One Year Later: The 7 Lessons Of October 7

One year ago today, the world turned upside down.

It’s approximately 6:30 a.m. Israel Standard Time, October 7, 2023. Air raid sirens go off as Hamas fires hundreds of rockets into the state of Israel. Israelis have gotten used to the occasional spate of rockets from the Gaza Strip ever since Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 in a vain attempt to disengage from the problem of policing the area.

The eliminationist terror group Hamas, whose charter explicitly calls for the death of Jews and the extermination of Israel, was elected in 2006. Since then, Hamas has spent billions of dollars building hundreds of kilometers of terror tunnels below civilian areas. They’ve also sporadically fired rockets over the border, necessitating that hundreds of thousands of Israelis go underground or to their safe rooms.

That is precisely what Hamas is counting on.

At the same time, the rockets are fired, the security wall between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel is breached by thousands of Hamas terrorists. They’ve taken out the monitoring towers. They’ve knocked down the wall with bulldozers. They’ve also targeted the IDF troops in the region, destroying all resistance in their terror rampage.

Their first stop is Kibbutz Beri. Unimpeded, the terrorists go house by house. They’ve gotten inside information from Gazan workers, who worked in Israel. They kill all the civilians they can find, including men, women and children. They drag dozens of hostages back into Gaza.

Video shows them rampaging through Kibbutz Beri, where they’ve blown away people in their cars. You can see them, including Gazan civilians as well as elderly people on crutches along for the ride, coming through the gates. 

You see them running through what was a perfectly nice kibbutz in Israel, shooting people in their homes, going through the refrigerators of people while they burn their houses and murder them.

The terrorists move town to town, slaughtering as many people as they can find. They kill children in their beds.

Meanwhile they are screaming “God is great” in Arabic. Gazan civilians celebrate as civilian Jews and Arabs and non-Arabs are dragged back into hell. 

Meanwhile, Hamas terrorists, as mentioned, descend on the Nova Music Festival, a large-scale party near the remote kibbutz. Paragliders descend over the wall and proceed to kill 364 people, abduct dozens, and by the testimony of survivors, rape many of the women before murdering them.

Israelis from all walks of life rush to the scenes of the massacres, trying to rescue the Jews, Arabs and others under assault; many die or are wounded in the attempt. It takes days to completely clear the area of the Gaza envelope of Hamas terrorists. By the time the massacre is over, some 1200 Israelis have been murdered and 250 have been taken hostage back to Gaza.

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Meanwhile, in the north of Israel, Hezbollah, a terrorist group backed by Iran, has joined the war as well, shooting rockets into northern Israel by the hundreds. The only thing keeping them from a full-scale invasion is fear of destruction. 

In the United States, we begin to find out the details of the massacre only gradually. The terrorists had waited, as per their usual religiously respectful arrangement, for a Jewish holiday in order to commit their horrifying crime.

My family and I had only left Israel on October 6 to make it home for the final days of the High Holy days, Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret. We arrived home on Friday afternoon. On Saturday morning, on my way to synagogue, I was stopped by my security. I was told what’s going on. First they said there are dozens of dead. Then a few minutes later, hundreds. And over the course of the day, over 1000.

Members of my community were in shock. Some had relatives in the assaulted areas. One had a brother living in an area directly under attack. The feeling of dread pervaded not just our community, but the entire Jewish community worldwide. It’s the worst terror assault on Jews since the Holocaust. 

In the year since October 7, Israel has launched the most targeted, successful urban military operation in human history. Israel has destroyed 23 out of 24 Hamas battalions with heartbreaking but statistically minimal loss of life among their members of the IDF.

Their ratio of terrorists to civilians killed is the lowest in recorded military history. Israel has killed the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in a pinpoint operation in Tehran, Iran. Israel has killed the military organizer of Hamas, Muhammad Dief. They may have killed Yahya Sinwar, the military leader behind October 7. He’s been out of touch for weeks.

In the north, Israel has, in the last month, absolutely devastated Hezbollah, an incredibly sophisticated and colorful operation utilizing exploding beepers Israel sold to Hezbollah. Israel simultaneously destroyed Hezbollah’s communications and their top-level leadership. Then there was a follow-up operation in which they exploded Hamas’s walkie-talkies. Then there was a series of targeted airstrikes that culminated with the destruction of Hezbollah’s long-range capacity and the killing of their terror leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and his deputies. And now there are military operations going on by ground troops in southern Lebanon.

Israel has also struck the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthis with force after Yemen sent a drone and cruise missiles into Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel and its allies have blunted two separate massive direct Iranian drone and missile assaults. And now Israel threatens extraordinary retaliation for Iran’s last major act of war. That happened just last week when Iran shot 181 cruise missiles into Israel.

If October 7, 2023, was the low point in the history of the state of Israel, Israel now stands in perhaps its strongest position in living memory. Iran’s top two terror proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been eviscerated. Iran itself lives in fear of Israeli retaliation. The Sunni Gulf Arab states that were considering the broadening of the Abraham Accords, who may have thought that Israel was a weak force after October 7 are moving steadily for normalization with Israel again. 

