“It was the largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, and the deadliest per capita terrorist attack, with just over 1 in every 10,000 Israelis killed, and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.”1
The events of 7 October
The facts of the atrocities carried out by Hamas and its fellow travellers don’t need repeating. A significant amount of evidence came from the Go Pros and cellphones of the terrorists themselves. That hasn’t stopped antisemites from denying some or all of it didn’t happen – another manifestation of “Holocaust denial’.
In summary, the invasion was preceded by a barrage of 3,873 rockets from Gaza. Another 987 rocket attacks were launched on 8 and 9 October.
Those killed or taken hostage were Jews, Arabs, Druze and Bedouins as well as citizens from 44 other countries. The youngest victim was 14 hours old and the oldest was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Victims were shot, asphyxiated, burnt, blown up by grenades, RGPs and missiles, mutilated, subject to sexual violence pre- or post mortem. The extent of desecration of many of the bodies was such that some were only identified many months later with sophisticated forensic techniques.
There were 119 border breaches by land, air and sea. Thirty-two civilian communities were attacked. Over 370 people were killed at the Nova Music Festival alone, the majority under the age of 30.
Why 7 October happened
The attack was not a response to anything Israel had done. Israel has had no presence in or authority over Gaza for 18 years. The planning for the assault had been about 10 years in the making by Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah.2.
It was motivated by a religious injunction fundamental to Islamist belief to destroy Jews. It has never been a conflict over land in the sense we westerners understand. For Islamists the existence of a Jewish state is an indignity: no one but Muslims must rule over land that at some time in history had been ruled by Muslims, least of all by the most base of people, the Jews.
The antisemitism that exploded globally
Across the world, on 7 October, protests started to gather in cities like New York and London to celebrate the terror.
Within a short time, many of those who protested in support of the attack, started to deny that the attack had happened. When it comes to antisemitism, it is completely possible to believe two entirely contradictory thoughts at the same time.
Over the past two years the realisation has grown that the orgy of antisemitism is yet another one of those potentially fatal spasms that have infected people since the Middle Ages. Libels against the Jews as baby killers received widespread traction across Europe then and, unbelievably, have been repeated now.
What has exacerbated the hysteria is the limp-wristed leadership of the so-called leaders of the Western world, on which more later.
The Manchester synagogue attack
The toleration of this hatred found its inevitable realisation in the deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester on 1 October 2025, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Many commentators expressed shock at the attack but not surprise. I was neither shocked nor surprised just deeply saddened. It was the first time Jews were attacked and killed for being Jews since the 13th century in the UK. This has happened numerous times in France in recent years – Charlie Hebdo, the defenestration of elderly Jews in Paris and Lyon, and the anti-Semitic rape last year of a 12-year-old girl to name a few.3
Protests in support of Hamas followed the synagogue attack, with the repulsive insensitivity one has come expect of the aggrieved Islamists and the progressive left who seek to assuage their inhumanity by calling Jews the ‘greatest evil’. 12th century Medieval England meets 21st century Western civilisation’.
For Jews who support Israel, life will forever be ‘after 7 October’. Europe once provided the opportunity for the evolution of the Oslo Accords. It is these very accords that gave Palestinians authority over their own lives. The further negotiations under Oslo which could have resulted in a 2-state solution never happened, because reaching an accord with the Jews would deny the Islamists their claim for all of Israel.
The inevitable result of the Second Intifada
Despite the self-autonomy that resulted from the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian leadership launched the Second Intifada. The only possible explanation for this event was to abort the possibility of peace.
The Second Intifada, which so many protesters want to export globally, didn’t involve tanks, artillery or the hand-to-hand combat of past wars. It became known by the names of “…the restaurants, bars, buses and road junctions in the heart of the country that constituted the main front in that war”.4 And shopping centres, transit stations, cafes and nightclubs.
The suicide bombing became the method of choice for wreaking devastation. 1,137 Israelis and 64 foreign nationals were killed. Civilians comprised 78% of deaths, and 5,676 of the 8,341 wounded. The majority of casualties were caused by suicide bombings, the rest were killed or injured by bombs, shootings, stonings, stabbings, lynchings, rockets etc.5
Hamas committed 39,9% of the suicide bombings; Fatah 26,4%; Palestinian Islamic jihad 25,7%; 5,4% by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and 2,7% by other groups.6
The deaths caused by and locations at which civilians were killed include: suicide bombings – 21 people in a disco; 15 in a pizzeria; 11 in a bus; 3 in a train station; 3 in a shopping mall, 11 in a café; 11 in a suburb in Jerusalem (two babies, three children and two teenagers were among those killed by a bomb full of shrapnel alongside a group of women with their baby strollers, waiting for the services in a nearby synagogue to conclude).7.
Perhaps the most well known suicide bombing was the one carried out by Hamas on 27 March 2002 at a Passover meal in the Park Hotel. Of the 250 civilians present, 30 were killed and 138 were injured. The dead included Holocaust survivors.8.
Oslo died after the Intifada. The path to peace made possible by the Oslo negotiations had been emphatically rejected. The Israelis built the security barrier to keep suicide bombers out. Israeli voters moved to the right with the Second Intifada being seared into the collective Israeli consciousness.
Weaponising victimhood
Victimhood has remained a weapon of Hamas’s propaganda war. The woke European elites have continued to embolden this abject state. The Europeans have known for years about the school curricula in the West Bank and Gaza that spewed antisemitism and hatred for Israel, ensuring that this conflict would endure from generation to generation.
On occasion wars have to be fought and won for peace to be achieved, for that status of perpetual victimhood to be vanquished. The problem is that Israel has been at war since its founding and to date it has not lost a war. In fact, it won the two major wars that forever extinguished the ancient concept of the pathetic, poor defenceless Jewish victim.
Perhaps the Palestinians have never understood that Israel is militarily powerful because it has faced genuinely existential threats from its leaders since its founding. The Palestinians have never faced an existential threat.
If Israel had been successfully destroyed in one of those wars, half of world Jewry would have ceased to exist and the Islamists could have moved on to reclaim the lands that they had once ruled in Europe.
In their arrogant naïvety, the leaders of France, Britain, Australia and Canada decided now was a good time to recognise Palestinian statehood. They assumed that Israel could be pressured into ending the war with the declaration, while the West failed to consider placing real pressure on the one party that could have ended the war, Hamas. The consequences? Hamas welcomed the recognition of Palestine as state. It does not want a 2-state solution, but, predictably, it called it a success for the 7 October attack.
As Jonathan Sacerdoti says: “The Palestinian movement has not earned peace. It must show that it wants more than survival, more than revenge, more than martyrdom. That it wants a future.”
Make no mistake, Israelis have been bitterly divided about the tactics of the government in the way they prosecuted the war, particularly after March this year. Many believe that the Gaza offensive was wrong and that the war should have ended sooner. However, the Israelis were united in their scorn for the posturing of allegedly powerful men scoring a victory for the party that started this conflagration. Their relevance to the solution of the conflict has been completely shattered by Donald Trump.
Since 2007 Hamas has had total control over Gaza. It could have uplifted Gazan’s quality of life, or advance its religiously motivated desire for the ultimate death. It chose the latter. Islamists venerate the perfect, redemptive death. Hamas’s most devastating armoury lay not in its weaponry but in the ‘human shield’ its people provided, voluntarily or not.
Using people, their homes, hospitals and schools should make Westerners queasy but the propaganda armoury of the Palestinian cause was enhanced to astonishing levels by the Soviet Union after 1967. It proved to be the best form of defence possible.
Denying people access to the 500km tunnel network for shelter from Israeli attacks has been glossed over or ignored. As Moussa Abu Marzouk of Hamas’s political bureau said in a TV interview with Russia Today’s Arabic channel on 31 October 2023, Hamas is not responsible for protecting its civilians; the tunnels network are only for the protection of Hamas – because 75% of Gazans are “refugees” the UN must protect them.
Hamas, Iran, Lebanon and Syria came very close to achieving their dream of destroying the Jewish state. If Hamas had not jumped the gun in launching its attack, Hezbollah would have launched a similar attack from the north at the same time and overwhelmed Israel.
No Jewish life before 7 October
Even if peace does resolve the conflict, after 7 October Jews will never fully trust Western democracies to protect them. Everything will be coloured by the repetitive, genocidal outbursts towards Jews on and after 7 October.
Jews are indebted to the non-Jewish world that hasn’t abandoned them, that hasn’t bought into the blood libels that have driven antisemitism to the logical conclusion of venerating genocide and the extinction of Jewish life. Non-Jewish allies are crucial to the survival of the Jews and we are grateful for it.
But we will never be sure that this will be enough in the long run. Responses by Western leaders to events of antisemitic violence have usually been an expression of “there’s no place in our society for antisemitism”. Without a bold and muscular response Jews are left in no doubt that there definitely is a place for antisemitism in the West. There are only 15 million Jews in the world, but the world will not be a better place without them.
The Islamists and the progressive left are obsessed with the utopias that the extinction of the Jews will portend. However, they will be bitterly disappointed because life will just continue to be as nasty, brutish and unfulfilled as it always was.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/globe-world-europe-turkey-2234559/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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