To be a post-October 7 Jew is to accept the responsibility of living at a pivotal moment in Jewish history. It is to know that our generation’s turn has come to confront Jewish vulnerability and reaffirm Jewish purpose. It is to find the courage and fortitude of our ancestors within ourselves. It is to understand, as well, that power presents moral dilemmas our ancestors in exile couldn’t imagine. It is to be multidimensional Jews, embracing complexity and contradictions.

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to share in the resilience of a people capable of overcoming the most formidable threats. On the day of the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, Israel seemed to be unraveling. Its military deterrence—essential for its long-term survival—had been shattered. Israel’s weakest enemy had delivered the most devastating blow in our history. We experienced the destruction of Israel in microcosm: our border overrun, our army and government in disarray, citizens left to fend for themselves against an enemy with no moral restraint. Helpless, as though there were no Jewish state.

Who could have imagined on that horrific day that the Israel Defense Forces would recover its elan and so decisively restore its credibility? That the terrorist siege around our borders would be broken? That we would literally disable Hezbollah by wounding thousands of its fighters in one of the most brilliant operations in the history of warfare? That we would dominate the skies of Iran for 12 days, without losing a single plane, and entice America to join the effort, not to save us but to share in our victory?

And yet to be a post-October 7 Jew is to know the maddening elusiveness of a knockout blow. This is not the 1967 Six-Day War. The “12-Day War,” as President Trump called the Israeli and American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, is hardly over. Iran is still working toward a nuclear bomb, Hezbollah hasn’t yielded its weapons and Hamas has not surrendered. Perhaps our greatest victory has been to restore faith in ourselves. But a wounded, grieving and still-anxious Israel is not celebrating.

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to know the reach and the limits of our power. We can fly more than 1,200 miles and neutralize Iran’s air defenses, but we cannot rescue hostages within arm’s length of the IDF.

Over the last several decades, the Zionist promise of safe refuge for the Jewish people seemed to have finally been realized. The trajectory of Israel’s wars revealed a gradual diminishment of threat. In the 1948 War of Independence, the new state faced seven Arab armies; in 1967, three armies; in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, two. Since the 1982 Lebanon War, Israel fought its battles on a single front.

Until October 7. Now we have come full circle, back to a seven-front war. We veer from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran to Yemen to Syria to Iraq while combatting terrorism in the West Bank. Even as the fighting on one front eases, another erupts. Israel is stronger than ever, yet we have not been freed from regional conflict and existential threat.

On October 7, we came face to face with the consequences of wishful thinking. We imagined we could live normal lives while surrounded by Iranian proxies, bribing Hamas with Qatari dollars and deterring Hezbollah with a balance of fear. A post-October 7 Jew knows: If a regime constantly affirms its intention to destroy you, you will awaken one day to terrorists in your living room.

Now we live in a state of permanent alertness. We crave the return to routine that helps us cope with endless threat, yet fear the return of complacency. Now, when Israelis pledge “never again,” we mean the illusions that led to October 7. 

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to perceive reality differently than most of the world. It is to live in an alternative Jewish universe, where what to us is urgent and self-evident is widely dismissed as irrelevant or outright lies. It is being forced to prove that Hamas’s atrocities really happened, that mass rape was integral to its war strategy, that not Israel but its enemies are genocidal, that Jews around the world are facing a wave of hatred and physical threat not seen since the 1940s, that Jews don’t cause antisemitism, that Israel has the right to defend itself, that a Jewish state has the right to exist. It is to experience so much rage so much of the time that you feel you are about to explode.

Astonishingly, the disconnect began on the day of the massacre, with Israel’s critics describing it as a self-inflicted wound, an uprising of an oppressed people against occupation. But Israelis, including almost all on the left, perceived the massacre very differently, as part of the radical Islamist war against a Jewish state within any borders. For that reason, a united Israel went to battle, even though Israelis understood that this would be the most brutal of all our wars.

For the Iranian axis, there is no difference between a West Bank settlement and Tel Aviv. Even if a West Bank Palestinian state existed, an October 7 would still have been possible. That, after all, is the meaning of the slogan, “From the river to the sea.”

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Hadassah Magazine Presents: Two Years On With Yossi Klein Halevi and Lee Yaron

Join us on Wednesday, October 29 at 12:30 PM ET when Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein hosts renowned Israeli writers Yossi Klein Halevi and Lee Yaron for a discussion about what it means to be a Jew today, in a post-October 7 world; how Israeli survivors are coping; and what almost two years of war and rising global antisemitism mean for the future of the Jewish people.

REGISTER

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Astonishingly, that slogan went mainstream on the day its genocidal intent became clear. The goal was never a benign democratic binational state in which Jews and Palestinians lived happily together. On October 7, anti-Zionists revealed their hand: Their goal is the eradication “by any means necessary,” as the popular slogan puts it, of the so-called white colonial settler state of the Jews, who have no place in the land they stole.

