October 7, 2023 was the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. The violence targeting the most vulnerable, from infants to elderly Holocaust survivors, revealed a viciousness that evoked the worst Nazi crimes. Shouting “slaughter the Jews,” Hamas terrorists murdered Israeli-Arabs, Bedouins, Thai and Nepalese agricultural workers, simply for associating with “the Jews.”

Nine months later, most Israelis were surprised to still be fighting. Israel’s supporters are still reeling. Israel’s counterattack burgeoned into a long, difficult war to destroy Hamas’s capacity to repeat this massacre, free 253 hostages, crush Hamas’s governing grip over Gaza, and deter other enemies from considering a similar invasion – which Hamas officials vowed to replicate “a second, a third, a fourth time.” With Hamas embedded among Gaza’s civilians, many civilians caught in the crossfire died, along with many terrorists hiding in civilian clothes.

On October 7, protests with cries of “Death to the Jews” erupted worldwide – while the slaughter continued, long before Israel counterattacked. After Israel entered Gaza on October 27, and the Palestinian death toll mounted, protests worldwide intensified. Posters proclaimed “Rape Is Resistance and “Babies Are Occupiers Too… Free Palestine by Any Means Necessary.” Anti-Jewish incidents soared – ranging from harassment to graffiti to occasional beatings. A foiled terrorist plot in Ottawa targeted “Jewish persons.” By the spring, over 130 encampments in major universities left two of three Jewish students polled on those universities feeling threatened, having heard anti-Jewish not “just” anti-Israel and anti-Zionist cries, as well as personal threats such as “we know where you live” and “Zionists must die.”

True, some protesters were upset about the loss of civilian life. But too many turned vicious.

The anti-Israel mobs often attacked Israel’s allies too, burning American flags in New York and British flags in London. Pro-Palestinian protesters chased Michael Grove, a British Minister, in London’s Victoria Station. They shouted “Fuck the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House. They disrupted the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, the Toronto mayor’s New Year’s ice-skating party, and multiple commencement ceremonies. They screamed outside the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and splashed red paint on the White House gates.

October 6: The Context

On October 6, most Israelis worried more about internal divisions than about their lethal enemies. After a year-and-a-half in the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu had returned as prime minister on December 29, 2022. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu led governments from 1996 to 1999, and again from 2009 to 2021.

Netanyahu’s governing coalition controlled 64 of 120 Knesset seats. Yet, from the start, it triggered intense opposition in the media and on the streets. Much of the controversy centered on the government’s sweeping proposal to overhaul Israel’s judiciary. The issue stirred tribal, ideological, and religious divisions. For the first time in Israel’s tumultuous political history, many army reservists threatened not to serve if mobilized.

Even amid the domestic chaos, Saudi Arabia showed many signs of being ready to normalize relations with Israel. Since September 2022, the Abraham Accords had revolutionized the Middle East, as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, then Morocco and Sudan, launched bottom-up economic, cultural, and political ties with Israel. Israel’s foes wanted to sabotage these peace moves. Iran’s regime kept trying to develop nuclear weapons, while threatening “Little Satan” – Israel – and “Big Satan” – America. Iran and Qatar bankrolled proxies throughout the Middle East, supplying Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon with rockets, armaments, and well-trained fighters. Meanwhile, Hamas tried outmaneuvering the Palestinian Authority, which controlled the disputed territories called “the West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria.” On October 6, most Israelis worried more about intensifying terrorism in those territories than any Hamas threat.

The Invasion

At 6:29 A.M. on October 7, 2023, Hamas launched 5,000 rockets in 20 minutes. Israel trusted a billion-dollar-fence along the 40-mile-long border to detect infiltrators and repel them with remote control machine gun turrets and other devices. Hamas’s old-fashioned firepower overwhelmed the high-tech defenses. Rockets, mines, and bulldozers created seven main breach points for 3,000 terrorists. Hamas ambushed soldiers and civilians running to shelters – and armories. Some terrorists paraglided over the fence, raining death on Israelis below – especially at the SuperNova Rave, where 4,000 concert-goers danced near the border.

