October 7 thousand

It’s October 7 thousand.

One thousand days since families were burned alive in their homes. Since people were hunted at a music festival. Since children hid in safe rooms begging for help that did not come in time. Since soldiers, medics, police officers, kibbutz security teams and ordinary civilians ran toward hell because there was no one else to send.

One thousand days of war.

And not one war.

There are three:

The first war is the one everyone can see.
The war against Hamas in Gaza. Against the architects of the massacre, the hostage-takers, the men who built tunnels beneath homes, schools and hospitals — who turned civilian neighborhoods into launchpads and command centers — who dragged our people into darkness and then demanded the world forget how this began.

It is the war against Hezbollah in the north, where entire Israeli communities became ghost towns, where families from Kiryat Shmona, Metula, Manara, Shlomi and so many other places have lived out of suitcases for months, waiting to know whether home will ever mean home again.

And it is the war against Iran. Not as an abstraction. Not as some distant regime chanting slogans in another language. But as the organizing force behind so much of this fire. Iran armed, funded and trained the ring of enemies surrounding us. Iran built the axis. Iran lit matches from Gaza to Lebanon to Yemen to Syria. Many nights under missile fire with entire neighborhoods flattened.

This is the war of soldiers sleeping in dust.
Of reservists who have spent hundreds of days away from their families.

Of parents refreshing the news with one hand while packing school lunches with the other.
Of children who know far too much about interception systems and safe rooms.

Of funerals where the speeches are unbearable because the dead were far too young.

But that is only the first front.

The second war is being fought far from the battlefield.

It is unfolding in university lecture halls, city squares, editorial boardrooms, international institutions, museums, airports, bookstores, comment sections and social media feeds.

It is the war against the rape of our story.
Against the relentless effort to erase Jewish history, deny Jewish indigeneity and reduce one of the most complicated conflicts on earth into a morality play where Israelis are villains by definition and Jews everywhere are expected to answer for every decision made by a government they may not even support.

It is the war against people who discovered Israel on October 8 and immediately decided they understood it better than those of us who have spent our lives here.

Against people who can say “ceasefire” but somehow cannot say “hostages.”

Who can meticulously catalogue every Israeli military operation while treating October 7 as little more than an inconvenient prologue.
And yes, it is also the war against the oldest hatred wearing fashionable new clothes.

Antisemitism no longer always announces itself with swastikas.

Sometimes it wears a keffiyeh.

Sometimes it wears a faculty badge.

Or a warm smile and claims to have Jewish friends.

Sometimes it calls itself anti-Zionism and then screams at Jews outside synagogues, kosher restaurants, Hebrew schools and cultural events as though a Jew in New York, Paris or Melbourne is personally responsible for every decision made in Jerusalem.

We are watching Jews around the world become visible and vulnerable again.

Students hide Stars of David beneath their shirts.

Parents tell their children not to speak Hebrew on the subway.

Hostage posters were torn down with moral satisfaction.

Sexual assault is denied because acknowledging it would complicate a preferred narrative.

“Globalize the Intifada” is defended as an aspiration rather than recognized as a threat.
This is not criticism of Israel.

Criticism of Israel is legitimate.

Necessary, even.

I live here.

Trust me — I have notes.

But when every Jew becomes a proxy for the Israeli government, when Jewish spaces become acceptable targets for intimidation, when Jewish grief alone is considered suspect, we are no longer talking about policy.

We are talking about Jew hatred.

But the third front may be the hardest to speak about because it isn’t somewhere “out there.”

It’s here. Inside us. Inside our politics. Inside our homes.

Inside our nervous systems.

One thousand days of war changes a country.
Loud noises don’t just make us jump anymore.

They make people angry.

A motorcycle backfires and someone spins around ready for a fight.

A slammed door sends hearts racing before our brains have time to catch up.

People lose their tempers over parking spaces, supermarket lines and comments that would once have rolled off their backs because none of us are really arguing about parking spaces, supermarket lines or careless remarks.

We’re arguing from a place of exhaustion.
We’re grieving people we’ve buried, people we’re still waiting to bury and people we’re still praying will come home.

We’re carrying reserve duty, financial strain, children who wake in the night, marriages stretched thin, parents trying to care for traumatized adult children and children trying to hold up traumatized parents.

We are all, in one way or another, walking around with our proverbial shirts barely held together.

One loose thread away from coming apart.
Which is precisely why leadership matters.
Because trauma explains our reactions.
It does not excuse those who exploit them.
Instead of helping stitch the country back together, too many of our leaders have learned to pull at the loose threads.

They deepen every fracture — religious and secular, left and right, Jewish and Arab, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, center and periphery — until every disagreement becomes an existential battle and every political opponent becomes an enemy.

This is the third war.

The war for Israel’s democratic soul.

Because a country can survive rockets and missiles and drones. It is much harder to survive the erosion of trust.

We are fighting Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
But we are also fighting the temptation to become a country governed by fear and chaos and rage instead of principle.

We are fighting the extremists inside our own government who have treated this catastrophe not as a moment for humility but as an opportunity to climb the ladder of chaos.

An opportunity to weaken democratic institutions.

To attack the judiciary.

To delegitimize the free press.

To demonize dissent.

To speak casually about permanent occupation, expulsion and collective punishment as though these ideas carry no moral weight.

To convince us that the only way to love Israel is to stop asking difficult questions.

But patriotism has never required silence.
In fact, it requires the opposite.

One thousand days later, our prime minister remains in office.

The man who built his political identity around the promise that only he could keep Israel safe has yet to be held meaningfully accountable for the greatest security failure in the history of the State of Israel.

The dead cannot ask questions.

So the rest of us must.

Because accountability is not a distraction from war.

It is part of what separates a democracy from the people trying to destroy it.

If we ask 19-year-olds to risk their lives for this country, surely we can ask those who lead it to answer for the decisions that brought us here.

One thousand days later, Israel is still fighting on three fronts.

Against enemies determined to destroy us.

Against a world increasingly willing to erase our history and excuse hatred of Jews.

And against the forces inside our own society that mistake rage for leadership and power for wisdom.

We will win the military battles.

Eventually, they all end.

The harder question is what kind of country will be standing when they do.

Because surviving has never been the whole Jewish story. The harder task has always been remaining ourselves while we do.