For the past two years in Israel, every day has been October 7
In a highly personal piece, author and filmmaker Gary Cohen writes about what it feels like to live in Israel two years on after the Hamas atrocities and see the world forget the 1,200 innocent people who lost their lives
Today is October 7. Yesterday was October 7. Tomorrow will be October 7.
For the past two years in Israel, every day has been October 7. We are suspended in time until every hostage is returned and this war ends. Only then can we finally move on with our lives.
From here, it appears the world has either forgotten or chosen to dismiss the atrocities of that infamous day, perfectly exemplified by the BBC’s highest-paid presenter at the time, Gary Lineker, who once referred to October 7 as “the Hamas thing”.
Well, the “Hamas thing” is not a thing. It is the greatest disaster ever to befall the Jewish state. The largest and most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Taken as a percentage of the population, it is also the biggest terror attack in modern history. To put that in perspective, in the UK it would equate to more than 8,000 dead, 30,000 injured and close to 2,000 kidnapped. Can you imagine such a thing happening, say, at Glastonbury and the surrounding area? What would Britain’s reaction be, I wonder.
Today, Israel is demonised and delegitimised and October 7 is paid little more than lip service. Truth and morality are inverted. False narratives and Jew-hatred are embraced. The brutal attack on a Manchester Synagogue was an inevitable consequence.
There is a profound lack of understanding, let alone empathy or sympathy, for what Israelis truly endured on October 7 and in its aftermath. From the outset, the inclination among many was to cast doubt on the massacre, despite Hamas live-streaming its atrocities to the world. Some preferred simply to deny it altogether. If it never happened, the world wouldn't have to deal with it. And clearly, the world did not want to deal with it.
Perhaps those outside Israel can’t fathom the scale and savagery of the attack, or the collective trauma and reverberations that continue. As the saying goes, “you had to be there”.
If you were, you’d know what it’s like to watch them bury two of your daughter’s closest friends. Two beautiful souls, who grew up in your house, who went to a music festival to dance, but never made it home. One of them, her body so badly broken she had to be buried in a coffin. Jews are normally buried in a shroud.
You’d know what it was to hug their parents tight, then look them in the eye, knowing no words can suffice. My daughter sold her Nova ticket the night before. She wasn’t feeling well. I cannot shake the thought that she could so easily have been with her friends.
When the rockets started at 6.29am, and chaos erupted, her friends made it to the car and tried to head home. Police stopped them, warning that there were terrorists on the road ahead. No one realised the scale of the attack or how many terrorists had entered Israel. The police recommended they take cover in one of the nearby bus-stop shelters. The terrorists found them. It was a bloodbath. They never stood a chance. Out of forty crammed into the shelter, only eleven escaped with their lives.
I watched my daughter and her friends trawl through the most horrific videos of Hamas atrocities on Telegram, as so many Israelis did in the immediate aftermath, desperately searching for any trace of their loved ones among the carnage. Those images can never be unseen.
I sat with the third friend who had been with them in the shelter, a survivor and witness to the slaughter. He survived lying under a pile of dead bodies in a pool of blood for over seven hours, defying never-ending blasts of machine gun fire and exploding grenades.
When I tell him how glad everyone is to see him alive, and that he made it home. I see in his eyes, he’s not so sure.
It’s impossible to grasp the collective trauma of a country so small and intimate, where everyone knows everyone, and everything that happens, happens to us all. The degrees of separation in Israel are two, three at most, not the commonly accepted six.
We have been forced to grasp the evil of men who restrained women, binding their hands and feet often behind their backs, prior to their abduction or killing. We have had to process images of them with their legs spread or bent over, their bodies carrying stab wounds, burns, lacerations and abrasions. Who can imagine a human being who rapes his victim, shoots her in the head, and continues to violate her?
How do you believe the cruelty of those who murder children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children, before burning entire families alive? You don’t want to think about the images of an infant riddled with bullets, soldiers beheaded, young people set alight.
These people, these monsters, the ones you cannot imagine, cannot process, and don’t want to think about…
They are our neighbours. On October 7, over 5,000 of them broke into our homes and committed these atrocities. This is our reality. Not slogans. Not propaganda. Flesh and blood. Lives ended, families torn apart. Survivors, and indeed a whole country scarred for life.
