October 7th revealed something much scarier than terrorism.

Hamas showed us what jihadists were capable of. The West showed us something far more frightening.

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Every year on October 7th, Jews gather to mourn those who were murdered that day. And every year, “pro-Palestinian” activists seem determined not to let the day belong to them.

In fact, according to Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, 262 pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and events have been identified across 37 countries. They organise their own vigils, protests, and events on the same day, as though even the anniversary of the massacre must be turned into an indictment of Israel.

Around the world, Jewish communities mark the day under heavy security, knowing that their memorials are likely to attract counter-protesters. And often they do.

There are 364 other days. And antizionists are hardly shy about using them.

To choose October 7th, of all days, to turn the anniversary of the worst single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust into a protest against Israel is vile and obscene.

If you still have not properly confronted what happened that day, I encourage you to. Watch the footage. Read the testimonies. Confront the evidence of sexual violence without immediately reaching for a “but.” I’ve seen virulent antizionists recoil once they saw what actually happened on October 7th, and others change their minds.

Read the accounts of evidence of the sexual violence, including material beyond the publicly discussed 47-minute compilation. A former British Army officer who has spent the past three years researching this war, including criticising Israel’s conduct, Andrew Fox describes what he saw as the most horrific evidence he has ever encountered.

“Nothing Israel has done in Gaza comes anywhere near the horrors of October 7th,” he wrote, arguing the two cannot be placed on opposite sides of some moral ledger. Having seen evidence most of us thankfully never will, he describes acts of such grotesque cruelty, sadism, and deliberate desecration that they permanently alter your sense of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.

For three years, images of death and destruction from Gaza have circulated relentlessly across our screens and social-media feeds. Most of the material from October 7th cannot be shown in ordinary coverage, because it is simply too graphic. Nor would it be ethical to broadcast the final moments, sexual violation, or mutilated bodies of identifiable victims, out of respect for both their dignity and the privacy of the families they left behind.

War produces horrifying death and suffering, and Gaza has unquestionably seen both. But October 7th was not simply people dying in war. Civilians were hunted in their homes and at a music festival. Family members were deliberately tortured and murdered in front of one another. Bodies were mutilated, limbs severed, and corpses desecrated. Children were set on fire, on camera, because terrorists filmed their crimes and used victims’ own phones and social-media accounts to broadcast what was happening to their families.

Terror, humiliation, and psychological torment were at the heart of the attack. And yet, despite being the most horrifying terrorist attack of this century, October 7th was not what shocked me most.

That probably sounds strange, but Hamas are hardline jihadists. Look at how other jihadist movements operate, from ISIS and al-Qaeda to Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia. If you want to understand what Hamas is capable of, familiarise yourself with what it has done to Palestinians. Listen to Gazans describe life under Hamas. Look at how Hamas crushed the “We Want to Live” protests, arresting and torturing organisers. Read the accounts of brutal repression and executions of its own people.

Hamas is only the latest in a long Islamist lineage that fused anti-Jewish violence with religious ideas of jihad. In 1929, Arab rioters massacred 67 Jews in Hebron, including women and children, destroying homes and synagogues and ending the city’s centuries-old Jewish community. Two years later, members of the Black Hand, an Islamist armed movement associated with the cleric Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, ambushed and murdered Jews from Kibbutz Yagur. Today, Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is fittingly named in his honour.

The violence continued through the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s. In 1938, armed Arab attackers entered a Jewish neighbourhood in Tiberias, setting fire to homes and a synagogue and murdering 19 Jews, including 11 children. Then came the fedayeen raids of the 1950s. In one night in 1956, three schoolboys and their teacher were killed during evening prayers at an agricultural boarding school near Tel Aviv, while other raiders attacked a family home and a bus. This was before any so-called “Israeli occupation.”

Then came the international terrorism of the 1970s. At Munich, members of the Palestinian militant group Black September took eleven Israeli Olympic athletes and coaches hostage. The captives were bound and beaten; Yossef Romano was shot and sexually mutilated, his body left in the room with the other hostages. By the end of the siege, all 11 Israelis were dead.

Then came the Second Intifada: years of suicide bombings on buses, in cafés, restaurants, markets, and nightclubs. In June 2001, a suicide bomber detonated outside Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium nightclub, killing 21 people, most of them teenagers. Two months later, a Hamas suicide bomber struck Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, killing 15 people, including seven children. In March 2002, a Hamas bomber walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya during a Passover Seder and murdered 30 people.

These were only a fraction of what occurred. There were shootings, stabbings, car bombs, suicide bombings, and plane hijackings, along with many more attacks thwarted.

October 7th may have been unprecedented in scale and brutality, but it was not without precedent. Those who insist it “didn’t start on October 7th” usually leave out everything I’ve just mentioned. I’m tracing the thread their version omits, while their own history begins at the point where Palestinians are already being “occupied” and restricted, apparently for no reason at all.

