Danger – How will Oct 7 be written in history?

You won’t believe it when I tell you that October 7 is according to Google amongst other things, National Taco Day and National Forgiveness Day. Elsewhere October 7 the narrative of October 7 is being told in a much darker way.

When and how does something become ‘History’ and how is that narrative set. 1917, 1947, 1948, 1967 and 1973 are amongst other dates that define our history alongside 1939, 2001 and many others…My fear is that the narrative is already being set, in a way that is simply inaccurate and grossly misleading, and that October 7 will start to be seen by too many as something very different to the day we remember it as, or alternatively forgotten in the midst of time. We should act now.

In an article in Le Monde last month the first of two warning signs went off in my mind.

Warning Sign 1:

In an opinion piece by Christophe Ayad he says:

“If the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so divisive in France – and elsewhere in the world – it’s because there are two radically antagonistic understandings of its origin, namely Hamas’s terrorist massacres on October 7, 2023. Some see it as a continuation, others as a rupture. Is October 7 a particularly horrific episode in a conflict that has been going on since 1948 and the birth of Israel, or does it mark the start of a new era that abolishes all previous parameters? The answer to this question has political, legal, historical and moral consequences.

In a historical reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict, October 7 is the continuation, atrocious but sadly predictable, of an ongoing conflict. It follows on from other massacres, notably that of the village of Deir Yassin in 1948, in which over a hundred Palestinian villagers were killed. This tragic episode is a reminder that massacres of civilians are not the exclusive preserve of Hamas.”

Warning Sign 2:

In another different but nonetheless worrying warning sign, I by chance did a google search of “is October 7…”. The prompt recommends the search “is October 7 a special day” and selecting it, the following are the first three items listed – (see the search – Link to Google Search)

1. October 7 is National Forgiveness Day! Forgiveness is defined as…the action or process of forgiving or being forgiven. 

2. National Holidays on October 7th, 2025 – National Inner Beauty Day, National Taco Day, ​National Frappe Day, National Bathtub Day, Team Margot Stem Cell and Bone Marrow …

3. October 7 – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › October_7 – October 7 is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 85 days remain until the end of the year.

This is an alternative danger to the pro-Hamas narrative – the ‘it is simply not a key date’ narrative. To think that National Taco Day and National Bathtub Day are National Holidays and that ironically October 7 is a day for National Forgiveness.

The danger and how do we prevent this?

Clearly the danger is that the narrative is set in a way that sees October 7 as merely one of a number of episodes or a non-event (even denied), both classic tactics of the counter anti-Zionist narrative. I won’t even begin to set out why this is so wrong but this UK Parliamentary report does the job for me.

As the Head of the Panel Lord Roberts states in the Foreword:

“Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on 7 October 2023 it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place. Hamas and its allies, both in the Middle East and equally shamefully in the West, have sought to deny the atrocities, despite the ironic fact that much of the evidence for the massacres derives from film footage from cameras carried by the terrorists themselves – though of course there is also much more from many other sources, as this Report delineates…

Our Report will hopefully permit people to see such denials and justifications for what they really are: a perversion of reason and rejection of human decency. We owe it to the victims and their grieving families to set down the ghastly, unvarnished truth about the sheer barbarism that Hamas and its terrorist allies unleashed on 7 October 2023.”

When is History set?

It is NOW. Already there is the start of what seems to me to be a repositioning of October 7 as a day (Heaven Forbid) like any other. We need to prevent this from happening.

It is made easier of course by the Israeli political elite being consumed with other issues, interests and of course a war to prosecute but we should turn our attention to this.

Around the world, Education Ministries will be setting history text books and other authorities, museums and the like will be deciding how October 7 is remembered. It is much broader than Israel and in some respects Israel is the least important place in this regards.

I suggest we take a leaf out of the Passover story

As we celebrate Passover – we would do well to remember as I set out in another TOI blog, namely that the Seder is perhaps the best set narrative ever in that some 3,000 years later, we still remember it as it should be remembered and not as the detractors of Israel no doubt in that time as well would have preferred to remember (a revolt by evil Jews leading to death of firstborn etc).

Too many innocent people died on October 7, including friends of mine and the children of friends of mine. Too many people gave everything to fight to defend the country including my son on and after October 7 to now lose the battle and have its memory destroyed.  Too many people are still held hostage and we pray they come home now.

As we remember ourselves as if we too came out of Egypt having been slaves, history should remember the day for what it was and not otherwise.