We don’t indulge in victimhood. We don’t have that luxury. We bury our dead, tend to our wounded, take a breath, and carry on. Communities razed to the ground are being rebuilt. Parents and family members who lost loved ones work tirelessly to free the remaining hostages. They lead the fight for the rights of survivors and the bereaved against endless government bureaucracy.
For many, the Netanyahu government is part of the problem, not the solution. Survivors and their families feel betrayed by a leadership that shirks responsibility for the gross failures of October 7. It is a government that plays politics with their suffering, the plight of the hostages, and the ongoing war in Gaza.
But we are also dumbfounded by the world’s reaction. We struggle to comprehend how the slaughter could be so easily dismissed. How women’s groups could refuse to acknowledge the rape and sexual violence committed by Hamas. How the hostages held in Hamas dungeons, starved and tortured, could be forgotten, the yellow ribbons quietly tied to railings to remember them, loudly cut down.
We watch, bewildered, as, from the very beginning, week after week, crowds across the West pour into the streets, not to mourn the slaughter of innocent Israelis and foreign nationals, but to call for Israel’s destruction and the death of Jews.
In any other reality, the murder of hundreds of young people at a music festival would unite the music world in empathy and remembrance. In the wake of the massacre at the Nova Festival, during a concert in Vegas, Bono changed the lyrics to the first verse of U2’s “Pride”, dedicating the performance to the victims. But this was one rare display of humanity towards the Israelis who lost their lives that day. By Glastonbury the victims of the Nova festival weren’t remembered, instead, the UK’s largest music festival provided a platform to those promoting hatred towards Jews.
On the kibbutzim that were attacked, so many of those murdered were at the heart of the peace movement, people who had spent their lives advocating for Palestinian rights and a two-state solution. These were Israelis who dreamed of coexistence, but were butchered like sheep. Thirty-nine children, as young as three months old, were slaughtered. This is evil beyond comprehension. Perhaps simply too much for the world to digest, where looking away is just easier.
There are mountains to climb. The psychological toll is immense. One survivor and eight family members of those murdered at the Nova festival, have taken their own lives. Most are somehow finding their way back to life, to work, to classrooms and more. Soldiers fighting at the front, attend funerals of fallen comrades, then return straight to the battlefield. Reservists are exhausted, their families too. Yet they continue to serve.
Hamas has promised to repeat October 7 “again and again.” We take them at their word. This is our truth. We want our children back. We want our people safe. We have an obligation to bring the hostages home, to protect our families, defend our homes, and restore some semblance of normality.
Golda Meir said it best: “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”
That is why we fight and Hamas must be eradicated, so it can never again pour across our border to rape, mutilate and butcher. There can be no rockets, no more threats of any kind.
Gaza suffers terribly. Nobody denies it. According to the Hamas health ministry, 66,000 Gazan lives have been lost, but Hamas could end this war today. They could have done so at any time in the past two years, by releasing all hostages and laying down arms. How many innocent lives could have been saved? Instead, Hamas chose to brutalise, exploit, and sacrifice ordinary Gazans.
For many here, it’s a bitter irony that the clearest path to ending this nightmare comes not from Jerusalem, but from abroad. Ordinary Israelis find themselves looking to Washington, not their own government, for leadership. That speaks volumes.
The deal on the table could offer ordinary Gazans a way out, a chance to escape the brutality and oppression of Hamas, to rebuild their homes and their lives. Gaza lies in ruins, the result of a brutal and costly war. The task before them is immense. But it offers hope; rebuilding over continued conflict and destruction.
Today, in Israel, peace activists are questioning their core beliefs. The depth of the hatred toward Israelis and Jews, means the majority of Israelis no longer believe peace with the Palestinians is possible, at least not with this generation.
The day after, for both Israelis and Palestinians, will be long and hard. However, predicting the future in the Middle East is the pursuit of fools. If you live in this part of the world, you best be an optimist, but one that lives in reality, while hoping and working for something better.
When the hostages are home, when this war ends, when Israelis finally emerge from the trauma of October 7, the longest and darkest chapter in our history, only then can the healing begin. And when that day comes, from our perspective, it will not be thanks to the international community, but rather in spite of it.
You can read more from Gary Cohen on his substack: https://gc22.substack.com/about
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