‘Oct. 7 isn’t over yet’

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.As the United States prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in its history, Israel is steadying itself for its own solemn commemoration. Nearly three years have passed since Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded Israel and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped hundreds more. In Israel, the memories of that tragedy haven’t even begun to fade. The wounds are fresh, and the war is ongoing.“Oct. 7 isn’t over yet,” an Israeli reservist who deployed more than 100 days last year, told me in August. She’s right, even if America, the so-called international community, and not a few of her fellow Israelis may wish otherwise.“9/11 is history now,” Time magazine declared in 2019. More than 100 million Americans — roughly one-third of the population — were either born after or are too young to have a lived memory of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. In Israel, such a thing is, and will always be, impossible. Israel is too small, too embattled, and too conscious of its own history. Or more simply put: Israel doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting. Of course, neither does America, whether it realizes it or not. In Israel, Islamist terrorism isn’t an abstraction. It’s a reality. And its lessons have been hard-earned.Israeli schoolchildren don’t need to be taught about Oct. 7. They know it firsthand. In a nation of a little more than 10 million, nearly every family knows someone who was murdered, held hostage, or is part of the longest military deployment in the nation’s beleaguered history. SEAN DURNS: THE FUTURE OF THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENTFor Israel, Oct. 7 has been a nightmare without end. That nightmare began at 6:29 on a crisp October morning, and it has continued through a multiyear, multifront war and the eventual, if inevitable, abandonment by an international community and its various institutions, many of them built in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. “When they said ‘never again,’ we thought they meant it,” someone acidly quipped to me.The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed the U.S. in ways so profound that it’s perhaps hard for many Americans to imagine what life was like before the era of scrolling news tickers and the Transportation Security Administration. For many Americans, 9/11 marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. But in Israel, that process is both ongoing and magnified. Borders are no safeguard from the threat of terrorism, as Americans learned to their horror a quarter century ago. Yet the U.S. is surrounded by two oceans and neighbors such as Mexico and Canada. Israel, by contrast, lives in an entirely different neighborhood. Up until recently, the Jewish state was virtually surrounded by terrorists and terrorist states, all patiently constructed by the Islamic Republic of Iran for its destruction. Adjusted for population, Oct. 7 was “like fifteen 9/11s” as President Joe Biden noted at the time. Hamas meant to break records for savagery, and it did. The Nova Music Festival Massacre, in which approximately 400 concertgoers were murdered, is the deadliest concert event in history. “It was the worst thing that I’d ever seen,” an Israeli special forces reservist with four decades of combat experience told me. He and a handful of lightly armed men rushed to the scene expecting to find a few terrorists, only to encounter hundreds of jihadists, many armed with RPGs and grenades.Oct. 7 may also be the largest instance of mass rape in modern history. Both men and women had their sexual organs cut off. Some women were raped multiple times and by multiple people, often before — and sometimes even after —being shot in the back of the head. The scope and scale of the attack are hard to fathom, let alone describe. So is the wanton savagery. However, we owe it to the victims to try to bear witness.Families were tortured and mutilated in front of each other. Toddlers such as 5-year-old Ethan Kapshetar were executed while sitting in a car seat on the way back from a family vacation. After seeing her parents and her brother murdered, Ethan’s 8-year-old sister Aline hid in the bushes before she too died from her wounds. Elderly citizens, family pets, and entire families were burned alive in their homes. Men were shot in the legs and left on the road as part of a bid to ambush those who would rescue them.Scholars have had to come up with entire terms such as “kinocide” to describe what unfolded. That is: the violence perpetrated by Hamas and its allies literally defied description. Before Oct. 7, the words didn’t exist. Even now, some legacy newsrooms and the United Nations won’t dare utter them.Terrorists wore GoPros to film themselves murdering, raping, and pillaging. They even used their victims’ phones and social media to livestream their murders in front of their friends and families. After emerging from a bomb shelter with her family, Mor Baydar was horrified to turn on her phone and see her grandmother being murdered on Facebook. Notably, it wasn’t only Palestinian terrorist groups who took part. Everyday, Palestinians also came across the border, held hostages in their homes, and Palestinian workers from Gaza used their work permits to scout and map out the locations for attacks, even going out of their way to identify which homes had dogs in them.For many Israelis, this only further personalized a mass attack that unfolded, not in a distant downtown or faraway city, but in the very homes and communities of a nation which, at its narrowest point, is a mere nine miles wide.The violence was so total that officials from the Israeli Antiquities Authority were recruited to help sift through the ashes, debris, and burned-out homes to help identify charred or missing human remains. “We just want the dogs back,” one member of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a community in which 67 people were murdered, and another 19 taken hostage, lamented to me, as I toured its ruins.The barbarism was wholly intentional. Documents later uncovered in Gaza showed that the architects of the massacre wanted to terrorize not only their victims, but the entire nation itself. They wanted to strike fear. But instead, they’ve been met with fierce resolve.SEAN DURNS: OCT 7, TWO YEARS ONOct. 7, 2023, was the worst day in the Jewish state’s history. Yet it also may be the high-water mark for the Islamic Republic and its empire. Iran’s foremost proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been battered, their leadership decimated, and thousands of their operatives eliminated. Israel, later joined by its American ally, took the fight to Tehran itself and carried out the largest decapitation strike in modern history and all but eliminated Iran’s air defenses.Israel has seized key ground in both Gaza and Lebanon. Bashar Assad, a top member of Iran’s “Resistance Axis,” has been expelled from Syria and now resides in Moscow, where one of modern history’s great butchers is reportedly depressed and addicted to Candy Crush.Yet the war that the Islamic Republic and its proxies initiated lasts to this day. The Iranian regime, committed from its inception to Israel’s destruction, has maintained its hold on power. And as long as it exists, peace in the region will be little more than a mirage.Indeed, Israel has never known peace for a very simple reason: There have always been those who refuse to grant Jews political and social equality, even in their ancestral homeland. The long war against the Jewish state has mutated, and its proponents, from the Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Nasser to the ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic, have changed. But one feature has remained the same: It has been ceaseless. As the late Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien noted many years ago, it is a “siege.” And sieges continue until one side exhausts its will or its resources. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the Jewish state’s founding fathers, recognized as much in a prescient 1923 essay called “The Iron Wall.” For peace to occur, the enemy must be deprived of its hope for victory, he wrote. So, the war continues.Sean Durns, the deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, was a participant in the Foundation for Defense of Democracies National Security Trip to Israel