It’s now been three years since the day that should live in infamy, when Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza, brutalized, raped, tortured, and murdered 1,200 women, men, children, and babies, and kidnapped hundreds more.
But to consider the impact of Oct. 7, 2023, one can usefully start not with the hideous events of three years ago, but with what was happening last year as the second anniversary of those horrors approached. On Oct. 7, 2025, according to a 214-page indictment, seven Hamas terrorists and their accomplices planned celebratory anniversary massacres in Berlin and Vienna. They were itching to visit more unspeakable violence on Jews in Germany and Austria, as well as on Israelis.
According to a reliable report, the plotters were supported by an international weapons network that would facilitate coordinated attacks on Israeli diplomats, Jewish community centers, and pro-Israeli demonstrations. (So much for Hamas terrorism merely being about “occupied” land.) If security forces had not thwarted the terrorists, the planned pogroms would have expanded the range of action of jihadis in Europe from fundraising, propaganda, and logistics to a greater capacity for mass murder.
But it is less these practical results that should weigh on our thoughts than the simple fact that the plot existed at all. What does that mean? It means that while governments from Washington to the capitals of Europe were agonizing about bringing peace to Gaza, the terrorists who run that Levantine enclave were preparing to bring more death and misery to the West and Israel. They were intent on escalating violence and glorying in past murders, which they see as triumphs, not, as we do, as matters for regret.
This is one of the most important things to grasp about what has happened and what has not happened since 10/7. The past three years, including the highly destructive war in Gaza, have changed nothing in Palestinian attitudes or intentions. They have not lessened their determination for slaughter one bit.
Misguided democracies of the developed world have strained every sinew to support “Palestine” while the Palestinians themselves have been getting on with unstinted terrorism. The Arabs of Gaza and their sympathizers falsely claim to be victims of genocide, and foreign leftists and establishment handwringers parrot this view. Yet the supposed sufferers of that fabricated crime do not pause even a moment in their own plans to rekindle genocide against Jews.
World headlines a year ago were all about suffering Palestinians needing a solution. Bogus claims of starvation and deliberate mass killing of Gazan civilians had not been as thoroughly debunked then as they have now. But the intended beneficiaries of “peace negotiations” were intent on more headline-grabbing atrocities. The only solution they are interested in is Hitler’s “final solution,” the extirpation of Jews and the elimination of Israel.
Hamas leaders and Gazans themselves are explicit about this and dismiss the idea of ever living in harmony with Jews. They are not merely uninterested in living at peace with Israel as their neighbor, but are determined to prevent that vanishingly remote possibility from ever being attained.
Critics often say Islam is a death cult, and they are not wrong, even though the majority of those who practice the Muslim religion are less enamored of death than are the minority who are jihadis. But whatever the numbers, it cannot be denied that instructions to murder and terrorize non-Muslims, especially Jews, are plentiful and unambiguous in the foundational literature of Islam.
The fact that most Muslims do not act on those instructions should not blind us to the reality of a cultish fervor in the Palestinian street, which massively and delightedly supported the Oct. 7 massacres. Gazan civilians have recently boasted without a shadow of remorse that they kept Israeli hostages in their homes. Palestinian crowds erupt in joyous celebration at the news of the slaughter of Jews and the people of the West.
Remember their whooping and tears of ecstasy after the 9/11 attack on America and the 10/7 equivalent on Israel? Remember that Palestinian man waving his bloody hands from a police station window in 2000 so his neighbors could share his glee as a young Israeli was lynched inside?
These are not people who share any of the values we uphold in our civilization. Palestinian savagery looks like the drunken violence of a Dionysian orgy, its participants intoxicated with blood-lust and outdoing each other in bestial depravity. That Palestinian man with the blood-soaked hands wore on his face an expression of delight beyond the imagining of Western liberal democratic minds. And his expression reflected the feelings of his neighbors.
On 10/7, thousands of such people mutilated and raped their victims, burned them, gouged out their eyes, strangled toddlers, and sexually defiled corpses. Then hundreds or thousands more capered in ecstasy, beating the bodies of dead victims as they were paraded through Gaza’s streets in the back of pickup trucks.
Western sensibilities hardly imagine, let alone share, such evil urges. It is important that the enormities of that day leave an indelible impression on us about the nature of those with whom Israel and we are dealing.
But our society and polity are dangerously forgetful. What really happened on 10/7 has been memory-holed by many in the developed world, not because contemplating its evil is too much to look at without flinching, but because accepting the truth of what was done by supposedly suppressed people of the “Global South” does not fit with an intersectional leftist narrative that makes Israelis the bad guys. The atrocities of that day have been rationalized as “resistance,” a framing that requires an utterly false understanding of reasonable Israeli self-defense and the relative merits of Jewish and Arabs claims to contested land on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore.
Instead of learning a vital understanding about the Palestinian cause by looking squarely at its bestial horrors, much of the world has become sympathetic toward the perpetrators and hostile toward the victims. This is plainly so among Democrats who now increasingly side with the terrorists against the Jews.
Since 10/7, “progressive” opinion has sunk into a massive moral distortion, which has led to such astonishing journalistic malfeasances as that of the New York Times a few weeks ago reporting that “Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” as though that could be in doubt. Of course they regard themselves that way — they were the victims.
The New York Times, like many other outlets, has presented the world with an account of the conflict so biased and misleading as to be propaganda rather than news. An incessant stream of left-wing falsehood depicts the Jewish state as a genocidal oppressor rather than a decent democratic nation engaged in a war it did not start and manifestly did not want.
