October 7th. Three Years Later
A mixture of mourning, outrage and apathy floods social media and the mainstream press as the world marks three years since Hamas-led gunmen broke through the border from Gaza and carried out the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. They killed nearly 1,200 people, including infants and toddlers, in the most gruesome ways. They dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza, from infants to grandparents. They filmed much of it themselves, which is why the images have traumatized anyone who has seen them.
The revisionist lies started before the bodies were counted. On the afternoon of October 7, while Israeli soldiers were still fighting gunmen in the kibbutzim, New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America announced a rally in Times Square for the next day, billed as solidarity with the Palestinian “right to resist.” About a thousand people showed up. Some chanted that resistance was justified “by any means necessary.” Similar crowds gathered outside Israeli consulates in Chicago and Atlanta. Call these whatever you like, but they were not protests against a massacre of civilians. They were rallies in support of killing Jews.
Since then, that rebranding has had three years to do its work.
The hostages came home slowly, and some came home in coffins. The last 20 living captives were released in October 2025. The remains of the last hostage weren’t returned until January of this year. For more than two years, families learned to live inside a news cycle that treated their children as a bargaining chip, or worse, as a talking point.
Meanwhile the chant “globalize the intifada” stopped being a slogan and started being a schedule. Look at the last year and a half:
In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence hours after Josh Shapiro’s family hosted a Passover seder there. In May, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young couple about to get engaged, were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. In June, a man shouting “Free Palestine” firebombed people in Boulder, Colorado, who were walking to call for the hostages’ release. In October, on Yom Kippur, worshippers were attacked outside a synagogue in Manchester. And in December, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney and killed 15 people, the deadliest attack on Jewish civilians anywhere since October 7 itself.
Notice where those happened. Not Gaza. Not the West Bank. Washington, Harrisburg, Boulder, Manchester, Sydney. The victims weren’t soldiers or settlers or government officials (well, two worked at an embassy, which apparently was close enough). They were Jews at a museum event, a walk, a prayer service, a holiday party on a beach. The common thread wasn’t anything Israel did. It was being Jewish in public.
Which brings me back to the third word in my opening: apathy.
Mourning and outrage are at least responses. Apathy is what happens when a horror becomes a date on the calendar, then a hashtag, then a thing people politely scroll past because it’s “complicated.” Three years is roughly how long it takes for an atrocity to slide from news into history, and history is where inconvenient facts go to be reinterpreted. We’ve already watched it happen in real time: the sexual violence questioned, the death toll quibbled over (by people who weren’t asking in good faith), the hostages recast as “prisoners,” the attackers recast as freedom fighters.
That’s the real anniversary story. Not that people disagree about Israel. People have always disagreed about Israel, and they’re entitled to. The story is that the line between criticizing a government and hunting its co-religionists on a beach in Sydney has gotten very blurry for a lot of people who should know better, and a lot of the rest of us have decided it’s not our problem.
It is our problem. Antisemitism has never stayed contained to Jews, and the people who chanted “by any means necessary” in Times Square on October 8, 2023 were telling us exactly what they meant. Three years later, we’ve seen the means.
So remember the 1,200 slaughtered. Remember the 251 taken hostage. Say what happened plainly, without the “context” that somehow only ever gets attached to Jewish victims. And when someone calls a massacre resistance, don’t scroll past it.
Apathy is how it happens again.
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