Bari Weiss: A Year of Revelations

Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question. 

How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do you look at something with a sense of distance when it has revealed so much, so close to home?

The genocidal war launched by Iran and its proxies a year ago this morning began with rocket fire and a ground invasion by Hamas battalions who carried maps of every kibbutz and village. These maps, made by Palestinians who worked inside Israel, told them where the daycare centers were, where the weapons were stored, which families owned a dog. After several thousand terrorists, targeting civilians, had raped, murdered, and kidnapped, they were followed by waves of ordinary Gazans—to borrow Chris Browning’s phrase—who played their role in a day of slaughter with millennia-old echoes in Jewish history. 

Just look at the terror on the face of Shiri Bibas, clinging to her nine-month-old baby Kfir and her four-year-old son Ariel—an image that flashes across my eyes when I put our children to sleep. 

I do not mean to say that the more than 1,200 human beings murdered by Hamas terrorists on that day—at a music festival, in their beds, in shelters where they sought safety—are symbols of history or politics. Only that what happened on that day—what Hamas did—was exactly what they had always said they would do in their founding charter, which calls for the genocide of the Jewish people. In stealing the Bibas family, and in butchering and maiming and raping and burning their neighbors, the terror group was doing exactly what it promised. 

The promise of America was to give “bigotry no sanction,” as our first president wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

But on October 7, 2023, the enemies of Washington’s vision—of America’s founding impulse—began to reveal themselves. 

As news of the scope of the slaughter was still registering, and the tally of hostages still being made—the final count: 240 people from 40 countries carried off like barbaric spoils of war—progressive groups here at home and across the West began to celebrate. 

More than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre. Israel. Not Hamas. Israel. This was on October 8, as Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israel’s south, and Hezbollah began its assault on Israel’s north from Lebanon.

Surely it had to be some terrible mistake, a sick prank. But the statement was sincere. And it wasn’t an anomaly. 

In October 2023—just in that first month—George Washington University students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.” At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted “globalize the intifada,” which can only mean: open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean,” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.

Over the weeks that followed, posters with the faces of the hostages were put up on lampposts and bulletin boards in campuses and cities across North America and Europe. And young people—and sometimes not so young—started tearing them down. 

At first, we rationalized this by assuming that the people tearing them down were abnormal. But there were more than a few of them, including college professors. And they were gleeful. 

Posters of lost cats aren’t systematically torn down by Broadway producers and graduate students, and yet these were human beings stolen from their beds. The only sane conclusion was that our times are not normal. To pretend that they are is as delusional as insisting that the supreme leader of Iran was merely speaking metaphorically when he said over the weekend, at his first public sermon in almost five years: Israel is a “malicious regime” that “will not last long.”

“A total derailment from civilization” is how the Nobel Prize–winning German writer Herta Muller described the Hamas massacre in her extraordinary speech delivered this past May. But the phrase included derailments closer to home.

Listen to the words being shouted on our streets.

Just this weekend, thousands of people in Toronto gathered to declare “We don’t want two states, take us back to ’48,” the kind of call for the elimination of Israel that has been heard in cities across the West over the last year. At a rally in Philadelphia, one speaker recalled: “On October 7 when I was watching those resistance fighters flying into Palestine on paragliders, I was cheering.” In Berlin, protesters shouted in Arabic: “Anyone have a bullet; either you kill a Jew with it or give it to Hamas.” 

There is no political argument consistent with the values of a free society that justifies this behavior. There is no moral universe that explains how two visibly Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh were recently struck with a bottle; or how a literary festival in New York cancelled a panel because the moderator was a Zionist; or why a (now former) member of Congress downplayed the sexual violence Jewish women suffered on October 7; or why medical students and doctors in San Francisco shouted “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!”

This is not to say that the majority of Americans aren’t horrified by these examples and hundreds of others—or that they are without precedent. In 1939, after Kristallnacht, more than 20,000 Americans flooded Madison Square Garden to cheer for Hitler. Today, with the distance of almost a century, that shames us. We owe it to ourselves and to our country to be no less horrified when today, in New York City, Hamas’s allies “Flood New York City,” an allusion to the group’s October 7 massacre, which it called Al-Aqsa Flood.

So there will be no closure today. Though on October 7, 2024, as with every single day that has elapsed since October 7, 2023, I will think of the human beings—each one a world unto herself—destroyed by terror. I will pray for the hostages and the recovery of those who have been liberated. And I will pray for a lasting peace. Not just for Israelis, but for the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Yemenis and the Iranians and the Syrians and all those tyrannized by murderous governments and terror groups who choose death over life. And I’ll pray for America, my home. 

We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. 

People often ask me why The Free Press has covered this story with such intensity and relentlessness. This is the answer.

Since the earliest hours of October 7, 2023, we have published more than 150 reports, features, essays, podcasts, and videos, many from on the ground in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and more recently, Lebanon and Syria. 

Today we wanted to present all of them to you in one place as a resource, a historical record, and a reminder of the kind of journalism you are supporting when you support The Free Press. 

Our reporting on this topic has always had one goal: the pursuit of truth. In the course of that aim, it has also led to congressional hearings, House report citations, new laws, and pressure on Hamas to release an imam in Gaza who refused to toe the line.

Please click here to read, listen to, and watch all of our coverage over the last year. 

Idit Ohel, her husband Ronen, and two of her children, Kobi and Inbar.

As of this morning, there are 101 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. One of them is named Alon Ohel, who turned 23 years old in captivity.

This is the last his family saw of him:

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Today Alon’s mother, Idit Ohel, writes in The Free Press: “A Year Ago Today, Terrorists Stole My Son.”

When Hussein El Hajj Hassan was growing up in Lebanon, he was indoctrinated by Hezbollah propaganda. He was taught to hate Israel and to see its people as “zombies. . . spreading and growing, who aim to conquer the entire Arab region from the Nile to the Euphrates.” 

Today, he is a changed man—a peace activist whose life is being threatened by Hezbollah.

How did he change his mind?

Watch Hussein’s remarkable story in the latest installment of our series, Hezbollah’s Hostages: 

And catch up on the rest of the series here. 

Since Iran struck Israel last Tuesday, in what may be the largest ballistic missile attack in history, Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Iran made “a big mistake” and vowed “it will pay for it.”

What will happen next?

Our Jay Solomon reports that Netanyahu is now weighing direct strikes against Iranian nuclear, military, and energy installations. Current and former Israeli officials told our reporter that the prime minister sees the next four months—when the U.S. is helmed by a diminished president and consumed by an election and political transition—as a singular window for Israel to pursue its military aims without Washington’s constraints. 

Read Jay Solomon: “Will Israel Bomb Iran’s Nuclear Sites?”

And ICYMI: Read Douglas Murray’s latest column on Jonathan Sacks, plus Matti Friedman’s new dispatch from the north of Israel: “Can Israel Win Back What October 7 Took?” 

To support our journalism on this important story and others, become a Free Press subscriber today: 

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