Israel’s command-and-control centers in the south collapsed. Thousands of other Gazans then swarmed. Some were directed by Palestinian day laborers who had gathered intelligence for Hamas in Israel, because the international “conceptzia” assumed that steady incomes would prod Gazans to bury their jihadist dreams.

The assault was carefully planned – for over two years. The terrorists had maps and battle plans for each village. Some had the prayer times of synagogues in cities nearby – hoping to kill Jews as they celebrated their Sabbath and Simchat Torah, a holiday celebrating the Five Books of Moses. The terrorists also overran three military bases, including the IDF’s Gaza division headquarters, and captured the main police station in Sderot, a town with over 30,000 inhabitants.

Some intelligence reports concluded that Hamas hoped to seize as many communities as possible, then work their way up the coastal corridor, to the larger cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Tel Aviv. Had they succeeded – and had Hezbollah invaded from the north – the casualties would have been exponentially higher.

One captured Hamas terrorist confessed that “The plan was to go from home to home, from room to room, to throw grenades and kill everyone, including women and children…. Hamas ordered us to crush their heads and cut them off, [and] to cut their legs.” This terrorist received permission to rape a young girl’s corpse.

Another was asked “Why did you kidnap women.” The terrorist responded: “To rape them.” A third was recorded boasting to his parents about killing “the Jews.”

Within hours, terrorists murdered at least 52 civilians in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. They killed over 90 in Be’eri – a tenth of that kibbutz’s population. They decimated one-quarter of Nir Oz, murdering 46 and kidnapping 71. Nearly half of Be’eri’s homes, and 80 percent of homes in Nir Oz sustained damage. Engineers estimated it would cost $80 million to rebuild Be’eri alone.

Hamas murdered 30 people during its assault on a symbol of Israeli sovereignty, Sderot’s police headquarters. But the terrorists missed a yeshiva with hundreds of sleeping students 190 meters away. They murdered another 40 throughout the city. Meanwhile, two pickup trucks filled with terrorists penetrated 15 miles into Israel. They killed 52 in Ofakim, with a population of 40,000. “I still can’t believe it,” one resident remarked three months later. “There were terrorists running around our neighborhood, on our streets.”

Hamas turned the international SuperNova concert into a bloodbath. While murdering 364 revelers and kidnapping 40, they raped and mutilated many partygoers. “We couldn’t imagine that hundreds of terrorists could invade Israel like this,” Amir Ben Natan, 37, told Rolling Stone. “I feel like I was hunted…. We were helpless. We were unarmed civilians who just wanted to have fun.”

The next day, U2 front man Bono dedicated a song during one of his concerts to Israel and the doomed concertgoers. “Our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed….” he proclaimed. “We sing for those. Our people, our kind of people, music people. Playful, experimental people. Our kind of people.…”

Experts will long debate “how did it happen.” But the scale and success of Hamas’s October 7 massacre raises a second question: how did Israel repel most of the invaders by nightfall, especially because it took hours before so many army units arrived?

It’s a less popular story because it’s not about Jews bleeding, but Jews fighting back. Nevertheless, on October 7, citizens, police officers, and soldiers, at home and on base, fought back fiercely. These Citizen Commandos not only saved countless lives. These Jewish, Arab, Bedouin, and Druze Israelis saved Israel.

October 7.2: When Israelis Saved Israel

If October 7 represents Hamas’s massacre, October 7.2 represents Israel’s counterattack. That story is not about Jewish powerlessness echoing pogroms or the Holocaust. These heroic tales returned Israel to its Zionist trajectory. October 7 and 7.2 added more chapters to Zionism’s rollercoaster tale about Jews redeeming their homeland, despite cruel neighbors, and how Israelis learned to fight when necessary but to live, build, and rejoice always.