For much of the world, Israel and the IDF’s response to the massacre was about revenge. However unconsciously, this accusation drew on the old Christian contempt for Judaism as a religion of vengeance, while theirs was the religion of love.

For Israelis, though, the war from the outset had strategic goals: re-establish deterrence and break the siege on our borders. More deeply, the goal was to deny terrorism immunity. Hamas’s strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: massacre Israeli civilians, then create the conditions that result in large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties, triggering world revulsion against Israel. The perfect strategy for the age of social media: mobilize the journalists and the human rights activists, the conscience of humanity, to strengthen the terrorists.

Our friends around the world—and we are not friendless, even if it often feels that way—understood that a victorious Hamas would empower global terrorism. They understood that this was not only Israel’s but the West’s war, too. That Israel was “doing our dirty work,” as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it when Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in June. Those voices of sanity have been precious precisely because they have been rare.

The disconnect between Israelis and much of the world has continued through the war. Even as criticism over the war has grown among Israelis, its basic justness hasn’t been questioned. And no, however horrific, this is not genocide. The casualty proportion of civilians to combatants has been well within the norm of asymmetrical warfare fought in dense urban conditions, against an enemy operating from hospitals and refugee centers.

Still, we ask ourselves agonizing questions about Israel’s conduct. Why have so many Palestinian civilians been killed by IDF fire at food distribution points? Why didn’t the army better prepare its soldiers for such a complicated mission? Yes, the United Nations covers for Hamas, which strengthens its hold on power with stolen aid. But at what point do we concede that our alternative system isn’t working?

And most urgently: How did we get to the point where we allowed Gaza to veer to the edge of starvation? Yes, the United Nations falsely and repeatedly warned, from the very beginning of the war, that starvation was imminent; but eventually the wolf appeared at our door. It was not a deliberate policy to starve Gaza, but a combination of incompetence, neglect and Israeli government apathy has severely undermined the moral credibility of the Jewish people and left the Jewish state more isolated than at any time in its history.

To be a post-October 7 Jew, then, is to move between certainty and ambivalence, indignation and self-doubt, sometimes over the same dilemma. It is to resist those who seek to turn the epic story of the Jewish people’s return home into a monstrous crime, even while quietly fearing that the decades of relentless assaults have eroded our moral sensitivity. And it is to vehemently oppose the Holocaust inversion that portrays the Jewish state as genocidal for resisting a genocidal enemy, even as we anguish over the devastation we have caused. 

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to have known, however fleetingly, a level of unity and shared purpose rare in Jewish history. On October 8, Israeli society instantly pivoted from its deepest-ever schism—over the ruling coalition’s assault on an independent judiciary—to the peak of national solidarity. Confronted with a revelation of pure evil, we responded with the instincts of peoplehood.

Perhaps inevitably, our divisions have re-emerged—over the mass military exemption of the ultra-Orthodox, over the government’s renewed attempts to weaken the judiciary, over the wisdom of continuing the war and even over the fate of the hostages. 

Competing posters on Israel’s streets tell the story of how the hostage tragedy has failed to unite us. There are the faces of hostages with the words, “Don’t leave me behind.” The message being that saving them is more important than defeating Hamas. And there are the faces of fallen soldiers, demanding the IDF continue fighting “until victory.” That message is: Defeating Hamas is the greater priority. 

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to struggle for a new vision for Israel. How can we manage our disagreements in a way that doesn’t risk the cohesiveness of Israeli society? How do we ensure that we remain true to our values, even under overwhelming threat? What does it mean to be a Jewish and a democratic state? What is the place of Arab citizens in Israeli identity? How should Israeli policymakers consider the needs and concerns of Diaspora Jews, whose lives are affected by our decisions?

Our choice is between October 6 and October 8—that is, between dissipation and convergence. Will our mutual antipathies define us, or will we commit to national healing?

To be a post-October 7 Jew is to know the strangeness of Jewish fate and ponder the meaning of the Jewish story. Zionism set out to end the anomaly of Jewish otherness and return us to the community of nations. How is it possible that, in a world replete with mass murder and state repression, we are once again the symbol of evil?

And most of all: Why is it always about the Jews? This is not only a political question about the persistence of an ancient hatred but a theological one. For me, as a Jew of faith, this time only strengthens the credibility of the story we have told ourselves from our earliest origins: That we are a people consecrated to a Divine purpose, and otherness comes with a price. That no matter how hard we try to “normalize” Jewish fate, Jewish destiny intrudes. And the price, it seems, is periodic ostracism. 

But whatever one believes about the meaning of our story, Jews share a belief in its goodness. “This story will have a good ending,” read one Israeli bumper sticker shortly after the massacre. To be a post-October 7 Jew is to know that a time will come when our reality will not be defined by October 7. 

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Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and author of several books, including Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a New York Times best seller. He is currently working on a book about the meaning of Jewish survival.