October 7 Was an Apocalypse. Now No One Is Safe
People visit the site of the Nova festival, where partygoers were killed and kidnapped during the October 7 attack by Hamas from Gaza, the day before the first anniversary of the attack, in Reim, southern Israel, October 6, 2024. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
There is nothing more benign than a calendar. Every day has a name, a constant drop of dates that fall like sand in an hourglass, each one unique and yet collectively meaningless. Since each date repeats year after year, even important events—wedding anniversaries, a death in the family, a birth of a child, an election, the start or end of a war—can have their date easily forgotten, a monument buried in the vast desert of the sands of time. This makes it even more improbable that a date will live on for long in our collective consciousness, and yet we remember December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001. And now we are likely to remember October 7, 2023, for a long time to come.
A year ago, Israel, a nation of only 9-10 million people, became the victim of one of the most barbaric and indiscriminate attacks in memory. More than 1,200 people, almost all civilians, of every race, gender, age, and creed, were brutally murdered as thousands of Hamas militants launched a well-coordinated, long-planned, multi-front attack from the air, sea, above the ground, and below it. While the worst details of this attack are indeed disputed, the squabbles about the specifics should not and cannot hide the bald face of evil that unfolded that day as people—regular people—went about their lives until they were massacred. 200-250 more were kidnapped across the border, including women, children, elderly people, and soldiers, to be held in dismal conditions and to be used as bargaining chips in a war that never seems to end. The scale of the attack was unprecedented in recent history for Israel, marking the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. Yes, October 7 deserves its place among the dates that will live forever in infamy.
Unfortunately, the true horrors of October 7 may be eclipsed by what happened next, but before we discuss the important context—the time before and the time after—it is critical to understand that day, a day that will forever be burned into the Israeli psyche.
Israel's September 11, A Nightmare Unrivaled
On September 11, I was in Washington, D.C., when those planes hit the World Trade Center, then the Pentagon. I walked through the open-air courtyards of The Catholic University of America with my eyes on the sky, waiting for the next plane. I attended a special prayer service at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic church in North America, as it was guarded by National Guard troops, some with anti-aircraft missiles, wondering whether God, if there is a God, was going to protect us from the next plane, if there was a next plane. I remember the feeling that we did not know how many planes, how many attacks, we would suffer. Were there dozens of terrorists involved in this attack? Were there thousands? I remember the insecurity of it all, the feeling that every time we gathered and every large building, plane, ship, or train we were on could be "next." It took true bravery to go to school, church, or the mall.
This is just a taste of what Israel suffered. The October 7 attack was conducted by many thousands of Hamas terrorists. Some tunneled in, some climbed walls, some came by boat, and some dropped in from the sky. The terrorists seemed like they were everywhere, a virtually unending swarm. They could be in your town, on your street. They could be in the hallway outside your home or office, or in the streets just outside your door. As the literal smoke cleared after September 11, we realized that Al Qaeda numbered in the thousands and we were separated from most or all of them by an ocean. As the fires still burned on October 7, Israelis KNEW that the enemy was just on the other side of a border that had just been breached in every conceivable way. There was no reassurance. The attack was absolutely, beyond a doubt, not over.
There is an Israeli viewpoint that they are an island, surrounded by those who would either try to kill them or would do very little to stop them. I want to stress here that this is a perception, one that draws supporting evidence from history, one that is echoed by many in Israel who support Israel's war against Hamas and Hezbollah. There is also an awareness that Israel has several neighboring governments that want it destroyed and its population removed—particularly Iran and Syria—a weak government in Lebanon that is either incapable or unwilling to stand up to Hezbollah, and a wider group of Arab states, most of whom participated in several wars in the 20th century to try to remove Israel, who have more cordial relations now with the Israeli state but whom most in Israel don't trust to intervene to help if Israel is facing existential demise.
This viewpoint is constantly absorbing data. After October 7, Israel was attacked by rockets from Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in Yemen, the Houthis. While many Middle Eastern countries, Israel's neighbors, did condemn the Hamas attack or attacks against civilians, many of those condemnations were hedged by also criticizing Israeli actions. To many in Israel, this felt like lip service at best.
I have called this a "perception" not to dismiss it but to acknowledge it in the hopes that the reader will accept that it describes at least part of a reality that most Israelis feel. I know very many people who live in Israel; some are citizens, and others are foreign correspondents. Many of them are highly critical of the Israeli government. But the fear, the visceral fear, was real and is real. To live in Israel is to live in fear, regardless of your political opinions.