An analysis of 14.7 million stories in 65 languages over the past 10 years has found that one out of every 26 news articles was about Israel. World news media discussed Israel, on a per death ratio, 10,000 times more than it looked at war in Ethiopia, for example, which was the deadliest of the decade. On only eight out of 390 days did Sudan, where a real genocide is taking place, account for more than 1% of global news coverage. But after 10/7, Israel accounted for more than 1% of global news on 344 of 365 days. This has done much to curdle coverage and build the inverted morality we see all around us today. It is impossible not to conclude that the world’s obsession is the result of the oldest hatred in the world: the hatred of Jews because they are Jews.
Since 10/7, this antipathy has driven the policy of important nations, especially in Europe. As its second anniversary drew near and President Donald Trump’s administration was trying to negotiate a settlement between Israel and Hamas, the United Kingdom and France officially recognized the state of Palestine, encouraging the terrorists to understand that they were winning what they wanted without concessions. This was just two weeks before the intended massacres in Germany and Austria by the Hamas government of Gaza.
Britain and France were rewarding the atrocities of three years ago. Britain, under its socialist Labour government, has now gone even further, imposing sanctions against Israel because it is frightened of militant Muslim voters defecting and toppling it from power.
It is trying to fend off an electoral challenge on its left flank from the Green Party, which has forged a despicable alliance with Islamists. This Faustian bargain drew praise from Iran and Hamas.
The move has enraged Israel, from which Britain, perhaps for not much longer, derives solid benefits such as security intelligence and pharmaceuticals. Britain, which once also valued a “special relationship” with the United States, has also further sacrificed goodwill on this side of the Atlantic.
But the U.S. has not been entirely staunch on the side of right since 10/7, certainly less so than before. It needs to recognize consistently that the Palestinian cause is fundamentally anti-Western, and that Israel is both morally and practically the most important and natural ally we have, certainly in the Middle East and perhaps anywhere.
The failure to resist Palestinian and leftist propaganda since the horrors of three years ago has not been that of the Trump administration, although the president has criticized Israel for taking actions that any other nation would take to defend itself. The failure has, rather, been by the broad Left and the Democratic Party, which, despite paying lip service to Israel’s right to exist, has become the anti-Israel party, embracing the vilest antisemites, such as streamer Hasan Piker, as well as nominating them as candidates for political office.
Democrats, including Jews such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), like the British government, want to appease terrorism-supporting Muslim voters who could be decisive in congressional districts and states crucial to the blue party’s hopes of retaking power on Capitol Hill.
Thus, Oct. 7, 2023, has pushed Democrats and Republicans further apart, the latter mostly maintaining America’s traditional staunch alliance with the Jewish state, and the former, sinking in the moral mire of Woke 2.0, abandoning Israel and the Jews. Democrats make the cynical if unstated calculation that political ascendancy is more likely to flow from alignment with the world’s 2 billion Muslims and 4 million now in the U.S., than it is from the tiny democratic nation besieged since 1948.
This split can be a political inflection point. The Republican Party can be the party that stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel and worldwide Jewry, against the lies and predations of an enemy that hates America almost as much as it hates Israel. The GOP can leave Democrats to be the appeasers of one of the most dangerous and ugly forces abroad in the world. The left party is being overtaken by people who want to make Israel more vulnerable to murderous attacks against it by refusing to sell it even defensive weapons.
The scarcely imaginable savagery of Palestinians means Israelis and diaspora Jews cannot reasonably be expected to accept a two-state solution in the Holy Land. Indeed, they long since realized it was an impossibility. How can they be pressed to live alongside those who murdered their family members and intend to do so again? For Jews to trust in any agreement reached with Palestinians is not a serious suggestion. It is almost, in the Swiftian sense, a modest proposal — so absurd as to be obviously and deliberately provocative.
If Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution — they obviously don’t — and if Israelis cannot want one either, the U.S. should stop chasing that unattainable dream, or nightmare. America should end that pretense, which for half a century has suggested that a land-for-peace deal is possible with jihadis. Drop the cynical international fiction. One cannot build a secure future on lies. The U.S. should simply support its ally, Israel, against its unreformed and relentlessly predatory foes. We should not cajole or browbeat the Jews and their nation into concessions to their would-be killers. We should back them and persuade or defy international opinion as necessary.
There is a solid legal case that Gaza and the West Bank — in truth, Judea and Samaria — are properly part of Israel. They have been invaded and illegally occupied only once, and it was not by Israel in 1967 but by Egypt and Jordan in 1948. Legal doctrine accepted everywhere, except in the case of Israel, dictates that newly independent states include all the land that was part of their territory at the moment of international recognition. That means both Gaza and the West Bank are part of Israel. The only reason they were given special status rather than incorporated once again into a united Israel in 1967 was that Israel’s government was willing to exchange land for peace.
UNITED NATIONS USELESSNESS GLARING AT GENERAL ASSEMBLY
The Palestinians rejected that exchange, never more horribly than three years ago. They have spurned such a deal five times in the past because it involves recognition of Israel’s right to exist. Even now, Palestinian terrorists are planning more massacres. It is surely time to acknowledge that they will never agree to a real peace.
Oct. 7, 2023, corrupted much of the developed world’s judgment. But the U.S. has led the world order since 1945, and part of that order is the continued existence of a homeland for Jews. Whatever 10/7 has done to people elsewhere bent on cultural suicide and appeasement, it should strengthen this nation’s determination to uphold the right.
Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.