October 7, 2023. While most of us in North America went about our daily routines that day, Hamas launched the most vicious attack against the Jewish people since WWII. It was the Jewish Sabbath during the Simchat Torah holiday. The Israeli people were in a festive mood, but that mood soon turned to disbelief, shock, and horror. Hamas fired over 4,300 rockets at Israel as an air and ground assault began, with combatants in vehicles and motorized paragliders, totaling around 7,000, wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting holiday celebrants.
The Hamas militants murdered at least 1,139 people, including approximately 700 Israeli civilians, among them almost 40 children. The young revelers killed at a music festival numbered 364. Around 250 Israelis were taken hostage, used as pawns in the hopes that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would refrain from storming the Gaza Strip for fear of harm coming to them.
Hamas miscalculated.
War broke out as Israel retaliated by pummeling Gaza, decapitating Hamas leadership, and then turning its sights on the Hezbollah network in Lebanon. This war has now entered a new phase. Israel has determined that it will not stop until its foes—of which there are many—are vanquished. Iran, having fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, may soon face the fury of the IDF.
Laid before us is the sobering reality that all efforts to bring peace to the region over the past several decades have achieved little. It has been an utter failure. The hundreds of millions of dollars given to Gaza, intended for the welfare of its citizens, have instead gone toward militarization. The naïveté of the West is laid bare.
Many condemn Israel; many take a stand with the Palestinians as they commandeer our roads in protest. Yet it was not Israel that attacked Gaza. The Hamas strike against innocent people on October 7, 2023, led to war. This war is far from over. Many innocents have already been killed, and many more will be. Such is the brutality of war. Such is the brutality of antisemitism.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess were murdered by Serbian nationalists. That one event triggered a chain reaction whose consequences still haunt us today. It led to 20 million casualties in WWI. WWI, in turn, resulted in 40 million casualties in WWII. There is a direct line from WWII to October 7, 2023. The antisemitism that resulted in the wholesale slaughter of six million Jewish people in WWII rightly led to the establishment of their homeland in 1948. Yet antisemitism remains.
“Never again” is a rallying cry from a people who have suffered the cruelty of war throughout the millennia, especially over the last 100 years. They will not allow the ravages of October 7, 2023, to go unpunished.
Over 15 years ago, I began a new job in Washington, D.C.. When family came to visit, among their first requests was, “Will you take me to the Holocaust Museum?” Off we would walk. At least four different trips, with many hours spent each time absorbing the full story as it unfolds through the various museum exhibits. It made an everlasting impact.
I watched many films, including Schindler’s List, portraying the horror of the Holocaust. I visited the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp in Bas-Rhin, France in 2003—it was numbing to the soul—but the US Holocaust Museum offered a different perspective. In particular, the sculptural scale model of Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the museum still resonates with me. Each time I encountered it, I was moved profoundly. Leaving that model and walking through the hallway filled with the shoes of children, men, and women who were brutally murdered initiated a flow of tears: “Dear God, how can people be so cruel?!”
On several occasions, I became acquainted with one of the security guards at the Museum. He was a very tall, big, jovial African American man who always greeted us with a smile as we made our way through the security check. I remembered his first name as “Stephen.” Soon after I left my job in the area, Stephen opened the door for an elderly man entering the Museum. That man was a racist antisemite, who then shot and killed Stephen at point-blank range. When the news spread, I simply could not believe it—it was only weeks before I had taken my brother on the tour, and we both commented on the friendliness of “Stephen the security guard.”
“Dear God, how can people be so cruel?”
Antisemitism is real. The carnage of antisemitism is now our reality.