But they aren't the only ones living in fear.
The State of Palestine Is Fear and Poverty
Most people focus on the situation in Gaza when discussing the suffering of the Palestinians, but I think perhaps it's more beneficial to first focus on another location: the West Bank.
The government of Israel has advocated the building of settlements in the West Bank as a way to hedge against invasion. Settlers who are brave enough to live in this area help secure (and fund) the building of defenses deep across the border, in the area between the most important cities in Israel and Jordan. Many Israeli settlers have been more than happy to move to this area, some motivated by Zionism, most by the desire for a better life. The result is that Palestinians living in the West Bank live in an apartheid state, where settlements and checkpoints separate families and communities. Militant religious Israelis have attacked and killed Palestinians in this area. Angry Palestinians, including jihadists, have killed Israelis. The West Bank has become one of the largest frustrations for both Palestinians and for the international community—how can a Palestinian state be established when Israel continues to occupy and divide what will become the largest piece of the Palestinian puzzle?
Similarly, the Golan Heights is another area where Israeli settlements are slated to expand. Despite cries from the international community, Israel plans to double the settler population by 2027. Israel's motivations, on paper, are similar to the West Bank, but in reality may have much more to do with control of the precious water resources in the Golan, resources under threat as climate change makes the region even hotter. This leaves many Palestinians asking the obvious question—if there's not enough water to go around, will Israel get the water, or will they?
The settlements are a lightning rod, clear evidence to many Palestinians, many in the Middle East, and many across the globe that Israel is not serious about wanting a two-state solution. Nor is it interested in a one-state solution where the Palestinians are integrated into Israeli society. Rather, some think Israel's goal is the mirror image of the desires of Hamas or Hezbollah—the destruction or removal of the Palestinian people from what are currently, at least in theory, Palestinian lands.
And then there's Gaza, a land too poor for Israel to want to settle. Gaza is one of the poorest and most densely populated areas in the entire world, and yet it is a tiny strip of land, nestled between two major U.S. allies, Israel and Egypt, and it seems the world is completely unable or absolutely unwilling to help.
And that was all true before October 7, before this war that has killed 40,000 residents.
For those in Gaza, every day is their own version of September 11. The sky in Gaza is always falling. Civilian deaths from airstrikes are near-daily occurrences. Hunger, disease, and homelessness are widespread. The horrors of Gaza have been widely documented, and yet somehow understated. Regardless of their beliefs about Hamas or Israel, every civilian is helpless, a prisoner to two warring factions.
There are those who would debate who is at fault, which side is more justified, whether the decision to establish Israel after World War II was the right one, whether the Arab states were right to try to invade in the mid-20th century, whether Israel was right to occupy the land it gained in those wars. I would ask the reader to ask a different question:
Is anyone safe because of the status quo?
The Perfect Recipe For Radicalization
While Hezbollah, and to a much lesser extent Hamas, are terrorist groups which have impacted nations outside of Israel and Palestine, they are clearly not focused on conducting attacks far beyond their immediate spheres of influence. This is not said to diminish in any way the importance of the Middle East to both the people who live there and the importance of the region to the economic and security well-being of the rest of the world. But in recent decades, the obvious and immediate threats to international security are two different groups: Al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS). And it is by looking at these other two organizations that we begin to get some clarity on why the situation in Palestine is not acceptable.
Al Qaeda's origins date to the 1980s and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union was an anti-religious movement that had removed mosques from areas that it controlled, even famous mosques like the one in Tbilisi, Georgia. Their invasion of Afghanistan was unacceptable to many Muslims, including people like Osama Bin Laden, and ultimately Muslims from around the entire region took up arms against the Soviets. While most who fought in this war were not radical Islamists or Salafists, that movement found a home in Afghanistan, and as the Soviets withdrew and foreign interest in Afghanistan virtually disappeared as a result, the modern jihadist movement had been birthed. What followed was decades of war wherein hardline Islamists, the Taliban, took control of Afghanistan and grew tentacles that reached deep into neighboring states, particularly Pakistan.
The core Al Qaeda philosophy was that Muslims are locked in an existential war, a holy war, against external godless forces, infidels. If you were a young Muslim fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, or if you lived there in the poverty and destitution that followed, you lived this prophecy. After the U.S., Israel's key ally, expanded its presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, it looked to many that this would be the next chapter of this holy war. Al Qaeda was committed to striking first.