The last year has been a year of lessons.

There are seven major lessons that have to be learned or October 7 will be repeated even worse, not just in Israel, but in the West more broadly. 

Lesson Number One: Evil exists. 

It’s become fashionable in the West to believe that evil does not exist, that there are no truly evil people, only people who are misguided, who have bad thoughts or who are victims.

It’s tempting to believe we all believe the same things and want the same things but we’re prevented through conflicting ideologies and interests from attaining those things. 

That is a lie. 

There are better and worse cultures, better and worse ideas, and better and worse people. And there is, in fact, evil. It is difficult to think of better evidence of human evil than the phone call in which a Hamas terrorist in the middle of the massacre called his family to tell them how proud he was that he had murdered Jewish civilians, saying to his father, “Open my WhatsApp now and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!  Dad, I’m talking to you now from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband! I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed!”

That is the voice of evil members of Hamas chopping the heads of dead Thai workers, members of Hamas shooting children in their beds. That is evil. Hamas didn’t just cross the border and kill soldiers. It targeted civilians. It celebrated the murder of civilians and celebrated the rape and slaughter of civilians.

The Nazis hid their crimes. Hamas live-streamed them in real time for the whole world to see. 

It’s not as though the West’s enemies are hiding the ball here. Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, has openly called for Israel’s destruction after being healed of brain cancer while being held in an Israeli prison and then released. Hezbollah has said the same thing. So have the Houthis. The Iranian government has said the same thing. 

The easiest cop-out is to pretend evil doesn’t exist or that evidence of evil is actually evidence of oppressed status. That is lazy and it is ugly and it is a lie. 

The Book of Isaiah says “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil. They put darkness for light and light for darkness that put bitter For sweet and sweet for bitter.”

Woe to us. 

Lesson Number Two: Only the credible threat of crushing force destroys evil. 

Evil cannot be deterred through negotiation. Buying off evil with promises of negotiated settlements does not work. The old adage, “You don’t negotiate with friends, you negotiate with enemies,” is  only true when your enemies understand their failure to achieve a negotiated settlement guarantees their own destruction.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey authored a book called “The Causes of War” in which he examined every international war between 17oo-288 years of war. His conclusion: Wars only break out when one side correctly or incorrectly believes it can win or can deal the enemy a serious blow for purposes of improving bargaining position. He wrote, “Anything which increases optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.” 

Crush your enemies and win peace. Let them know that you will crush them and prevent war. War can only be deterred through the credible threat of overwhelming force. And that credible threat only comes from a record of victory. 

That is why Israel is now pursuing the only strategy of war that has ever worked. Ever. A strategy that has now been abandoned for generations by the West: Victory. Victory leads to further peace as neutral states sign on. That’s precisely what Donald Trump knew when he brokered the Abraham Accords. It was the weakness and stupidity of the Biden White House and the blindness of Israelis who went to sleep on Hamas that led to October 7. This is why the current Biden administration tactic of trying to hold back Israel from destroying its enemies isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. Which leads to lesson number three.

Lesson Number Three: Weakness incentivizes your enemies. 

Weakness incentivizes evil people to act. Israel has spent four decades apologizing for its own power, hoping to apologize for the necessity of strength in defending its existence in one of the worst spots on planet Earth. Since Oslo, Israel has promoted the absolute lie that it could simply pay off those who wished for its destruction. 

Israel pulled out of large segments of the so-called West Bank, the biblical homeland of Judea and Samaria, and handed it over to the terrorist Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah. They pulled out of Gaza and they handed it over to the terrorist group Hamas. They pulled out of southern Lebanon and they handed it over, effectively, to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

None of it brought peace. None of it. All of it bought war. All of it.

The same thing is true of the pathetic Biden administration. Thanks to the increased strength of the Israeli tech sector and military over the course of the past decade, and thanks to the rising threat of Iran created by the pathetic Obama administration and its truly disgusting decision to woo Iran and move America’s allies, the Sunni Gulf states signed on to the Trump-backed Abraham Accords.

They knew they’d have to form an alliance against Iran and that any durable future could be achieved only in alliance with a forward-looking technological and military power. 

Then came the Biden administration, which moved quickly to alienate Saudi Arabia and Israel in favor of Iran again. This led Iran, in fear at the prospect of a Saudi-Israeli alliance, to activate Hamas, the goal being to split the Muslim world over the Palestinians, who have never wanted a state and never wanted peace and have always been a tool in the Middle East to destroy the state of Israel.

When Trump says October 7 would never would’ve happened on his watch, that is clearly correct. If America had made clear it was going to back Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iranian proxies, rather than attempting to chastise both countries for fighting those Iranian proxies, Iran wouldn’t have had room to breathe.

Instead, they got billions of dollars from the White House and they went for broke.

