For nearly a century, Jews in places like America, Canada, Great Britain and Australia took for granted their connection to and comfort within their homes and nations. Even if antisemitism still dwelt at the fringes of society, Jews in these places felt as though they had finally been woven into the very fabric of society and shared history.

There was comfort and confidence in being Jewish as well as a part of daily American, British, Canadian and Australian life. Finally, after wandering for thousands of years, we found homes and places where we could let our collective guard down.

It took a single day last year for that comfort and confidence to shatter. In the wake of Hamas’s gruesome attack in Israel, our homes, businesses and places of worship suddenly became targets of hateful acts, slurs, screams of “go home,” graffiti, assaults, gunshots and murder.

At no point since World War II have so many Jews in so many places across the world felt so insecure and untethered from the Western democracies in which they live. At no point in nearly a century have so many felt as though the citizenship and connection they had with their homes had suddenly and shockingly been ripped away. We have lost our basic sense of normalcy.

This latest watershed moment epitomized the existential threats facing the State of Israel. On Oct. 7, Hamas was responsible for the greatest number of deaths in a single day in the country’s history, leading to the most rapid, pervasive and tectonic transformation of global Jewish existence since the Holocaust. The Jewish sense of security, safety, acceptance and integration into our broader communities has been permanently altered across the world.

On this first anniversary of that dark day, it is incumbent upon us as Americans — as well as upon citizens of all democratic countries — to take stock of that transformation, to understand what it means to our greater society and to the future into which it is heading us.

This assessment cannot simply be limited to documenting the percentage increases in the number of antisemitic incidents or diagnosing the trends and types of threats now facing Jewish communities. It is imperative for us to recognize the truly global nature of the altered state of Jewish existence simply in a matter of one year.

Within one year, British Jews went from freely and safely using public transit in London to now taking separately designated buses as a way of keeping them safe.

Within one year, Jewish kindergartens in Perth, Australia, went from being openly integrated into their neighborhoods to now being protested by anti-Israel activists and needing 24-hour security protection.

Within one year, Jews in France went from having the choice of political parties across the spectrum to becoming politically homeless, as Marine Le Pen emboldened far-right nativist extremism, and far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused of antisemitism multiple times, downplayed antisemitism in French society.

To be clear, many of the trends negatively impacting Jewish life did not begin with Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League has been documenting the normalization of anti-Jewish hate globally for the past decade.

I joined ADL as the senior vice president of international affairs in 2017. Even then, my number one task was to ring the alarm bells through data quantifying the year-over-year increase in antisemitism and highlighting incidents that impacted the lives of Jewish communities across the globe.

For the first five years of my tenure, I witnessed a consistent pattern of normalization of anti-Jewish hatred both in national and local settings impacting Jewish life in big and small ways. In Europe, we documented the “perfect storm” of the rise of far-right populist parties such as in Italy and Germany. In the United Kingdom, we watched far-left extremists such as Jeremy Corbyn hijack the Labour Party.

We witnessed the proliferation of radical Islam in both perpetrating acts of terror — such as the beheading of French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 — and in daily life in Brussels, Paris, Madrid, and other cities where Jewish citizens have been harassed, accosted and even murdered.

In just one gruesome example in 2018, Yacine Mihoub murdered 85-year-old French Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll and set her apartment on fire. After convicting Mihoub in 2021, a French court associated the brutal attack with a “broader context of antisemitism.”

In the Middle East, as we witnessed the miraculous opening brought about by the Abraham Accords, we also documented the expansion of the Iranian regime’s fundamentalist Islamist ideology in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as European and Latin American cities.

As the top state sponsor of antisemitism, Holocaust denial and terrorism, the Iranian regime’s direct support of the Oct. 7 atrocities is what brought all that we had witnessed in the past decade to a devastating new climax.

What Oct. 7 and its aftermath demonstrated to Jews around the world is that the lessons of the Holocaust have not been taught or learned effectively enough to prevent the replay of those very horrors.

We learned that “Never Again” is not real. Nor can we trust the world when it proclaims those words. We learned that the semblance of safety and security can be completely destroyed within a year; that blacklists of Jewish authors, musicians and artists can sprout up again; that Jewish businesses can again be targeted, vandalized and destroyed; that Jewish schools and institutions must yet again rely on their own security to keep their children and community safe while Jewish university students fear walking across campus alone.

So, if Oct. 7 communicated to global Jewry that we cannot trust the commitment to Never Again, then it should also convey to all people of the world that our democracies are in danger. If our Jewish citizens are so fearful, so isolated and so unsafe, then our very democratic values and institutions are on the brink of shattering.