Similarly, Islamic State was born out of a marriage of two crises—the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Arab Spring revolution against the Assad regime in Syria which began in 2011. The United States invaded Iraq, and what followed was a nasty war against Sunnis and Iran-backed Shia groups that left hundreds of thousands dead. In Syria, peaceful pro-democracy protests (opposed by many Islamic hardliners) turned into a revolution as government forces, dominated by Alawites, a Shia sect, slaughtered hundreds, then thousands, and ultimately perhaps a million Syrians, predominantly Sunnis. If you were a Sunni living in Iraq, your perception was that an external force, the United States, the "far enemy" in jihadi speak, invaded and opened the door for Shia Muslims, backed by Iran, the "near enemy," to try to seize control. In Syria, an Alawite government backed by Shia Iran and Hezbollah and installed by the British was killing Sunnis, with the help of Russia, the original target for modern jihadism. The outside world said it backed the pro-democracy activists (whom the Islamists also opposed), but really did nothing while the fires spread, the bombs fell, and the people starved.
In both places, the message from jihadist leaders was simple: the Sunnis really are locked in an existential struggle against external forces that are turning their world into a hellscape. This is the perfect recipe for growing radicals, and radicals do radical things and create opposing radicals.
With this in mind, everything that is happening in Israel and Palestine—from the October 7 attacks to the Gazas to the West Banks and Golan Heights—reinforces the most radical positions of both Jews and Muslims who are living through this nightmare. There simply is no path forward until this dynamic changes.
It's important to remember that things are getting worse, not better. Hamas did not hold any political power until 2006. Hamas and Hezbollah have only become more radical, and their membership and appeal have swelled in recent years. Similarly, Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party have faced serious domestic opposition. Netanyahu is even facing criminal prosecution or jail time should he be removed from power. They are stronger than ever. The leadership of Israel, then, is the mirror of Hezbollah and Hamas—their power flows from the militant opposition of their respective enemy. Compromise or progress could endanger the existence of Likud, Hamas, or Hezbollah. Radicals on all sides use religious fervor to paint their enemy as THE enemy but also owe their political power to the opposition to that enemy.
No one has any incentive to change.
Everyone Is Worse, No One Is Safe, Something Has to Change
But none of this has improved the living conditions of actual human beings—not in Israel, not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, nor in the Golan Heights, not in Syria nor Lebanon, nor indeed anywhere in the world. The situation has exclusively gotten worse, progress further away, and compromise more unlikely. But the stakes continue to rise as a regional war spreads, threatening not just the Middle East but global trade. A refugee crisis could topple regional neighbors, which means it could spread to Europe, Africa. And then there are the possibilities that the conflict could trigger more radical jihadist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, or even radical Zionist groups. Or, the worst-case scenario, it could go nuclear.
Jews and Muslims living far from Israel are also suffering. Hate crimes against both groups have exploded over the last year and have been getting worse for decades. Political divisions among those living abroad mean a solution is getting harder to achieve, as many in Europe and the United States feel more sympathetic to one side or the other.
The unfortunate answer is that change is unlikely to come from either the Palestinians or the Israelis, the Muslims or the Jews. The answer will likely come from external forces, those who set up the current situation, finally taking ownership of the mess.
But those external forces have been happy to pour fuel on the fire and watch it burn from afar rather than get involved. The United States, for example, continues to provide Israel with significant amounts of funding and weaponry, regardless of the fact that the U.S. government has objected to the tactics used by the Israeli military that have caused tremendous levels of death and suffering in Gaza. On the other side, Iran continues to fund its proxies, though Israel and Iran are now directly attacking each other with greater frequency. Europe has largely been hands-off, preferring to issue critical statements or fund aid that is both inadequate and often fails to make it into the hands of those who need it most.
This will not work. The United States in particular cannot continue to supply Israel with weapons, criticize Israel, and expect Israel to change. The United States in particular can't expect Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran to change if the U.S. continues to supply weapons to Israel. If the U.S. stops or curtails its support of Israel, that only makes Israel's situation more desperate. This is not leadership, and it will not get any results.
The American people would like to move on from the conflicts of the world. They would like to forget that the outside world even exists. But we live in a global society, connected by a global economy, where we have global travel. Problems always spread, especially problems at the heart of the world. Inaction is not an option. The status quo is not an option.
But the U.S. has also proven time and time again that it is incapable or unwilling to get involved in a crisis abroad and stay for the long term.
There is no easy solution, and since we're in political crisis here, even hard solutions are nowhere on the horizon. Perhaps a candle of hope is burning on some other October 7, far in the future. For now, we should be prepared for another very dark year.
