The October Turn Finale: Ex-Antizionists Admit They Were Wrong and Pay for It

Part I followed an attorney who spent years organizing and promoting the antizionist movement. Part II told the stories of those who spoke with their names withheld. This last part belongs to the rest of the people who answered, in their own words.

“Nothing to Do With Resistance or Liberation”

On October 7, 2023, Laura Foster was scrolling through social media when she came across posts about an incident in Israel. An antizionist at the time, she first thought Palestinians had found a way through a border wall in an act of resistance. Then the news came through that Hamas was breaking into homes and killing Jews in their beds. “What I was reading,” Laura notes, “had nothing to do with resistance or liberation.”

Laura lives in Finland, where, as she points out, barely any Jews live. Her views had come from various human rights organizations, left-wing politicians, and The Guardian, and she absorbed antizionist libels “without ever questioning who engineered them and why.”

After the massacre she started watching the coverage closely. “Unverified reports from Hamas were reported as fact and laundered through the UN and Amnesty International to lend them moral authority,” she contends. Her studies took her to the “Nazi-Soviet-Arab origins of antizionism,” and to the conclusion that the movement is “an ideological hate system built on libels, with a documented history of producing violence against Jews wherever it takes hold.”

That December she wrote her first post condemning antisemitism. “People I had genuinely believed were compassionate,” she says, “said vicious things about Jews.” Close friends of hers cut contact. A photograph of a menorah on Hanukkah drew from a friend a “textbook baby-killer libel.” Later she came face to face with a woman she had been close with. “She looked right through me,” Laura recalls. “I didn’t have the courage to approach her.”

I have the feeling her timidity has been expelled. When asked what could change her mind again, she answered, “Nothing would move me back.”

“Once You See It You Can’t Unsee It”

Tobias Barkley teaches law in Australia. He grew up in a Christian fundamentalist family in New Zealand and later found “my people” on the left through arts and music. When people called Hamas terrorists, he thought, “yes but to resolve a conflict you have to negotiate with them.”

Two days after the attack, his university’s union branch circulated a motion of “unwavering solidarity with Palestine and an immediate end to occupation and apartheid,” with no mention of Hamas or the Israelis it had killed. “I was the only person who said we cannot support Hamas and was ignored,” he told me. A conversation with the most influential person at his union “revealed that she actually did support Hamas.” In his response he described the left, “including many students and staff at my University,” as supporters of the attack.

On campus there were “antisemitic student posters with bloody stars of David.” In the law school, colleagues would say, “Israel is committing genocide,” without citing any evidence and using only the facts that suited them. “My belief that Universities were committed to truth and that the law was a process of trying to get closer to the truth,” he notes bitterly, “was shattered.” He’s changing universities.

He heard the chant “end the occupation” as an end to the oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank. He hadn’t realized that “they meant end the ‘occupation’ of the entirety of the land.” “Once you see it you can’t unsee it.”

He considered it reprehensible that Israel had not separated itself from the Palestinians. He came to understand that Israel “had separated from the Palestinians in Gaza.” “The result,” he writes, “was rockets and Oct 7.”

He recalls sending a message to a group chat with mates of his from the left. He said it was ludicrous for people to deny any link between pro-Palestine protests and the shootings at Bondi Beach. “That group chat and its friends went dead,” he says. He no longer wants personal relationships “with people who just go along with antizionism, let alone those who are active in it.”

“It’s Never Been About Land”

One of my questions asked people what they had misunderstood before October 7. Again and again, the answer was some version of the same excuse, and the day it stopped working.

Lee’or, an Israeli living in Italy, was pro-Palestinian until the day Israelis call Black Saturday. He changed his mind when he saw the left’s response. “Every action of this kind,” Lee’or admits, “was rationalized by me as—‘it’s Israel’s fault.’”

One respondent, who asked for anonymity, had also been pro-Palestinian. “Seeing the brutality of Hamas,” he explains, “made me rethink the idea of ‘resistance.’” Then came “the way so many people immediately flipped the aggressors and victims and demanded people side with Palestinians on the day of the massacre.” Of the Palestinian friends he once believed wanted two states, he admits, “I found out after October 7 that some of them want the obliteration of Israel.”

An advertisement for a pro-Palestine rally, he recalls, “used terrorist language,” boasting of having “humiliated the enemy.” “The way people justified the sexual violence Hamas committed,” he adds, “made me sick.” When he was pressed to take the Palestinian side, he would not. “I refuse to stand for violence and rape,” he insists, “and somehow that made me a bad person.”

