How Did the Victims Become the Aggressors?

Yesterday, we remembered what happened on October 7. Today, I want to talk about what happened to the truth afterward.

This week I heard Judge Roy Altman use a word I had never heard before.

Kinocide.

I had to look it up. And when I understood what it meant, I felt sick.

Researchers examining October 7 use the term to describe the weaponization of family itself: murdering people in front of relatives, attacking or abducting families together, separating parents and children, even using victims’ phones and social media to expose loved ones to what was being done to them.

Three years later, we spend endless amounts of time debating Israel’s response while there are still dimensions of what was done to Israelis that much of the world barely knows how to name.

Judge Altman has spoken about what disturbed him afterward: not only the atrocities, but how quickly the moral roles seemed to reverse.

The victims became the aggressors.

That stopped me cold.

October 7 happened. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 people were abducted into Gaza.

One of those victims was Karin Journo, a 24-year-old woman who went to the Nova festival with a broken leg. When the attack began, she sheltered in an ambulance. It was hit by an RPG.

Her mother later said all that remained of her daughter were three teeth.

Three teeth. That is what her parents buried.

Just writing those words makes me want to cry all over again.

October 7 happened to Jews. Deal with it.

The attackers documented much of what they did themselves. Footage from wearable cameras captured parts of the assault. When Shani Louk’s body was paraded through Gaza, footage showed people cheering; one man came close enough to spit on her body.

That does not make every Palestinian responsible. It does make it impossible to pretend the brutality was hidden from view or universally rejected around those attackers.

And Hamas did not tell us afterward that October 7 was a terrible mistake it would never repeat.

It told us the opposite.

In 2023, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said publicly that October 7 would be repeated again and again – a second time, a third and a fourth.

Former hostage Avinatan Or later described hearing essentially the same message from one of his captors: go home, see your family, pack a bag and leave for Europe because “we’re going to do October 7 again.”

Or answered:

“I’m not leaving.”

Israel is not defending itself from an enemy whose intentions we have to guess.

They have told us. And more importantly, they have shown us.

These are not empty threats. October 7 is the proof.

How many times does an enemy have to tell you what it intends to do – and then demonstrate that intention in blood – before you are allowed to believe it?

There is another question I cannot get out of my head.

During the Holocaust, non-Jews across Europe risked their own lives – and sometimes their families’ lives – to save Jews. Germans. Poles. Dutch. Hungarians. Muslim Albanians. Yad Vashem would later recognize many as Righteous Among the Nations.

They lived surrounded by terror and propaganda, yet some still chose humanity.

And I keep thinking about our hostages in Gaza.

Where was the person who tried to bring one of them home?

Where was the person who secretly contacted Israel and said, I know where one is being held? Where was the door opened with one word: Run?

I have searched for that story.

I have not found it.

What I did find was the story of Roni Krivoi. He escaped captivity and hid in Gaza for four days. According to his aunt, Gazans eventually found him and returned him to his captors.

That contrast haunts me.

Among all those people who knew hostages were being held in Gaza, where were the rescuers?

Yet so much of the international discussion begins later – with Israel’s response.

October 7 becomes background. Hamas becomes an inconvenient footnote. And Israel – the country that was attacked – somehow becomes the defendant.

You cannot erase the cause and then condemn only the consequence.

Yes, Palestinian civilians have suffered. Their suffering is real. But Hamas does not get to disappear from that sentence.

Hamas governed Gaza. Hamas launched October 7. Hamas murdered civilians and took hostages back into Gaza. It chose to start this war, and I will not accept a retelling in which that choice somehow becomes Israeli aggression.

Two peoples can suffer at the same time. What angers me is the sense that only one population’s suffering is allowed to occupy the moral conversation.

Our suffering counts too.

My people have buried children, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. People were murdered in their homes and at a music festival. Hostages were dragged away. Soldiers have lost limbs. Families are watching sons and daughters return physically and psychologically changed.

Israel’s Defence Ministry has reported roughly 30,000 wounded IDF and security personnel entering its rehabilitation system since October 7, many dealing with psychological trauma.

Thirty thousand is almost too large a number to feel.

Recently, I went to print a Tehillim list of wounded Israelis we were praying for. I thought it would be a couple of pages.

The printer kept going.

Three.

Four.

Five.

More than six pages.

I stood there staring at page after page of Hebrew names.

Every name was a life.

Someone loved that person.

Someone was waiting for them to heal.

Someone’s world had changed.

Six pages.

Do not tell me our suffering does not count.

You do not get to assign compassion to one people and condemnation to the other. You do not get to erase what happened to us because Israel was strong enough to fight back.

Our dead count. Our wounded count. Our trauma counts.

And defending ourselves does not erase the fact that WE were attacked.

Which brings me to another part of this moral inversion: language.

