OPINION: The world forgot 7 October – but we never will

Two years ago, our lives changed permanently. The worst massacre of Jews on one single day since 1945 was also the worst Islamist barbarity on Western soil since 9/11. It was an eruption of Iran’s volcanic hatred of the Jewish state, the culmination of an ideology of annihilation that portrays Jews as a satanic people. 1,200 innocent people were murdered, and over 250 hostages were taken, a small number of whom still remain in Gaza’s hellish torture chambers. The attack was of such paralysing horror that it shattered Israel and created a national trauma from which its people have yet to recover. 

It also shattered the hearts of diaspora Jewry. It was not just the fathomless savagery that unfolded on that day. It was the sickening firestorm of hatred that engulfed Jewish communities in country after country, amounting to a ‘continuation of the pogrom’ in the words of Brendan O’Neill. From university campuses where the Hamas massacre became a point of jubilation and pride to the street demonstrations with their calls for jihad and intifada, antisemites and Israel haters poured petrol on Jewish wounds, creating a hostile climate without parallel in modern Jewish history.

Many chose to deny the massacre. They mocked the hostages. They tore down hostage posters and cut ribbons. They marched within hours of the Manchester attack. This is hatred cloaked in self-righteousness.

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Today, two years on, thousands of students in major universities will use this day, both to venerate Palestinian ‘resistance’ and to mark the anniversary of a genocide. Here, the word ‘genocide’ has been stripped of all meaning and hurled at the world’s only Jewish state as a strategic weapon of war. It is clearly designed to vilify and demonise Israel but, even more so, to silence its self-defence and prevent it from defeating its enemies. It has been a deadly part of Hamas’s non-military arsenal, and its useful idiots in the West have used it constantly.

Yet, the only genocide on 7 October was that committed by Hamas in full view of the world. Nor was their mass slaughter and rape a form of ‘resistance’ to anything. It was merely the latest iteration in the world’s oldest hatred, one that has witnessed an endless litany of cruelties and foul deeds inflicted upon the Jewish people.  That day will be remembered as one of the darkest days in our history and an eternal stain on those who perpetrated their atrocities.

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What happened on 7 October has become a mere footnote in the war that has followed, when it should have been the preface. It has been sidelined and forgotten, treated as a perfunctory afterthought, a mere inconvenience that interrupts the established narrative of Israeli malignity and Palestinian victimhood. But the inhuman barbarities unleashed by Hamas are one of the ghastliest crimes of the modern age. The glee with which the terrorists rampaged through communities, slaughtered people without abandon and live-streamed their atrocities is without parallel. It is both mediaeval in its hideousness and thoroughly modern in its performance.

Such a demonic slaughter demanded an overwhelming response and a regional realignment that removed genocidal actors from Israel’s borders. No sane nation would have sought different aims from the ones Israel chose in the aftermath of the attack. No post-7 October war could have avoided immense destruction, suffering and death. Israel was fighting a brutal urban conflict against the most cynical and evil of enemies, one whose entire raison d’être was to sacrifice its population for political ends.

That doesn’t deny the tragic consequences of war for innocent civilians, of whom there are clearly many. Palestinians deserve a better future free from all those leaders who wish to exploit them in the service of attacking Israel. That is why it is right that this conflict must end and bring to a close one of the most awful chapters in the history of the Middle East. But we must also understand the context for the war and assign responsibility for the suffering in a rational way. We must never forget 7 October.