Jeremy had been mostly sympathetic to Palestinians. He thought the conflict came down to “two stubborn people playing hardball.” Then he saw how the world, and New York, his own city, reacted to the attack, and he began reading the history. “I no longer saw Palestinians as passive victims,” he says. “I understood them to be active participants making moral choices and that Israel was in a no-win situation.” “Do nothing and the noose tightens,” he observes. “Act and you’re accused of aggression.”

Lawrence had been changed by “Hamas’ bloodthirsty glee in its attack.”

Jannie once considered Israel “an accessory, not a necessity.” The turn came with “the horrific attack on my people,” she says, “and the organized, global approval of it.” Among the assumptions that fell were “that UNRWA was legit and Palestinians are forever refugees” and “that our schools (and Hebrew Schools) are actually educating our kids. Oy vey.”

Megan, in Australia, points to “the wholesale slaughter, the jubilation.” “It’s never been about land,” she writes.

In New Zealand, Mish recalls being “taught by friends, media & academics that Israeli Jews were aggressors, Arab Palestinians their victims.” October 7 ended that. “I had not witnessed a pogrom against Jewish people in my lifetime before.” “I have lost many friends,” Mish says, “because I will not stay silent.”

Josh plays live at psytrance festivals in the United Kingdom, the same scene Nova belonged to. Astral Projection, one of the Israeli acts that shaped his music, was on the Nova lineup when Nukhba gunmen killed hundreds there. “Seeing the videos,” he asks, “how could this not shift my view?” What he had missed was “the constant security threats that Israel has to deal with.” The most ardent supporters of the Palestinians, he notes, live “a safe distance from the conflict.”

Nadia insists that “Jews outside of Israel should not be facing such disgusting racism.” No other people, she argues, face that kind of hatred over the politics of a country they may never live in.

“I Prefer to Be Called a Zionist”

Esmeralda Negron is a Catholic living in southeast Florida. She first went to Israel with a group of teachers from the Jewish academy in Boca Raton where she taught Spanish, and she was the only non-Jew on the trip. At the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem she needed a payphone. A soldier walked up and asked if she needed help. “He pulled out a phone card with minutes on it,” she remembers, “taught me how to dial the call, and let me keep the phone card.”

Years later she lived with an Arab Christian family in Beit Jala, in the West Bank, and came away believing the Palestinians had gotten “a raw deal to some extent.” In the months that followed October 7, she read We Should All Be Zionists by the Israeli author Einat Wilf. “Facts and history are a bitch, aren’t they?” she quips. “They don’t want a state next to Israel, they want one instead of Israel.” The attack, she says, “just pushed me over the edge.”

A few weeks before she wrote to me, she was walking on a beach in an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt when a woman in a hijab and burquini yelled, “Baby killer!” Esmeralda shot back, “I prefer to be called a Zionist and Hamas are the baby killers.”

The deepest wound has come from her own church. In December 2024, Pope Francis stood before a nativity scene sent from Bethlehem in which the infant Jesus lay in a manger lined with a keffiyeh. “A keffiyeh wearing Latin Patriarch and a nativity with the baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh,” she fumes, “is disgusting to say the least.” Of Pope Leo XIV she notes that his “recent statements about the war have really pissed me off.” She was once a regular at Mass and hasn’t been for some time now. She expects worse, and hopes she will be “willing to stand up for Israel and the Jews if SE Florida becomes NYC.”

“Not to Tell Anyone What I Think”

Marielle, who asked that I use only her first name, grew up in Spain in the years of ETA’s terror. Many Spaniards, she recalls, once answered its killings by saying the victim must have done something to deserve it. That changed when ETA kidnapped and murdered Miguel Ángel Blanco, a young town councilor, which she calls a turning point for Spanish society.

“My ex-boyfriend was strongly against Israel,” she admits, “and I looked up to him.” She adds, “I simply never questioned it.” Then she sought out voices she had never heard, Israelis among them. “That changed my perspective completely,” she recalls.

Her teenage daughter picked up the same views about Israel at school. When they began talking about it, “she became very triggered and literally told me not to tell anyone what I think,” Marielle says, “because people were not going to like it at all.” The daughter has since changed her mind. Marielle still keeps quiet around relatives “who happen to work in academia.” “Question your viewpoint,” she urges the people she once agreed with. “Consider that your opinion may have been manipulated. Ask yourself who you are really supporting with your attitude.”

