October 7, 2024
On the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel...
A year ago today, Hamas terrorists kidnapped, raped, and murdered hundreds of Israelis in one of the most horrific displays of barbarism perpetrated in modern times. It wasn’t freedom fighting. It wasn’t proportional retaliation. It was a vicious, utterly depraved massacre designed to devastate not just Israelis, but their family members, supporters, and allies around the globe. The motivation beyond that isn’t entirely clear to me, but I wonder if Hamas anticipated, one year later, the potential of a full scale war between Iran and Israel that I can’t imagine Iran has any hope of winning on its own.
To be sure, Israel has made mistakes in its response to October 7th — some quite serious — and I’m happy to get into those another time (Netanyahu is, to my mind, temperamentally ill-suited to his job, with legal and political motives for extending the conflict). But today is for the victims and survivors, as every day should be until the captors and killers are brought to justice. The link is a series of video and audio compilations of some survivors’ stories, filmed and recorded not long after the attack. They’re a striking reminder of what Israel lost — and seeks to regain — in the wake of the massacre.