Oct. 7, A Year Later

(Free Beacon Editorial Staff) Israelis awoke to a country safer and more secure today, a year after Jews around the world watched in horror as Hamas murdered, raped, pillaged, and kidnapped their kin.

The events of Oct. 7—and everything we have witnessed in their aftermath—were a grim reminder that the world is set against the Jewish people, as it always has been. The short-lived support offered by the Biden administration, the immediate calls for a ceasefire, and the near-instantaneous pivot to accusations of genocide and other war crimes the moment Jews undertook their own defense, not to mention the conflagration of American university campuses as students declared their solidarity with the terrorists beset on the elimination of the Jewish state—all were a reminder that the world’s oldest hatred remains as powerful today as it ever was.

And yet, over the past 12 months, Israel has proven itself to be a cohesive, functioning, imaginative, and ruthless defender of the Jewish people. The American people, even with weak, feckless, and senile leadership, have been a crucial ally.

Among Israel’s enemies, meanwhile, many are dead, either obliterated in precision strikes or assassinated by the Mossad. Many more have been maimed in spectacular fashion by the detonation of pagers and walkie talkies. Nasrallah, Deif, Haniyeh, and at least a dozen other enemies of the Jews have been eliminated along with thousands of their henchmen and imitators, all to the delight of Jews in Israel and beyond.

We celebrate these victories with our friends and families, obsessing over the details of the latest daring operation, just as those who would see Israel and the Jews exterminated celebrated the rape and murder of defenseless women and children a year ago.

Who’s laughing now? Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has become “fatalistic,” the New York Times reports, and doesn’t believe he will survive the war. Until then, he relies on human couriers rather than electronic devices to communicate. In Tehran, the “supreme leader” has been whisked to a secure location while he awaits the Israeli response to his latest missile salvo that seems to have killed not a single Jew.

Israel’s enemies in the United States are a relative fringe: The Uncommitted Movement of Michigan that hopes to tank the Harris campaign, terror sympathizers and their non-binary Jewish allies, and lost college kids who lack the options of a Weather Underground or Symbionese Liberation Army.

If the Left ever got its way and forced the Democratic Party to abandon Israel, it would be political suicide, which is why we see Kamala Harris trying to cap Palestinian rogues at her convention and pretending to be a supporter of Israel—at least until November.

The sophisticates in New York and D.C. keep asking, “What is Israel’s strategy? Sure, they’re tactically proficient and clever, killing their enemies, decapitating the leadership of this and that terror group, but what’s the end game?”

The end game for the Jews has always been to survive another year. One year at a time, for the last 5,784 years. If they think they will wipe Israel off the map and bring the Jews to heel, well, it did happen once before, but, based on what we’ve see over the past few months, we like our chances heading into 5,785.