“Watch What They Say in Their Own Language”

A playwright in the United States, whose name I am keeping out, says he never understood “the tolerance or enthusiasm for bloodthirstiness in the Palestinian movement.” His doubts began in the second intifada, when a mob tore Israeli reservists apart with its bare hands and a teenager held up his bloodied hands to the crowd, and some of the children watching were proud of it. He thought then that it would be “at least twenty years before Israel could afford to let an inch of security be ceded” to such a culture. “Why arm the people who want to murder you?” he asks.

A second clue came at Hadassah hospital in Israel. A mother told the surgeons there about her hopes for the child they had just saved. “She hoped he would become a suicide bomber,” he recalls, “and kill everyone there.” Then there is Yahya Sinwar, who, he notes, was “saved from a brain tumor by Israeli doctors” and “was responsible for the bloodiest pogrom in Jewish history.”

He works in the theater. “I’m sure I would have more success if I spoke ‘as a Jew’ and cursed Israel through lies or libel,” he says, “but I cannot do that.” “I do not believe Israeli children are taught to devote their lives to ending the society of others,” he insists. “Listen to the people you advocate for,” he tells his old allies. “Watch what they say in their own language.” And he warns that “honor and martyrdom cultures are significantly more dangerous and must be opposed in every conceivable way.”

“Strengthened by People Who Hate”

“I thought that people were honestly looking for a fair solution,” Jacques says, “rather than the annihilation of the state of Israel.” Back then he was an atheist living in the United States, and he took talk of two states at face value. That idea, he came to see, had served as “a hypothetical position.” He hadn’t realized “how strong anti-Semitism was,” he admits, “and it has only gotten stronger since.” Now he lives in Israel. He moved partly for family, and partly to return to a faith, in his words, “only strengthened by people who hate.”

Raised Christian, Mishka became a Muslim through an early marriage and spent thirty years in that community. A DNA test later showed part Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Asked what had been misunderstood before October 7, Mishka gave one word: “Everything!” “Oct 7 broke many fogs of deception, brainwashing, everything for me,” Mishka says. “I give that to Hashem and my searching for truth spirit.”

Durian was an antizionist before the attack. On October 8 a friend posted a photograph of a Ceasefire Now banner held by protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. Durian complained, and the friend was surprised that anyone would object to a call for a ceasefire.

Looking for a reply, Durian came across a speech at the United Nations by Mosab Hassan Yousef, the Green Prince. “My mind got officially blown,” Durian recalls. “I never even heard the pro Israel side of the story, so overwhelmingly omnipresent was the antizionist zeitgeist.” Durian is now “flirting with the concept of aliya.”

Carrie has begun making plans to move to Israel. October 7, she declares, “made me an Israeli loyalist.” What she had underestimated, she confesses, was “the incredible antisemitism that still exists.”

Eli, in Australia, came to see that “the only place in Universe we have is Israel.” Eli calls it “one little but huge thing.”

In the massacre, Svetlana saw the pogroms and the Holocaust, which had taken members of her family. She had lived nine years in Israel and never adjusted to life there. “October 7 woke me up,” she says. Whatever her own struggles in Israel, she could not stand aside from a tragedy that struck the only Jewish state, and she now fights antisemitism and what she calls its new form, antizionism.

“Stronger Despite Breaking Us”

What I have seen in these 36 respondents is more than inspiring. I could elaborate on this forever, but as promised, I leave you with their words.

The attorney says, “this has brought me into the Jewish community in a deeper way than before in my life.”

Daliah, the Scottish woman from Part II, says she now prays the Shema. “I stand with the Jewish people, I stand with Israel,” she told me. “I am even more proud of my Jewish heritage.”

“I want them to know that there’s people like me who care about them,” Marielle says of the Jewish people.

The writer who grieves for Psyduck is “much happier now.” “I have love in my life,” he wrote, “and despite it all I’m finding contentedness if not complacency.”

“What I would rather do is enjoy and celebrate being Jewish, being alive, learning, experiencing the world” the writer says. “And that more than anything is what has changed for me, bringing me healing and joy.”

“I’ve much grown closer to other Jews than I’ve ever been,” the writer says.

Esmeralda counts herself “fortunate to be friends with people who can actually dialogue and have conversations without losing their minds.”

“When I go to Israel I get emotional as it is so personal to me,” Susannah writes. She has become “more Zionist and more observant.”

Jonathan, a New York City teacher who lived three years in Israel, is “more Zionist than ever.”

“I understood my deep connection to Klal Isroel,” Svetlana writes.

“October 7th was an attempt to destroy us,” the writer told me, “yet it made us stronger despite breaking us.” He signed off, “Am Israel Chai.”