What 4,000 years of Jewish history have taught us is that if it starts with the Jews, it never ends with the Jews. And what we have witnessed across our cities is not a Jewish problem for Jews to solve.

It is an American, Canadian, French, British, Australian, Argentinian and South African problem. It is a problem of democracy, telling us that our society is headed in the wrong direction. And we need to find an offramp from this dreadful highway we’ve been down before.

Sharon Nazarian is the president of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation, with a regional office in Israel named the Ima Foundation and founder of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She previously served as the Anti-Defamation League’s senior vice president in international affairs.

The first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres in southern Israel adds yet another sacred date to a calendar already filled with those devoted to mourning tragedies in Jewish history. But the fresh pain from this most recent instance of Jewish suffering is due to more than the fact that it happened only 12 months ago. The war against Islamist terrorists that began that date is ongoing with hostilities against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And more than 100 of the hostages taken on Oct. 7 are still unaccounted for or continue to be held captive by Palestinian terrorists.

The main purpose of the memorial ceremonies and commemorations will be to mourn those lost amid that orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction by Hamas operatives and ordinary Palestinians who joined in the mayhem. Still, there’s little doubt that a lot of what will be said and written about the anniversary will be about the lessons that should be learned from what happened that day and the war that followed it.

In Israel, much of the commentary will focus, as it has in the previous 365 days, on pinning responsibility for the massive failure on the part of Israel’s military, intelligence and political establishments that allowed the catastrophe to unfold. At the top of the list of those who will be held responsible will be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on whose watch the disaster happened.

Others deserve to be in the dock with him, including the entire leadership of the Israel Defense Force as well as that of the intelligence agencies. Their complacency and blind belief in the “conzeptzia” that Hamas couldn’t and wouldn’t successfully attack Israel in force explained why the vaunted IDF was asleep on that Simchat Torah morning.

A widely shared complacency

Sadly, the complacency about Hamas was shared by most of Israel’s leading politicians, including those opposed to Netanyahu like former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, and former prime ministers Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, all of whom hope to replace Netanyahu at the next election. The truth is that no one except those considered on the “far right” rejected the notion that Hamas could be contained in Gaza and, if necessary, paid off in funds from terror- and Iran-supporting Qatar in order to keep the border quiet.

This is an issue that deserves not just discussion but a full-blown governmental investigation, although, like everything else that happens in Israel, the politicization of any such effort is more than likely. The debate about Oct. 7 should not be just another version of the one Israelis have been having for the last decade about Netanyahu’s seemingly endless tenure in office. Whether that is the way it plays out or not, other more important questions should be addressed.

The post-mortems about the Oct. 7 disaster shouldn’t be limited to how and why Hamas was able to breach the border so easily, setting in motion a day of horror that was the worst instance of mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Both in Israel and in the Diaspora, the discussion about what happened must also include broader misconceptions that not only helped bring about this epic disaster but that might conceivably allow it to be repeated in the future. That’s especially true in the United States, where public discussion of the war on Hamas continues to center on myths that should have been rejected long ago.

The ‘solution’ was tried and failed

Belief in the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict evaporated in Israel in the wake of the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, which brought nearly five years of suicide bombings into every realm of Israeli civilian life. The two-state concept was once embraced by a majority of Israelis amid the euphoria that ensued when those accords were signed on the White House Lawn in September 1993. But the once-dominant Israeli parties on the left were destroyed when the Palestinians—then led by the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO—proved they regarded them as merely a stepping stone to the destruction of the Jewish state.

That point was made even clearer after 2005 when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every Israeli settlement, settler and soldier from Gaza in a vain effort to “disengage” from the Palestinians. Some on the left, especially in the United States and Europe, cling to the lie that Gaza was nevertheless still “occupied” by Israel or an “open-air prison.” The Strip might have been transformed—with the help of the billions in Western foreign aid—into a Palestinian Singapore; instead, it was taken over by Hamas in 2007, which turned it into a terrorist fortress.

More to the point, it was, for those 16 years until Oct. 7, an independent Palestinian state in all but name. As such, it was an experiment that demonstrated what a two-state solution that encompassed the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) would mean.

