Table of Contents
Sometimes a single day can shatter decades of carefully constructed beliefs. October 7th, 2023 was one of those days – not just for Israel, but for anyone who thought they understood the modern Middle East, technology's role in warfare, or the state of Jewish life in the 21st century.
Key Takeaways
- Israel's high-tech military superiority was undone by Hamas using World War I-level tactics like wire cutters and handwritten notes
- The brutal nature of the October 7th attacks surprised even skeptical Middle East observers who thought they understood the conflict
- American Jewish identity is experiencing unprecedented tension between Zionism, Judaism, and American patriotism
- Major media institutions have been fundamentally transformed by activist capture, despite maintaining their prestigious names
- Israeli children are growing up playing games about hiding from terrorists – a psychological toll that will last generations
- The hostage crisis reveals both the strength of Jewish values around redemption and the impossible moral calculations of modern warfare
- Anti-Semitism is rising on both the American left and right, leaving Jews politically homeless in many contexts
- Liberal institutions from universities to human rights organizations have been repurposed by activists with different goals entirely
When Technology Meets Medieval Warfare
Here's something that should keep military strategists awake at night: the most technologically advanced army in the Middle East was completely blindsided by guys with wire cutters.
Israel had spent years building what looked like an impenetrable border with Gaza. High-tech fences, cameras everywhere, remote-controlled machine guns, drones patrolling constantly. If you'd taken one of those pre-October 7th tours to the Gaza border, you'd have seen this incredible tech array and probably felt pretty impressed. The startup nation had apparently solved an ancient problem with Silicon Valley innovation.
Except Hamas knew exactly what they were looking at. They understood that Israel had gotten drunk on its own Kool-Aid, believing technology could substitute for the messy reality of human conflict. So when they planned their attack, they did something brilliant in its simplicity: they went deliberately low-tech.
No cell phones that Israel could intercept – they used handwritten notes instead. No digital communications that could be hacked – just old-fashioned planning and coordination. When they hit the fence, they didn't try to outsmart the cameras. They just shot them out with sniper rifles and cut through with wire cutters.
"It was a World War I level attack," as one observer put it. And here's the kicker – if Israel had deployed a World War I-style defense, just soldiers in foxholes with rifles and no fancy electronics, they probably would have stopped it cold. You can't blind an entire deployment of people with guns, but you can definitely knock out a tech-dependent system by taking out its nerve centers.
The moment Hamas overran the headquarters next to Gaza, all communications went down. For about 24 hours, the Israeli military didn't know what was happening an hour and a half from Tel Aviv. There were Israeli women sitting in safe rooms from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon, waiting for rescue that couldn't come because the high-tech system had failed so completely.
This isn't just a story about military tactics. It's about what happens when we convince ourselves that we've outsmarted fundamental realities. The same army that later pulled off those incredibly sophisticated operations against Hezbollah – remember the exploding pagers? – had left itself vulnerable to the most basic kind of cross-border raid.
The Children Who Play Terrorism Games
There's a moment that really captures what October 7th has done to an entire generation of Israeli kids. Picture this: you're at a Shabbat dinner, and you're listening to eight and nine-year-olds playing in the next room. Normal kid stuff, right? Except they're not playing house or superheroes. They're playing a game about hiding from terrorists.
These are children who can't remember any reality other than this war. They've spent months stocking up safe rooms, running to bunkers when sirens wail, absorbing conversations about people their parents know who've been killed. One eight-year-old recently asked his father, "Would it be better to be dead or wounded?" – apparently something he'd been discussing with his classmates.
Another kid, same age, randomly asked, "What would happen if a missile hit a grave?" This while they were probably talking about soccer or cartoons just moments before.
This is the psychological landscape that an entire generation of Israeli children is growing up in. And here's what's particularly heartbreaking – their parents know there's no way to shield them from it. When a family friend like Hersh Goldberg-Polin gets kidnapped and murdered, when the son of the guy who runs the local grocery store gets killed in Gaza, when the baker's son dies with the paratroopers – how do you explain to kids that their world is different from what you grew up expecting?
One parent at a Shabbat dinner recently turned to all the children at the table and simply said, "I'm so sorry." He was apologizing for this being their world, for this being the reality they inherited. It's a moment that speaks to something larger – the recognition that October 7th didn't just shatter military assumptions or political hopes. It shattered the possibility of normal childhood for an entire generation.
The Faces We Drive Past Every Day
Living in Israel right now means you develop relationships with people you've never met. Drive down any major road, and you'll see their faces on posters – the hostages. For fifteen months, these faces became part of daily life. You'd recognize Kfir Bibas, nine months old when he was taken. You'd know Keith Siegel's smile. You'd feel like you personally knew these people because their images were everywhere.
The emotional whiplash of the hostage releases captures something essential about Israeli society right now. There's incredible joy when families reunite – images that seem impossible in the modern world, people literally rising from the dead after vanishing into Hamas tunnels. But there's also the brutal awareness that many won't make it home, and that the price of each release is releasing hundreds of dangerous terrorists.
It's what one observer called an "almost schizophrenic response" – celebrating the deals while knowing they'll cost Israeli lives down the road. Jewish tradition prioritizes redeeming hostages, even at great cost, which explains why Orthodox parties in the Knesset support these exchanges despite their obvious dangers. The principle is saving the lives that can be saved now, even knowing the future price.
But then you see the images from the prisoner releases – young Palestinian women in crowds baying for blood, celebrating the return of terrorists who masterminded suicide bombings – and something else gets driven home. These aren't people who've been waiting for the right peace deal. These are people celebrating violence itself.
When Institutions Keep Their Names But Change Their Purpose
Here's something that should terrify anyone who cares about objective journalism or human rights: many of our most prestigious institutions have been fundamentally transformed from within, but they still use the same letterhead.