So when the border was breached on October 7th and thousands of Hamas-led terrorists gained access to Israeli communities, the horrifying potential was not difficult to imagine. What shocked me was the world’s reaction. It was watching people thousands of kilometres away, who had no excuse of confusion or coercion, see reports of families being massacred and hostages dragged into Gaza and respond with jubilation, justification, and slogans about “resistance.”

While the attack was still underway, people were already celebrating in Western capitals. In Berlin, sweets were distributed in celebration. In London, people danced and waved Palestinian flags. By October 8th, a pro-Palestinian rally was being held in Times Square.

And in Sydney, just two days after the massacre, protesters descended on the Opera House while it was illuminated in solidarity with Israel. Flares burned as people chanted “f**k the Jews.” Police had advised Jewish Australians not to attend their own city’s gesture of solidarity because of the risk to their safety.

Also in Australia, at a rally in Lakemba the following evening, a speaker described himself as “elated,” called it a “day of victory,” and celebrated Palestinians having “broke through the largest prison on Earth.”

Overnight, we heard people with virtually no previous interest in the Middle East suddenly invoking “occupation,” “resistance,” the “Nakba,” and decades of Israeli brutality while Israeli families were still identifying their dead. Where had this sudden fluency come from? Who had fed them this one-sided moral framework?

Even at my most critical of Israel, I have never confused jihadism with liberation. I was not so naive as to believe that years of Hamas rule and Islamist indoctrination would leave Gaza untouched by radicalisation. So I wasn’t surprised that jihadists were capable of massacring Jews with medieval brutality. Nor, grimly, was I shocked that civilians joined in, celebrated, spat on the dead, or handed out sweets as bodies were dragged back through Gaza.

What I hadn’t understood was how quickly people living comfortable lives in Western democracies could watch it happen and reach for “resistance.” Before Israel’s response had become the war we know today, the rationalisation had already begun.

When rationalisation failed, denial took over. October 7th presents an intolerable contradiction for anyone invested in a moral framework in which Israelis are the “oppressors” and Palestinians the “oppressed.” To confront what happened honestly means accepting that people you regard as “oppressed” can also commit acts of extraordinary evil.

And so the conspiracy theories started. Israel killed its own people with the Hannibal Directive. Netanyahu allowed it to happen. Netanyahu orchestrated it. October 7th was a false flag. Images were staged. The sexual violence was “atrocity propaganda.” Different versions serving the same psychological function: returning Israel to its proper place as perpetrator rather than victim.

There are legitimate questions about Israel’s catastrophic security failures that day, and they should be investigated. But they are a very long way from evidence that Israel orchestrated October 7th, or that Israeli forces somehow explain away a Hamas-led massacre documented by the attackers themselves, hundreds of survivor and eyewitness testimonies, and vast amounts of contemporaneous footage, and which Hamas leaders celebrate and vow to repeat “again and again.”

In the years since October 7th, anti-Israel conspiracy theories have become mainstream. Pay attention, and you’ll notice Israel is now behind everything. Charlie Kirk gets shot — “Israel did it.” Migrants pour into Ceuta, Spain — “Netanyahu engineered it.” An attempted plane hijacking — “Israeli false flag.” A politician changes position — “Zionist money.”

Give it 15 minutes.

October 7th marks a clear turning point, when something previously simmering beneath the surface broke into the open, hostility toward Jews became explicit once again, and Israel became the universal scapegoat, blamed as the omni-cause of every grievance under the sun.

That is the thread connecting what happened then to what happens every October 7th. From that day, Israelis were never allowed to be victims. Before the bodies had even been identified, their massacre was being celebrated or contextualised as “resistance.”

Every anniversary, the same instinct returns. October 7th must be reclaimed and redirected until the people massacred that day are once again the ones on trial.

People should consider carefully what they are doing when they choose October 7th. The impulse to deny Jews ownership of their own suffering has an old and extremely ugly history. After the Holocaust, for example, Soviet authorities stripped massacres such as Babyn Yar of their specifically Jewish character, memorialising the murdered as generic Soviet victims. The dead could be mourned, so long as they stopped being Jewish.

Such is the annoying tendency of the antizionist cause to colonise every available space. Universities, museums, Pride marches, climate protests, concerts, literary festivals, even causes with no discernible connection to the Middle East. Nothing is allowed to remain outside it. Not even October 7th.

You do not have to diminish Palestinian suffering to acknowledge the horror of what happened on this day. You do not have to support the Israeli government or abandon your belief in Palestinian rights. But making October 7th about “Palestine” does nothing for Palestinians. It only hurts Jews.

Jewish communities are already familiar with their sacred days becoming targets: Yom Kippur in Manchester, Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, Passover in Poway. There is something especially perverse about refusing Jews even the sanctity of a day reserved for their dead.

Let parents mourn their children without explaining why their country deserved it. Let children mourn their parents without turning their memorial into a protest. Let survivors remember the friends they watched die without being confronted by the flags and slogans invoked to justify their murder. For one day, resist the urge to respond with “but Gaza.”

There are 364 other days. Let them have one, you ghouls.

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