Kibbutz Nir Am’s security coordinator, Inbal Lieberman, 25, instantly realized the scale of this attack differed than the others the people in this beleaguered region had long endured. She organized 11 other kibbutz members. She prevented the electricity from being restored so the kibbutz’s electric gates wouldn’t open. She and her neighbors then fought against the infiltrators for three hours until the IDF arrived. No one on her kibbutz was killed that day. “I’m not a hero, I wasn’t there by myself,” she told reporters.

When the sirens wailed in Beersheba, two brothers, Noam and Yishay Slotki, also sensed a cataclysm. Despite usually respecting Judaism’s religious restrictions against driving on the Sabbath and holidays, despite each having been discharged from the army, they drove toward the Gaza border. Both were killed fighting outside Kibbutz Alumim.

Each brother left a wife and baby behind. Noam was 31 and Yishay, 24. “They understood that there was a need to help Israel immediately, that the army was not able to arrive at that time to save the towns near Gaza, and they took on the task themselves,” their father Rabbi Shmuel Slotki said. “Like many others, they enlisted for this task on their own and without being called… it’s really an incredible thing — the spirit of heroism, the spirit of responsibility, dedication to the people of Israel.”

Many police officers fought fiercely. Yisrael Zinger used Google Maps to find a backroad exit when terrorists blocked the concert’s main roads. His convoy led 500 concertgoers to safety.  He then joined with other officers and soldiers in the firefight of their lives.  Part of the answer to “Where was the army,” is that soldiers were stuck in many intense gun battles as early as 7 AM.  Zinger’s only regret when interviewed on TV from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from injuries: “we didn’t save more people.”

Others who saved concertgoers included Oz Davidian, 53, a local farmer, who saved 120 people, and Youssef Ziadna, 47, a Bedouin taxi driver, who saved 30 more. Each used his knowledge of the area to dodge the terrorists. In Ofakim, another cop, Itamar Alus, a 39-year-old husband and father, defines himself to TikTok fans of his cooking videos as a “simple guy who likes preparing appetizers for our holy Sabbath.” His neighbors call him a hero.

Alus battled for hours, armed only with his pistol, and a fighter’s instinct he had never tapped before. “The terrorists shot ‘rat-tat-tat-tat-tat’” with Kalashnikov assault rifles, he recalls. “We were just ‘pop-pause-pop-pause-pop…. But they never anticipated our citizens’ resistance.”

Describing a father-and-son team and two brothers, who rushed toward the bullets, each sharing one gun between them, Alus marvels: “What love of country! What love of the other!”. All four died.

The same social networks that spread anti-Israel propaganda, and that day publicized repulsive rape videos trying to demoralize Israelis, mobilized the first wave of defenders – the Home Front Commandos. Many Israeli military corps have alumni WhatsApp groups, trading gossip, updates, and occasional job offers. That day, they improvised their own command and control systems.

The Duvedevan counter-terrorist commandos’ WhatsApp shared pin locations and deployed groups of two, three, four veterans who lived nearby – as the enlisted soldiers and reservists reached the overrun communities within an hour or two and fought to reconquer them. Other soldiers hit particular intersections and created WhatsApp groups to share information with improvised units while fighting.

The anti-judicial reform protesters leapt into action too. Throughout nine months of political struggle, Ahim BaNeshek, Brothers and Sisters in Arms, developed a large network of elite combat reservists. When Hamas attacked, an effective network of battle-hardened veterans existed, thanks to Israel’s political chaos.

Politically, many Duvdevan veterans lean right. This network is all left. But partisanship vanished as patriotism – and extraordinary military training – triumphed.

So much for the threats not to serve.

When the politicians failed and the IDF faltered, the people stepped in. A consensus coalesced that day. For Israelis, victory does not just include breaking Hamas and restoring deterrence – but rebuilding the pastoral south, which was safe and blooming, in undisputed territory behind pre-1967 borders, until Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005. Omri Bonim, one of many Kibbutz Rambos who saved his community, Reim, says, “when we all return, we will rebuild it all, and we will show the world how beautiful our community is.”