October 5th 2023

Crucial historic events demarcate time between how things were before said event, versus how things became afterwards. 7 October 2023 is one of those events, like 9/11. And yet, while such events can seem so sudden and spontaneous, one also realizes upon reflection that these cataclysms were in one or many senses anticipated by preceding developments.

A couple nights before the pogrom I was with my dearest friend, Johnathan Simcha Weisfeld-Hinojosa, early-celebrating his birthday. He had travel plans for the 6th–happy birthday, JB!–so we got together on the 5th. As the evening concluded, we both remember that the last thing we talked about was Israel, per usual.

We talked about the surreal development of Saudi Arabia signing on to the Abraham Accords, and what that could mean for the Middle East. I so naively said, “We’re going to live to see peace in our time.”

The awful Saturday morning came. The first notification I received on my phone was one of those automated text alerts from “Apple News”. It might’ve been a New York Times headline that read something like “Israel strikes building”. At first, I thought, oh okay. Hamas must’ve sent over some rockets and now they’re finding out, and everyone’s going to blame Israel. Not long after, however, Johnathan began sending me videos of what so clearly was a pogrom.

Before October 7, pogroms were things I had read about in books, in articles and heard about in lectures from people much older than myself. As a Marxist, one is taught by your Marxian elders about how comrade Lenin and his mighty Bolsheviks crushed the Czar’s pogroms and inoculated the masses against the venom of Jew hatred. When I saw videos of kids running away from gun fire, and mass-murder-on-wheels, I knew I was seeing in live action that which hitherto had been almost theoretical.

I responded, “That’s a [expletive adjective] pogrom.”

I had been on a months-long writing hiatus. Plagued with writers block. I dropped what I was doing, forgot about the small-time irrelevant story I was about to ‘investigate’, and reported and wrote down what I was seeing in real-time.

I haven’t stopped writing since.

While we can and should take seriously the sharp rise in antisemitism worldwide which resulted, I think we should also not underestimate the good that came in response to the bad.

Working-class people worldwide expressed their revulsion over what Hamas had done, and Israel gained the solidarity and sympathy from millions. Thousands flew in to the small country to help it by offering to reinforce its economy caught in a state of shock.

Johnathan himself was in Israel by December 2023, volunteering at a citrus farm with friends he met during his Birthright trip a couple years earlier. I know Johnathan inspired others from our local Jewish community here in the Rio Grande Valley to likewise visit and do what they could to help.

One of the most touching events to have impacted him was an IDF soldier who had been wounded in Gaza. He was shocked to find that people from across North America and Europe and Asia had traveled to Israel to volunteer.

As a student of history, I was reminded of how people worldwide rushed to donate blood during the six-day war in ’67, and how internationalist volunteers (at around the same time) traveled to Cuba to offer volunteer labor in the agricultural fields.

Many others began to take the problem of antisemitism more seriously. And removing the biggest obstacle for working-people to unite in the region, i.e. Hamas and Hezbollah, became front-and-center.

In a tragic way, which the Hamas cheerleaders couldn’t even begin to comprehend, the October 7 injustice was the biggest setback to Palestinian statehood in history. While Arafat absolutely doomed positive developments for the last 20 or so years of his reign, there’s absolutely nothing good one can say of Hamas. At least with the PLO, one can say it was once a progressive national liberation movement that lost its way more and more overtime. Nothing of the sort can be said of the Gazan-affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now Hamas–and their ever-increasingly-quiet supporters–is on its last legs. The world, including the U.S. empire which cares only about Israel’s survival insofar as it can use it to express its imperialist interests in the region against other rivals, is rushing in to save them.

Everybody wants Israel to stop short of absolute victory. But only a decisive victory over Hamas can deal the necessary blow to Tehran and its international propaganda machine of Jew hatred. Victory over Hamas would deal a major setback to the attempt to make a second Holocaust.