Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering approximately 1,200 people and abducting 251 others. They burned families alive, slaughtered civilians, hunted young people at a music festival, raped women, and took children, parents and grandparents hostage.
For us Israelis, it is still Oct. 7, 2023.
That morning should have changed what the world understood about Hamas and its murderous ideology of Islamist extremism. Instead, we have spent three years being asked to justify our refusal to let our families be massacred again.
This was planned. Had Hamas not launched its attack, the war that followed would not have happened. The terrorists came equipped to kill, kidnap and film their atrocities. And yet, almost immediately, people found ways to excuse them.
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Immediately afterward, demonstrators gathered outside the Israeli Consulate in Chicago. Organizers expressed support for the “resistance.” Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza had not begun. Families in Israel still did not know whether their missing children were dead, hiding or being held hostage.
Within a week of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, many demonstrators began painting Israel, the victim of these attacks, as a villain responsible for committing among the worst acts known to humanity.
Today, the accusation of “genocide” has become the centerpiece of the effort to reverse accountability.
The claim that Israel is committing “genocide” is a modern-day blood libel that fuels antisemitism. For centuries, Jews were falsely accused of murdering children and using their blood to make matzah. Today, the Jewish state is accused of deliberately starving and exterminating a people.
The accusation against Israel of “genocide” distorts its definition, which requires an intent to destroy a people, in whole or in part. Israel’s purpose was clear: to recover its hostages and to dismantle Hamas.
Consider what Israel was fighting. Hamas built a network of tunnels beneath neighborhoods. Hamas situated weapons and military operations in schools and hospitals, among people seeking an education, medical care or refuge.
Israel warned civilians to leave areas of fighting, facilitated humanitarian assistance, and took measures to reduce civilian casualties. Those efforts did not prevent every tragedy, but they need to be considered in an honest assessment of Israel’s intentions.
Rejecting the “genocide” accusation does not require indifference to Palestinian suffering. Families have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods. Their grief is real. That is precisely why Hamas’ responsibility must remain at the core of the conversation.
Accountability requires facts. It cannot begin with an automatic verdict against Israel and an automatic excuse for Hamas.
Yet that is how much of the campaign against Israel operates. Figures issued by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry are presented as unquestioned facts. Its total death toll, which does not distinguish civilians from combatants, is used to support claims of wholesale civilian extermination. Israel’s evidence is dismissed as merely “Israel’s claim.”
When Israel is accused of deliberately targeting journalists, the accusation spreads immediately. When Israel publishes records linking individuals working as journalists to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, campaigners dismiss the evidence.
That is how propaganda works: accept whatever supports the accusation, reject whatever challenges it, and repeat until the accusation becomes familiar enough to sound true.
Today, demonstrators are expected outside the Israeli Consulate in Chicago. Their protests have often included flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, both designated terrorist organizations by the United States. This display reveals that this campaign is not about concern for Palestinians but rather hatred of the world’s only Jewish state.
While we remember our murdered loved ones, others are exploiting the anniversary of their murder to baselessly accuse us of the same grand crime Hamas sought to carry out on that day.
Alongside this campaign, we have heard calls to “Globalize the Intifada.” Israelis remember the intifada through buses exploding and suicide bombers entering cafes and restaurants. To us, globalizing it means targeting Israelis and Jews worldwide.
That violence is already evident. Two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside a Jewish Museum in Washington and a man from Chicago has been charged. People calling for the hostages’ release were attacked with fire in Boulder, Colorado. An armed attacker rammed his truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, while children were inside. A FlyDubai pilot sought to commit an act of terror against nearly 180 Israelis by hijacking a plane heading to Tel Aviv. The list goes on.
Faced with this violence, we should expect public officials to confront the hatred behind it. Instead, some repeat the false accusation of genocide, giving it the legitimacy of public office. By doing so, they help feed the hatred that makes calls to “Globalize the Intifada” seem acceptable.
Especially in this charged political season, our communities are already polarized. Leaders who deepen that division and dismiss the fear their words create are failing the people they represent.
We should expect better.
But against this effort to rewrite Oct. 7, there are people determined to keep its victims’ stories alive.
British runner Yoel Levy plans to run the Chicago Marathon, dressed as Batman, in memory of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Ariel loved Batman. He was 4 when he was taken hostage by Hamas. Kfir was 9 months old. Hamas murdered them and their mother in captivity. Their father, Yarden, survived 484 days as a hostage and returned home without them.
When you see Batman running through Chicago, remember the Bibas family. Their story is part of the truth that disappears when Oct. 7 is reduced to ignorant slogans.
As we look ahead, we must focus on how to bring a hopeful future to our region.
Lasting reconstruction requires the demilitarization and deradicalization of Gaza. Gaza must have a Hamas-free future.
That is the future Israel wants: security for our families and the possibility of a better life for our neighbors.
We cannot undo Oct. 7 or the suffering that followed. But we must not let its perpetrators or their political accomplices erase their own culpability, excuse the massacre and rewrite history.
Elad Strohmayer is the consul general of Israel to the Midwest, based in Chicago.
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