Britain’s Green Party adopted a policy called “Zionism is Racism.” Ashok Kumar, defending the motion on Nick Ferrari’s LBC programme, described Zionism as “racist, reactionary and chauvinistic.”

Ferrari kept asking the obvious question: if Israel is replaced by one Palestinian state, what happens to the Israelis already living there? The conversation kept returning instead to Palestinian dispossession, rights, equality and justice.

Those issues matter. But they do not answer the question.

What happens to the Jews?

Who guarantees Jewish security? What happens to Jewish sovereignty? And after October 7, what guarantees Jews that surrendering the ability to defend themselves will make them safer?

“Equality and justice” are beautiful aspirations. They are not a security plan.

Victimhood cannot substitute for an argument. Neither can adjectives.

An adjective is not evidence.

Words are being emptied of their meaning: Zionist. Racist. Fascist. Colonialist. Genocide.

What exactly do people think Zionism means?

At its core, modern Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland.

I am not willing to accept the rewriting of Jews as foreigners in the birthplace of the Jewish people. Jewish peoplehood took shape here. Hebrew was spoken here. Jewish kingdoms existed here. Jerusalem was the centre of Jewish national and religious life centuries before the Arab-Muslim conquest.

That is not only a statement of faith. It is history.

Palestinian families can have generations of history here without that history erasing ours.

Jews are not colonizers in the birthplace of the Jewish people.

Israel is a tiny Jewish state in a vast, predominantly Arab region. Why is Palestinian national identity treated as something that must be preserved, while Jewish national sovereignty is increasingly treated as negotiable?

Criticize Israel.

Criticize the Israeli government.

Criticize settlements.

Criticize policies.

But say what you mean.
If you oppose a policy, oppose the policy.

If you oppose a government, oppose the government.

But if what you oppose is Zionism itself, then we need to stop dancing around what that actually means.

Zionism, at its core, is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination in our ancestral homeland.

So if you tell me you are anti-Zionist, I have a very simple question:

Do Jews have the right to national self-determination?

If your answer is yes, then where exactly are Jews supposed to exercise that right if not in the land where Jewish peoplehood was formed, where Hebrew was spoken, where Jewish kingdoms existed, and where Jerusalem stood at the centre of Jewish national and religious life?

And if your answer is no — while in the same breath insisting that Palestinians have an unquestionable right to national self-determination — then explain the distinction.

Because you cannot champion self-determination as a fundamental right for one people and condemn the very same principle as racist, colonialist or chauvinistic when Jews claim it.

That is speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

Palestinian national aspirations do not somehow invalidate Jewish national aspirations.

Palestinian history does not erase Jewish history.

And Palestinian claims to this land do not require Jews to surrender ours.
You can argue about borders.

You can argue about governments.

You can argue about settlements and policies.

But the principle itself has to be applied consistently.

If Palestinian national self-determination is legitimate, then Jewish national self-determination cannot suddenly become immoral simply because it is Jewish.

#SorryNotSorry. It doesn’t work that way.

The same care should apply to another word thrown around constantly: genocide.

Genocide is not simply another word for war, devastation, civilian deaths or terrible suffering. It is a specific legal crime with specific elements, including the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group.

A word that serious deserves precision.

Define your words before you weaponize them.

And then, on October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued an anniversary statement. He acknowledged the Hamas attack, the Israelis killed and the 251 people abducted – and then, in the next paragraph, pivoted to what he called the Israeli government’s “devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Just over a week earlier, he had unveiled New York City’s first municipal Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.

Criticism of Israel is not automatically antisemitism. Of course it is not.

But context matters. Date matters.

October 7 should be allowed to be about October 7.

If your goal is to make Jewish New Yorkers feel safe, understand why so many Jews hear that juxtaposition not as comfort, but as another example of our grief being granted a few sentences before the accusation returns.

That is the moral inversion I cannot accept.

We cannot even have one day of mourning before Israel is once again made the defendant.

Stop rewriting the story.

Stop beginning with Israel’s response as though nothing came before it.

October 7 happened.

Families were slaughtered.

Hostages were taken.

Hamas told us it would do it again — and had already shown us exactly what those words mean.

We were attacked.

We buried our dead.

We brought home the wounded.

We fought for our hostages.

And we defended ourselves.

None of that makes us the aggressor.

Our suffering counts. Our dead count. Our wounded count. Our trauma counts.

Palestinian suffering does not erase ours, and our survival does not make us guilty.

So, world, wake up.

Moral clarity should not be this difficult.

The aggressor does not get to attack us, threaten to do it again, and then convince the world that our refusal to die quietly makes us the villain.

We know what happened.

We know who attacked whom.

And we know what they have promised to do again.

We will not apologize for surviving.

The aggressor does not get to write the ending.

Am Yisrael Chai.