A year ago, October 7th was a Saturday morning, and a religious holiday in Israel to boot (Simchat Torah), when residents of kibbutzim (communal farms) not far from the Gaza strip woke up to guns blazing first in their streets, then in their homes. It was, the world later learned, a well-coordinated attack, which also included an attack on a music festival in the desert nearby. The culprit? The terrorist organization, Hamas.
By the end of the day, over 1,200 Israelis—men, women, children, even babies—were slaughtered. For around 250 others, however, the terror was just beginning, to be followed by captivity in Gaza. How have they spent the past year? The fate of the six hostages recently executed in a narrow low-ceilinged tunnel testifies to the horror of their experience, as do reports from the few who have been released. How do you even begin to measure the collective trauma of an event like this on a people whose entire history has been defined by unimaginable horror?
I think about this as a dual citizen of Israel and the United States. My elementary and middle school years were defined by fear—from monthly bomb shelter drills, in case of another missile attack (Israel had, after all, just emerged from the Gulf War), to the regular stern reminders at school that we must be vigilant and report any suspicious item (“hefetz hashud”) seen at school or on the street. Any strange backpack, small bag, even a takeout container or a pizza box—anything that does not seem to readily belong to someone else was to be reported right away. Otherwise, it could kill. Everyone, from the youngest child up, knew this. This was, after all, how a spree of terrorist attacks on buses and in other public spaces had taken place—beginning with a backpack seemingly forgotten by someone on a seat as he exited the bus or the coffee shop.
But it is not fear alone that rules in Israel now. There is, perhaps, even more anger—anger that there is no safety anywhere, ever; anger that people could be killed in their own homes, in their own beds, and still be deemed villains by the world; anger that the Israeli government, led by Netanyahu, is unable to save the remaining hostages, who are instead dying in captivity, one after another. But the anger that I feel, from the safety of my American home, has to do with the lack of compassion of the rest of the world for Israel.
A year ago, I wrote on the Monday following that weekend of slaughter, that Israel’s entire national calendar is structured around a liturgy of national suffering, to which one more date has now been added. October 7th, 2023 is now included in the liturgy used to commemorate the most tragic date in the Jewish calendar: Tisha B’Av, the date of the destruction of both the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and then the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70.
The present is, indeed, filled with anguish, though not merely from the atrocities themselves, but also the international reaction. The general tone has skewed away from support for Israel or an even-handed condemnation of violence against civilians in Israel and Gaza. Rather, we’ve seen a rise in antisemitism globally and in the U.S., along with a rallying from too many circles, around… Hamas. This summer, a group from my graduate alma mater, Princeton University, published a document, The People’s Style Guide, effectively declaring that Israel doesn’t exist, Hamas is wonderful, and that we should just stop talking so much about the Israeli hostages already.
The document is chilling. Its rationale: “Language has historically been and remains another front of the Zionist movement’s assault. From the policing of chants to the weaponization of antisemitism to the monopolization of ‘genocide,’ we have witnessed lexical machinery. In that vein, we offer our reflections and on language.”
But is it “weaponization of antisemitism” to point out the very hatred that permeates such documents as this, denying the suffering of one group of people to elevate the terrorists to the status of heroes or, at least, victims? As Russell Moore has poignantly noted, “Israelis and Palestinians are equally beloved of God. But there’s no moral ambiguity about the genocidal evil of Hamas.” And is it “monopolization of ‘genocide’” (please note the placing of genocide in quotation marks in the People’s Style Guide, suggesting their skepticism of any such genocide ever taking place against the Jews) to point out the suffering that continues to define a nation in which every citizen still has close connections to the Holocaust—relatives or family friends lost, even if now several generations past?
I contend that it is no “lexical machinery” to state the sheer facts of violence, brutality, and suffering of the Jewish people historically and particularly over the past year. It is, rather, intellectually dishonest to deny one group’s suffering to attempt to support the cause of another—especially if the other group happens to be a terrorist organization.
Of course, the document also offers a convenient new definition of “terrorist” that is, suddenly, transformed from condemnation into praise: “Terrorist is the word that Western governments use to malign political actors that threaten Western hegemony.” And then there are such twists of logic as this one: “Hamas is one of several political groups committed to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation and colonization. While Hamas is often depicted in the West as just a militant group, it also has a sophisticated political infrastructure concerned with governance, movement building, and development of a welfare state in Palestine.”
Words matter for anniversaries like this one. More than this, people—God’s image-bearers—matter. God sees injustice committed in word, thought, and deed. But as an American, no less than Israeli, I certainly hope that this antisemitism in some corners does not make it into national policy.