Among those most resistant to this basic fact were those who wound up failing on Oct. 7. In the years following the Hamas takeover, I took part in dozens of public debates with a liberal colleague, former Forward editor J.J. Goldberg, about the two-state solution and related issues. When I would point out that most Israelis regarded the idea of repeating Sharon’s Gaza experiment in Judea and Samaria as not so much ill-advised but madness, he would invariably respond that his sources in Israel’s intelligence community disagreed. They were sure, he said, that the various efforts at “mowing the grass”—a term that referred to Israel’s periodic efforts to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities with offensive operations in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021, demonstrated that even a terrorist-controlled Palestinian state was no real threat to Israel.

The events of Oct. 7 proved just how wrong they were.

Yet none of this seems to have penetrated the consciousness of the American foreign-policy establishment and, in particular, those like Vice President Kamala Harris, who tout advocacy for a two-state solution as part of what she thinks ought to be the world’s response to Oct. 7.

While there are individual Palestinians who may believe in the idea of peace with Israel, they are isolated and overwhelmingly outnumbered by supporters of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the so-called “moderates” of the Fatah party (whose nearly 89-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas serves as the head of the Palestinian Authority). They have all made it clear over and over again in their organizational charters, statements and rejection of every effort at a compromise peace plan over the decades that they deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.

The only relevant debate

To Israelis and those elsewhere who have been paying attention to Palestinian rejectionism, this is nothing new. Post-Oct. 7, belief in the myth that the conflict can be solved by partitioning the country beggars the imagination. The point of the mass terror attack wasn’t to end the “occupation” of a coastal enclave that had been evacuated by Israelis 18 years earlier or to push for a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. It represented a Palestinian desire to turn back the clock to 1947 or even 1917 and destroy the State of Israel, even within the borders that existed before 1967.

The widespread support among Palestinians for this effort (and for the atrocities that ensued) lays bare the futility and the insanity of any attempt to force Israel to make territorial retreats to accommodate yet another attempt at a Palestinian state. Palestinian political culture is solely predicated on the premise that Zionism and a Jewish state are incompatible with the minimum demands of their national identity.

This is something that ought to be clear to all Americans by now. Oct. 7 should have ended the debate about two states and the peace process for the foreseeable future. That is frustrating and hard to grasp for Americans who believe compromise is always possible or for Jews who are hard-wired to believe in millenarian solutions even when the facts on the ground argue otherwise. At the moment, the only debate about Israel that is relevant is the one that the pro-Hamas mobs that took over America’s streets and college campuses since Oct. 7 have been wanting to have: whether one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.

Calling out the antisemites

That is a position many on the American left have increasingly adopted. Indeed, it is the reason why anti-Israel protesters chant “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.” The whole point of woke ideology, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, as it applies to the Middle East, is to delegitimize Israel as a “settler/colonial” state. Seen from that perspective, nothing it does in its defense—even against the most barbarous opponents, like Hamas and Hezbollah—can be falsely characterized as “genocide” since there is virtually nothing Israel could do to defend itself that could be justified in their eyes. And it’s why the same people dismiss the atrocities of Oct. 7 (which, like Holocaust deniers, they simultaneously justify and minimize).

And so, it is incumbent on Israelis and friends of Israel elsewhere to stop bickering over peace plans or pretending that Israel should be “saved from itself,” as former President Barack Obama believed it should.

In the absence of a complete transformation of Palestinian society that is nowhere in sight, any advocacy for a Palestinian state in the post-Oct. 7 world from those who claim to support Israel is a unique form of delusionary thinking.

The only logical way to defend Israel going forward must begin by recognizing this truth and stop treating those who wish to deny Israel the same rights granted to every other nation in the world as if their opinions were reasonable and well-intentioned. We must not hesitate to label those who seek to “flood” cities like New York with protests glorifying the Oct. 7 massacres as justified “resistance” and call them out for being antisemites and proponents of foreign terror groups.

After Oct. 7, we must no longer treat those who oppose Israel’s existence as if there was some distinction between their position and that of classic Jew-hatred. The brutal truth is that whether or not they root their stand in what they call “anti-racism” or even if they claim to be Jewish, those who wish to eradicate the only Jewish state on the planet are, at best, the “useful idiots” of the Oct. 7 murderers, rapists and kidnappers. At worst, they are their active supporters.

As much as Israelis can and must sort out the crucial questions about who bears the lion’s share of the blame for the success of Hamas’s brutal surprise attack, there are more important lessons to be learned from this episode than just another repeat of the same questions that were asked after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began with a similar failure. Doing so will be extremely hard for liberal Americans who believe in the two-state myth as if it were a religious doctrine handed down from Mount Sinai. But if we fail to learn them, then they will set the stage for more such tragedies, just as much as if the IDF chose to repeat its pre-Oct. 7 complacency.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.