Lesson Number Four. Division incentivizes your enemies. 

Unity brings victory. Internal weakness, division, incentivizes your enemies. Israel was super-divided over judicial reform, a question of just how the judiciary in the country would be allowed to control the legislature and the executive. That fight in Israel wasn’t really about the structure of the judiciary per se, it was really about the demographics of the state, with some secular Jews upset with some members of the rising tide of the religious groups. The people of Israel, it turns out, weren’t nearly as divided as the elite in Israel.

No matter. Hamas saw weakness and they acted. Israel, however, instead of shattering, drew together, and the social fabric stood strong.

It turns out everybody secular in Israel has a religious cousin. People who had threatened to walk out on their military service instead signed up for immediate service. Religious and non-religious. Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Everyone joined up and fought side by side. The people of Israel are united by a common enemy, of course, but they’re also united by a common history and a shared faith.

So are we in the West, more broadly, if only we would see it. But we may be too busy tearing ourselves down. Which brings us to lesson number five.

Lesson Number Five: The West has failed to teach its children the right things. 

We have failed. The West has taken the cancer of decolonization ideology into its bones. It is bone-deep.

For generations, particularly since the end of World War II, the elites of the intellectual West have been apologizing for Western existence. The enemies of the West have been teaching our children that the West is a colonialist power, exploitative, brutal.

These children believe they are just victims. That’s why they’re so upset. That’s why the children of the West are marching around with Hamas and Hezbollah flags next to their trans pins. They agree with the words of Jean-Paul Sartre: “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.”

Thus for them, the only way to atone is to join people who would tear down Western civilization.

So the Left props up moral cretins like Ta-Nehisi Coates to tear away at its own foundations. Our civilization hands them millions of dollars and our finest awards from our finest universities, all because we as a civilization are too shy to teach our own children that our civilization is indeed superior, and that if you are losing to our civilization, maybe it’s not because you’re a victim, maybe it’s because you are a loser making bad decisions.

Lesson Number Six: The West has imported its own enemies.

As part of its own suicidal path, the West is now importing millions of people who wish for our destruction. It is not racist; it is not bigoted to point out openly that importing millions of people who openly sympathize with terror groups is not strength, it is insanity. But that’s precisely what the West has done, all in the name of supposed global reparations for the success of the West.

This cannot continue. Everyone knows it. The Nordic countries know it. The French know it. The British know it. And Americans know it, too. And yet to say so is somehow considered taboo.

It can’t be taboo. Not all cultures are equal. Some cultures are far worse than others. Not all ideas are equal. Some ideas are far worse than others. And not all people of all cultures and all ideas belong in the West. If you march with a Hezbollah or a Hamas flag, you do not belong in this country. You do not belong in the West. You certainly don’t belong on scholarship on an American college campus.

Final Lesson, Number Seven. In every generation, they rise to kill the Jews.

The Haggadah, which is the document we Jews read on Passover, has a very famous passage, which states, “In each and every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”

That’s certainly true historically. In every generation there are those who rise up to destroy all the Jews, and they ultimately fail. As a religious Jew, I would say they fail because of God, but they also fail because they are failures.

The very ideology of anti-Semitism is a failure. It rests on a very simple premise: that the Jews are a conspiratorial force who control the world through nefarious means, all in pursuit of corrupt ends.

This isn’t just nonsense on stilts; it’s dangerous nonsense.

It’s not just dangerous for Jews. It’s dangerous for any civilization that cherishes success and incentivizes it.

One of the oldest stories in the Bible, at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, is the story of Cain and Abel.

In the story, Cain and Abel both bring sacrifices to God. God rejects Cain’s sacrifice, but accepts Abel’s. It’s not really clear just why God makes that decision. But we do know what God tells Cain. He says, “Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? Surely if you do right, there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin crouches at the door. It’s urges toward you, but you can master it.”

That is the message of a successful West: you can master those urges.

Instead, Cain killed Abel, the first murder in human history. This is still the model of murder today, particularly political murder justified by supposed victimization. Cain was not a victim, even though he thought of himself as a victim. Neither are those who turned their lands into hellholes, who spend billions of dollars on terrorism, who call for the leveling of human achievement in favor of a cannibalistic pseudo-justice. They are scavengers and they have to be fought tooth and nail.

October 7 may have been a win for Israel’s terrorist enemies. But in the subsequent year, they learned one particular lesson: If they bet wrong; if they attack the West, if they bet on the weakness of the West and its own pathetic unwillingness to survive, if they bet wrong on that — they will be destroyed.

I spent the last year talking with the parents of hostages, with Israeli soldiers who have lost limbs in battle, with family members of soldiers who have been slain and family members of people killed on October 7 and since. And they all know one thing: Israel cannot afford to lose. And so Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are finding out the hard way: F*** around and find out.

It’s about time the rest of the West learned that lesson and applied it, because that’s the only type of West that will be able to survive and thrive.

And humanity depends on precisely that.