Oct. 7 brought anti-Semites out of the woodwork. Healing has begun. And the last victim of Oct. 7 was buried last week, Oct. 7, 2026.
Time, they say, heals all wounds. But not if the wound is made worse.
Three years is hardly enough time for the psychic wound to the Jewish people, the physical wound to the State of Israel, and individual wounds to bereaved and hostage families to heal. This was to be expected, though not eased thereby. Unexpected was the avalanche of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred spurred by the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.
As if healing from the wounds of Oct. 7 themselves were not enough.
How outrageous it seemed at the time when on Oct. 7, 2023, State legislator Tim Hernandez attended a pro-Palestinian event at the State Capitol. Keep in mind the nine-hour time difference between Denver and Israel. By the time of that rally on Oct. 7, news of what was happening there was spreading around the globe. How naive our outrage at Hernandez now seems. Even the Denver Post editorialized against him. It asked: How on the day of the atrocities themselves could anyone possibly celebrate them?
Three years later, celebration has been supplemented by justification in anti-Semitic circles around the world. Part of the justification — but only part — is based on Israel’s war against Hamas. Another part of the justification, however, is, “Israel deserved it.” Hamas ruled Gaza, but Israel was responsible for Palestinian suffering in Gaza. Israel, it is said from New York Mayor Mamdani on down, “occupied” Gaza, even though it withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, hoping Gaza would take the opportunity to make peace. It didn’t. And it doesn’t make a difference to Mamdani. “Occupation” justifies atrocities.
Israel fought back. That, too, is now widely subject to condemnation and stigmatization, partly — but only partly — because the Hamas Health Ministry says 74,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel.
We regret, and do not know any Jew who doesn’t regret the death of a single innocent Palestinian in Gaza. But our moral compass is, if not ignored altogether, demeaned, since it is taken to be obtuse: focus on the main point, the evil of Israel. Facts pervert this perspective — and how naive we were back on Oct. 7, 2023, never thinking we would need to do anything but mourn, defend and rebuild, never thinking we would need to engage in an ugly numbers game. To wit:
74,000 may or may not have died in the Gaza war. We do not trust any data point released by Hamas, perpetrators of atrocities not seen seen the Nazi era. But let us address this number: 74,000.
First, it includes combatants, terrorists, members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all warriors against civilians, engaged in their forever war against Israel. How many combatants? Impossible to know. Israel estimates 25,000-30,000.
Second, the 74,000 figures includes Gazans killed by Gazans — by Hamas and PIJ rockets fired at Israel but which fell short, in Gaza.
Third, the Hamas Health Ministry’s figure includes Gazans killed in internecine Hamas-PIJ battles, and even includes Gazans who died of natural causes.
The rest were killed despite Israel’s best effort to work around human shields and target only terrorists, not civilians.
Calling this genocide is like calling the Warsaw Ghetto rebels who tried to kill every Nazi a genocide. Self-defense is not genocide.
How outrageous that Jews around the world are forced to articulate this, to remember the losses of Oct. 7 — the people murdered, burned to death, raped, decapitated, kidnapped — by correcting falsehoods about genocide. Many do not have the decency to let us sit by our graves, undisturbed in mourning and memory.
They do not leave us to our grief because their claim that they hate Israel, not Jews, is but the latest delusion and self-deception that hides Jew hatred, pure and simple. It long precedes anything Israel ever did, good or bad; it long precedes the creation of Israel in 1948.
There are, thankfully, other things that Jews in and out of Israel think about three years after Oct. 7, 2023. We think about how Israel has rebuilt communities in southern Israel. We think about how some hostages survived and are rebuilding their lives. We think about the nearly 1,000 Israeli soldiers killed fighting in Gaza, and about the challenge this presents throughout Israel, about the orphans and the widows, even as these broken families struggle to heal.
We think about the major military defeats of Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas and the anti-Israel stewards of weaponry in Syria.
We think about the challenges ahead. Challenges like the need to fight our enemies with the pen as well as the sword, to stand up for the truth about Israel and about the Jewish people. Challenges like the need to stand up against the anti-Semites who would scare us out of the public square, and even out of the sense of safety in our persons, if they could. Challenges like the need to continue to lead full Jewish lives in all the spheres we inhabited on Oct. 6, 2023: the home, the synagogue, the workplace, the beautiful vistas of mountains and oceans.
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Memory persists, often beneath memory. It took most Holocaust survivors decades before they could speak about the horrors. A visceral reminder of the way Oct. 7 will persist in the Jewish collective memory is an incident last week in Moshav Yakhini, Israel. There, the last victim of the Hamas atrocities in 2023 was finally brought to rest.
What?
Hadn’t the remains of the last murdered hostage been returned to Israel in January, 2026?
Hadn’t the forensic pathologists completed their gruesome work in identifying the disfigured victims of Oct. 7, 2023 months later?
No, the work had not been finished.
The family of Elitzur Hajbi, killed in the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, could not bring itself to open the door of the bedroom where he was murdered three years ago. He lay there for three years. His room remained sealed. Elitzur Hajbi was inside, unburied, having suffered what disfigurations the family did not know and could not acknowledge.
The rest of the Hajbi home was cleaned and restored, but Elitzur’s room remained sealed.
A few days before the third Oct. 7 anniversary, the family finally found the strength to call ZAKA, to unseal the room, to bury Elitzur. ZAKA volunteers unsealed the room. How badly had Hamas desecrated Elitzur Hajbi? Imagine it from this: It took several hours to collect all of his remains, so that they could be brought to burial —three years to the day after he was murdered.
Said ZAKA’s Moshe Rozenberg: “For three years, that room remained frozen in time for Elitzur’s family.”
For the Jewish people and for the State of Israel, its many haters and distorters notwithstanding, October 7, 2023, remains frozen in time, and it will remain frozen in time for all time to come.
In Judaism and in Jews, memory persists, even if beneath memory.
© IJN 2026