Take the Associated Press coverage of Israel. At one point, the AP had more reporters covering Israel than the entire continent of Africa south of the Sahara – that's over fifty countries. They covered Israel more intensively than China, with its 1.3 billion people. If you understand news as a rational attempt to comprehend events on planet Earth, this makes no sense whatsoever.
But it makes perfect sense if you understand that many of the people making editorial decisions aren't interested in explaining complicated reality. They're interested in swaying readers toward what they consider the correct political conclusion. If your goal is to build sympathy for the Palestinian cause, then any story that makes Israel's position seem reasonable simply can't be reported. Any story that makes Palestinians seem unreasonable gets buried.
This isn't limited to Israel coverage. The same dynamic has infected reporting on American politics, gender issues, COVID origins – anywhere activists have decided there's a "correct" position that journalism should promote rather than investigate.
The tragedy is that these institutions still carry the prestige of their former selves. The New York Times still has that beautiful font. Harvard still has the Harvard name. Human Rights Watch still sounds like it cares about human rights. But the content has fundamentally changed, even as the branding remains the same.
What's particularly painful for Jewish Americans is seeing Jewish names on the buildings of institutions that now seem hostile to Jewish interests. Holocaust museums that downplay Jewish particularity in favor of generic lessons about injustice. Universities funded by Jewish donors that have become hotbeds of anti-Israel activism. It's a recurring pattern in Western history – Jewish ideas and Jewish philanthropy getting turned against Jews themselves.
The Political Homelessness of American Jews
Something unprecedented is happening to American Jewish identity, and it's not getting nearly enough attention. For generations, American Jews could seamlessly weave together their Judaism, their Zionism, and their American patriotism. These identities reinforced each other rather than creating tension.
That's over now.
Jews are discovering they don't do well in an era of tribal politics and ideological conformity. They don't thrive when mobs rule and mob justice replaces legal processes. They suffer when people on both the political left and right start calling for tearing down rules-based, law-based order.
The rise in anti-Jewish sentiment isn't just coming from the left anymore. There's a disturbing trend on parts of the American right too – figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson promoting ideas that should worry anyone who cares about Jewish safety. Just as liberals once dismissed fringe online movements that eventually captured mainstream Democratic politics, conservatives are making a mistake if they think these voices won't have broader impact.
This leaves American Jews in an impossible position. The left increasingly sees Israel as a settler-colonial project deserving destruction. Parts of the right are embracing conspiracism and anti-Semitism. The center – that political space where Jews have traditionally found refuge – has collapsed.
Jews need institutions that value merit over identity, that prioritize individual rights over group grievances, that maintain space for difference and debate. They need societies that resist mob mentality and preserve legal protections for minorities. When those norms break down, Jews historically find themselves in danger, regardless of which political tribe happens to be ascendant.
The Hubris of the Peace Process
Looking back now, it seems almost insane that Israel convinced itself a genocidal organization could rule territory on its border and somehow be managed through economic incentives. The idea was that Hamas could be bribed out of their genocidal intentions with work permits and economic development.
This wasn't just naivety – it was active self-deception in the face of clear evidence. Hamas leaders regularly appeared at the Gaza fence during riots, literally saying they planned to cross over, find Israelis, and "rip their hearts out." Other Hamas officials urged Muslims worldwide to "grab a knife, buy a knife" and attack Jews wherever they found them.
But Israeli leaders preferred to focus on the "real" threat from Iran – a more sophisticated adversary that suited their ego better than some "little terrorist group in Gaza." The high-tech fence gave them confidence that whatever Hamas wanted to do, they couldn't actually do it.
This pattern repeats throughout Middle Eastern history. Whenever you create a power vacuum in this region, it doesn't get filled by peace and prosperity. It gets filled by chaos, by guys with black masks and suicide bomb belts who have completely different plans for the future. It happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria, South Lebanon, the West Bank, and ultimately Gaza.
Even skeptics who understood this dynamic were shocked by the level of barbarism on October 7th. The systematic rape, the burning of families, the celebration of infant murder – this went beyond normal expectations of terrorist violence into something that felt medieval.
The question it raises is whether you want to live in a world where that kind of barbarism is possible. If you ignore it, you get October 7th. But if you keep your eyes open to what's really out there, the world becomes a pretty terrifying place. It's a dilemma facing anyone who cares about civilization in 2025.
What Comes Next
The Trump administration brings both hope and uncertainty. On one hand, Trump's negotiator apparently accomplished more in getting hostages released than Jake Sullivan managed in months of shuttle diplomacy. The Abraham Accords and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were genuine achievements. Potential Saudi normalization could be transformative.
But Trump's unpredictability cuts both ways. When asked about the possibility of a new Iran deal, one expert recently estimated 50-50 odds that Trump would negotiate something worse than the original JCPOA. The same impulses that produce breakthrough diplomacy can also lead to vengeful, unprincipled decisions that help no one.
The broader challenge isn't just about any particular leader or policy. It's about living in a world where the center has collapsed, where institutions have been captured by activists, where truth itself has become a partisan position. For Jews especially, this represents a fundamental shift from the relatively stable, merit-based world they've known in America since World War II.
The holiday from history – if Jews ever really had one – is definitely over. The question now is whether American democracy can recover the institutional integrity and social cohesion that made Jewish flourishing possible, or whether we're entering a more tribal, unstable era where minority groups like Jews will need fundamentally different survival strategies.
What's certain is that October 7th shattered more than military assumptions or peace process illusions. It shattered the comfortable belief that modernity had made certain kinds of barbarism impossible, that technology could substitute for human wisdom, that good intentions could overcome malevolent ideologies. Those illusions are gone now. What we build in their place will determine whether October 7th was just a terrible tragedy or the beginning of something much worse.
