jewish progressives were shocked to learn that “death to Jews” means all Jews, on and off campus.
October 7 also cast aside the outdated notion of Israel’s so-called “occupation” as the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas had explicit plans to destroy as many Jews as possible, to destroy the State of Israel, and to build its version of “Palestine” from the river to the sea. Additionally, Hamas remains supported by some 75% of Palestinians…
The lexicon of “occupation” has become the religion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within progressive-liberal circles. The orientation of this religiosity is the Palestinian claim that their alleged territories were “occupied” by Israel, whether in 1967 or 1948, regardless of where they are located on the map, much less in any legal sense under international law.
The mantra of “occupation” and the demand that Israel be shunned until the “occupation” is ended – meaning the time when Israel is dissolved by the implementation of the Palestinian “right of return” – is the key demand of the Palestinians and the BDS movement. In this worldview, Israel will always be the “oppressor.”
The Palestinian concept demands that the “occupation” – the existence of Israel – remain the root cause of all that society’s problems, self-imposed and otherwise, from social and economic woes to terrorism. All of this is detached from reality, doubly so for the Jews.
Trying to fuse Judaism with the ever-shifting notions perceived to be liberal values, while further rooting out Zionism in the wake of October 7 is perverse, but soothes those who cannot address the cognitive dissonance. The reality is that all Jews, even the so-called enlightened ones, are targets for being Jewish. This was true on October 7 and it is true today as Jews are harassed by pro-Hamas thugs demanding to know if they are “Zionists,” meaning Jews – and chased and beaten in the streets of New York, Toronto, and Paris.
Salman Rushdie Has Exposed the Great Lie of a ‘Free Palestine’ (The Spectator, O’Neil, May 20, 2024)
Watch Rushdie’s video here.
Rushdie chides the radicals who have failed to distance themselves from Hamas. This is a ‘terrorist organisation’, he reminds them, and it is ‘very strange for young progressive student [activists] to kind of support a fascist terrorist group’. Indeed. It’s been mindblowing to watch the self-styled anti-fascists of the bourgeois left either stay schtum or even try to rationalise Hamas’s fascistic attack on the Jews of Southern Israel. These are the kind of people who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’ – Brexit, Trump, gender-critical feminism – and yet when there was a pogrom that was genuinely reminiscent of the 1930s they essentially said: ‘Well, what do you expect…?’
Rushdie then commits a secular blasphemy – he questions the chant of our times: ‘Free Palestine.’ He himself supports the creation of a Palestinian state, but what would a ‘Free Palestine’ look like in 2024, he wonders? ‘Right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas and that would make it a Taliban-like state…It would be a client state of Iran. And is that what the progressive movements of the Western left wish to create?’…
And now he says that Hamas is a scourge, and that a Hamas-ruled Palestine would be a disaster, and that Israel should not have to live next door to such a monstrosity. We should listen.
Palestinians and Israelis Reflect on a Tragic Year (LA Times, October 7)
To mark the anniversary of October 7, the LA Times compiled a collection of articles titled “Palestinians and Israelis Reflect on a Tragic Year.” After boldly conceding that Israelis suffered a massacre on October 7, the collection offers readers a dozen articles that collectively give the impression that the Palestinians are the victims. The collection contains one article about slaughtered Jews—it describes the gruesome work of the forensic laboratory that is still trying to identify the human remains recovered from the scene (“Inside an Israeli Lab, Workers Pore Over the Mangled Bodies of the Dead”), but then shifts focus to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. And for good measure, tosses in an article about a fringe group of Israeli messianic Jews. Here is a screenshot of titles from the collection:
