October 7, three years later
A child's bedroom in kibbutz Be'eri.
October 7, 2023: what happened on this day, three years ago?
A commission of the British House of Lords conducted a year-long investigation into the events of October 7. It was led by the historian and life peer, Andrew Roberts, who is an Anglican. Here is how they started their 311-page report:
“The Hamas-led attack on Southern Israel on 7 October 2023 was one of the largest terror attacks in history, resulting in 1,182 fatalities and over 4,000 wounded. A total of 251 hostages were taken - 210 were alive and 41 were dead bodies. 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. The attack resulted in over 4,000 wounded individuals treated at hospitals, with gunshot wounds, grenade injuries, and burns.”
It went on: “Over 90% of those killed or taken hostage were Israeli citizens, including Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, and Bedouins. Many of the Israelis who were killed were also dual nationals. Citizens from 44 nations around the world were killed and taken hostage. The largest group of foreign victims were from Thailand.”
And: “Women and children account for 27% of those killed during the attacks and 49% of hostages taken alive – 316 and 102 respectively. The youngest victim of 7 October was just 14 hours old – her mother had been shot whilst driving to the hospital to give birth and a bullet hit the baby girl’s leg whilst in utero. The oldest victim was a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was killed at Kibbutz Holit.”
And: “The victims were killed through shootings, asphyxiation, burning, grenade explosions, RGP and missile attacks. Many victims were subjected to mutilation, sexual violence, and other forms of deliberate brutality before or after death. Forensic teams faced immense challenges in identifying remains due to the extent of desecration to bodies, with some victims identified months later through fragments like teeth.”
The report goes on and on like that - for 311 pages, single-spaced - providing the grim facts of October 7, 2023. It is important to quote the report, as I have done here, because of what happened immediately afterwards, and on every day since: denial. A monstrous but well-funded, well-organized global campaign to deny the reality of October 7 and its aftermath.
On this, the third anniversary of October 7, 2023, the most extraordinary thing - the saddest thing - is not just the inhumanity, the cruelty, of those who sought to “free Palestine” by kidnapping babies, or raping girls after they were dead.
It was how how quickly the victims were transformed into the villains. It was almost instantaneous.
Dates are important. Before October 7, 2023, an uneasy ceasefire had been in place, for years. Thousands of Palestinians commuted to Israel every day to work. Israel supplied Gaza with most of its water and electricity. Israelis in the kibbutzim ferried sick Gazans to medical appointments in Israel.
Then, at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, thousands of members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad - and ordinary Gazans - charged into Israel at 119 different points. It was the Sabbath and Simchat Torah, a religious holiday.
Israel was not ready. For years, the far-Right government of Benjamin Netanyahu had been quietly facilitating the transfer of millions of dollars from Qatar to Hamas - to “buy peace.” Those suitcases filled with $100 U.S. bills were used, instead, to purchase arms.
Israel was stunned, shocked. It took days to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who had captured kibbutzim along the border - and weeks to prepare for a ground incursion into Gaza. But in that time, thousands of protests happened around the world - nearly 3,000 protests in all - using the same slogans, the same sort of signage, the same military-like precision.
Accusing Israel, the victim, of being the villain.
Academics have a name for that sort of malevolence: Holocaust inversion. Accusing Jews of genocide throws actual genocides back in the faces of Jews. It trivializes the original Holocaust, and other pogroms. It also weaponizes genocide against Jews, and robs them of their past: it steals away the historical truth of what Jews have experienced. It causes pain by hurling the most serious libel of all against Jews - which was that they have become the new Nazis, and are themselves committing genocide against Palestinians.
It is all a grotesque, manifest, provable lie, of course. But it worked. Aided and abetted by social media, indolent mainstream media, soulless academics and public sector unions and politicians, gullible and witless hordes of Gen Z - plus China and Russia and, of course, Qatar’s treasury - the inversion of October 7 was almost immediate.
Now, three years later, it is nearly complete.
Despite being the victims of that day, Israelis - and Jews around the world - have been remade into baby-killing, fascistic, genocidal, white supremacists by a global propaganda campaign. It has been deeply evil and dishonest, but it has worked with too many people, in too many places.
So, on this day, three long years later, is too late to fight back? Is it too late to take back the narrative of October 7, 2023?
It is never too late. But time is running out - and civilization now hangs in the balance.
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