A New Book On October 7 and An Explanation

The subterranean rumbling heard across land and sea these past two years has its origins in the savagery unleashed on October 7. The brutality left more than physical destruction and open wounds in its wake. It shattered not only the lives of those caught in the crossfire—men, women, and children—it also asphyxiated the intellectual frameworks of those charged with making sense of such moments: educators, journalists, and policy analysts. A narrative, full of platitudes and slogans unmoored from  history and politics, became the rallying cry where facts had normative power only if they confirmed the fictional tale of Israeli evil. Reality became subordinate to what hardened into a legend curated with moral pieties that conferred a sacred status on Palestinians as refugees and as innocent victims. The tropes, metaphors, and avatars embellishing this tale quickly turned into a marketing tool targeting Jews.

That these barbaric atrocities precipitated political and cultural shifts of seismic magnitude—shifts too often denied, minimized, or ignored—only underscores the extent of the failure to comprehend what occurred and why. Internationally, an architecture designed to promote peace and resolve conflicts, still asserting relevance in theory, became prehistoric in practice in the midst of such slaughter. Nevertheless, international institutions instantly defaulted to rhetorical tactics and proposals that had halted earlier wars. But, given the slaughter, they were dismissed as nothing more than preparing the ground for the next round of brutality. UNRWA as well as an array of other UN institutions are intertwined, if not embedded financially and ideologically with the Palestinian cause enabling  martyrdom to be evangelized and turning one catastrophe after another into a moral imperative for never-ending war. No one should be surprised that UNRWA facilities were not only staging grounds for attacks, but that many of its employees were among the participants in the furies of October 7.

A global infrastructure is perched on an unstable alloy of states whose powers are weakening and whose interests in sustaining a system of shared humane rules and norms are eroding. For many, the very state protecting borders and granting rights to its citizens is the source of the world’s injustice. This view aims to permit people born in the so-called impoverished “Davids” to cross borders freely into the well-known wealthier “Goliaths” to foster a more just worldwide distribution of goods and power. In a sense, that very notion of a global reconfiguration bringing justice was tested in Israel and crushed in agony at the October 7 Nova Music Festival. A gathering promoting universal peace and love is now branded in the country’s memory, as a field of mass murder, serial rapes, people burned alive, mutilated bodies, and kidnappings. October 7 reminded all Israelis of the fragility of their country when state institutions go missing in action.

October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds[1]  thus responds to the massive failures on the battlefields and to the fables conjured to explain them. Its purpose is not simply to revisit the horrors of that day but rather to trace their reverberations through the cultural and political terrain reshaped in their aftermath. The volume undertakes this task with methodological rigor, drawing on empirical research and textual analysis to provide a composite portrait of the moment’s lasting imprint on Israel, the Middle East, the global order, and the institutions of higher education. October 7 was not only a rampage; it was also a fictional tale unleashing astonishing energy.

The full implications of that day cannot be comprehended without examining both what was said and what has been done, a conviction brought together the specialists whose essays appear in this book. And the classroom was very much in our mind as we shaped its contents. The contributors share the conviction that the study of this war and the conflict impelling it belongs on the campus. In fact, one of the essays was written by an undergraduate student tasked with analyzing the sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women during the attacks. Her work reveals that this subject can be addressed with analytical sobriety, free from ideological demands or moral evasion. It stands as proof that clarity of thought is still possible, even in the emotionally charged environment these events have provoked.

For what distinguished October 7 was not only its savagery—of a kind that in most liberal democracies would elicit immediate and unambiguous condemnation—but the curious response it provoked in many of those same rightly ruled societies. In elite academic and cultural institutions, Hamas’ brutality was met not with outrage, but with justification, sympathy, and in some quarters, celebration. Demonstrations erupted across universities, where faculty and students invoked slogans calling for a global Intifada and the erasure of Israel “from the river to the sea.” What began as campus activism quickly spilled into streets, government buildings, museums, hospitals, synagogues, and churches. Jewish students were harassed, sometimes even attacked, lectures disrupted, buildings occupied and defaced paralyzing the very intellectual inquiry required to understand the complexity of the conflict itself. Within hours, an inversion emerged and hardened into dogma: Israel, not Hamas, was cast as the aggressor. Accusations of genocide—deployed with little concern for definition or evidence—converted the victims of one of the most brutal attacks in recent history into its supposed perpetrators. This rhetorical reversal, astonishing even in an era of disinformation and algorithmic distortion, reflects a discursive war no less consequential than the military one it shadows. That so many in the academy and the media could interpret acts of terror as instruments of liberation—both for Palestinians and for the “oppressed” worldwide—reveals not just a failure of moral reasoning, but a fundamental disregard for historical precedent.

October 7 initiated a conflict over language as well as land. A new discourse emerged—detached from reality, disconnected from the tools of critical scholarship, and rooted in ideological dogma. It is against this backdrop that the contributors to this volume seek not only to correct distortions but to establish a reliable record. What gives the collection coherence is not just the information it presents, but the intellectual energy it generates, the questions it poses, the debates it invites, and the imperative it affirms: that serious inquiry must not yield to sentiment, and that scholarship must remain accountable to facts, however inconvenient.

This book matters not only for what it discloses, but for what it demands: a return to reasoned argument, to historical consciousness, and to the hard discipline of truth-telling at an age increasingly indifferent to all three.

[1] Donna Robinson Divine and Asaf Romirowsky, eds. OCTOBER 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds, Academic Studies Press, 2025.