On the third anniversary of the ominous day of October 7, a day on which over 1,200 Jews were brutally murdered, we pause, we reflect, and we remember.
But as we remember, we are also asking questions. Questions that, three years later, nobody seems willing to answer.
We are asking how the “safest” place for Jews was left so questionably vulnerable and exposed. We are asking how it is possible that one of the most intelligence-rich governments in the world did not “foresee” an attack of such magnitude.
We are asking how Jews in the Holy Land were never subjected to terror like that of October 7 before Zionists took “sovereignty,” while they lived in peace with their Arab neighbors. The frequently cited massacres that preceded Israel’s creation do not negate this point. Those tragedies occurred after Zionism introduced an organized nationalist struggle for sovereignty into the Holy Land, inflaming tensions between Jews and Arabs who had lived alongside one another for generations.
We are asking why Zionists continuously invoke the Holocaust to “protect” Jews from another Holocaust, yet when such a horrific massacre did occur, innocent people were left to fend for themselves for hours before the IDF arrived.
And three years later, we are asking what the Israeli government intended with its three-year-plus “war,” which still has not ended and has left so many innocent civilians in Gaza tragically dead and displaced.
We are asking how long Zionists will continue to exploit the memory of the October 7 victims to justify politicizing antisemitism, shutting down criticism of Israel, and enmeshing all Jews with its actions.
These are the questions that nobody is willing to answer. And they lead us to a broader question about the very premise upon which Zionism has sold itself to the Jewish people.
We have always maintained that Zionism was never fundamentally about Jewish safety. It was, and still is, a modern nationalist ideology, conceived to transform the Jewish people into a political nationality and eradicate the Torah as the epicenter and sole identity of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, Jewish safety became one of Israel’s most powerful moral justifications: Jews are asked to pay a steep price to sustain this costly “mortgage” because, as Zionists say, “one day” there may be a moment, GD forbid, when all these sacrifices will pay off.
But even from the Zionist vantage point, October 7 demands that this justification be scrutinized. When the very place presented as the ultimate refuge for Jews became the scene of the deadliest single day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, with the IDF saviors nowhere to be found, the promise of safety collided with reality.
We all know Israel is a failed experiment. Going against G-D does not succeed. It may appear powerful and strong at times, but the Will of G-D is eternal.
As we remember those whose lives were brutally taken on October 7, we should not be afraid to ask difficult questions about an ideology that exploits Jewish safety to promote a G-Dless nationalist movement that threatens the safety of Jews across the globe.