Israel’s hands loosened yellow knots and removed yellow pins as white clouds drifted across Zion’s blue skies. “From yellow to blue and white.”
Lungs swollen with waiting exhaled at last. After days that bled into an endless night, St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili (24) was coming home.
It was the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The best monument to the Holocaust is Israel – Israel at that exact moment. Not Jews gunned down and swallowed into the pits of mass graves, but a Jewish army – hundreds of strong Jewish soldiers deployed to recover a single soul and grant him a dignified burial.
That is what “Never Again” commands. The IDF has defied and defeated the German Nazis and their Hamas derivative alike. The last Israeli hostage has returned, and for the first time since 2014, no Israeli hostages remain in Gaza.
October 7, many have quipped, is over. Yes, we can breathe out now and inhale the fresh air of a new dawn. The day after can begin. October 8 can begin. Not October 8 of 2023, which became “October Hate.”
This October 8 is a blank slate onto which we are beckoned to draw. That slate should turn into our shield: indeed a stronger defensive posture, but more so, a shield of our values, which we wear at all times and transmit to the world in an offensive.
Ran’s rescue brought us not only a blank slate, but also transported us to a new gate. Will we let the barbarians through? That’s the question to which we must answer a hard “No.”
The hour of victory is not a license to drop our guard. We must remain vigilant against the forces of evil that fomented October Hate. And now we know: the barbarians need not break down the gate or obtain the key.
They sneak under and penetrate through, patiently, pervasively.
October Hate materialized because too many of us were too silent and succumbed to ideas with dangerous consequences.
Dostoevsky’s novel Demons warns us that ideas can possess minds and devilize human beings. Sometimes the ideas are dangerous in themselves.
Most often though, devils are not created because they bear malevolent intent, but because they allow extremism, nihilism, naïveté, and complacency to penetrate souls.
Then, the demons – the ideas – take hold of consciousness and conduct. They even risk handing the barbarians the key. Even those who have publicly opposed the dangerous ideas have fallen into the trap of performance.
The war of ideas didn’t end at the border
The Trump administration’s settlements with a handful of universities appear so far to be largely ineffective at uprooting the sources of antisemitism. It is easy to say that the situation on campuses has improved when there are no encampments to be seen and antisemitic protests have subsided.
But we are past campus borders, for the assault on the Jewish people has flooded into our streets: in Colorado, Washington DC, Bondi Beach, and Mississippi. The list is long.
While gleaning “accountability” and a “deal” in a settlement seems promising, Columbia University has reportedly retained a predominately anti-Zionist faculty spread in its Middle East Department.
That department was intended to undergo review and monitoring. Hamas-sympathizer Prof. Joseph Massad is still teaching the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Absent a real monitor, we will be mocked. It is these ideas, allowed to fester from the classroom to the streets, that breed violence. Who will ultimately win in the end?
Who will win in the end when Trump’s new Board of Peace includes Turkey and Qatar, hosts of Hamas leaders and funders of terrorism?
The board is too new for its activity to be judged; however, those two countries are incompatible with Trump’s National Security Doctrine. We cannot let performance dictate or override policymaking.
Performative efforts fortify annihilationist forces, and they are counting on Jewish, American, and Western fatigue.
They’re betting that we’ll grow tired of defending our right to exist and, moreover, that we will continue crying victim without challenging their ideational frame: antisemitism and Islamophobia, academic freedom over academic integrity, and free expression over unlawful conduct.
We bear the responsibility to emphasize that the outcries of Islamophobia, academic freedom, and free expression have been hijacked and taken as weapons in the pro-terror arsenal.
Worse, those weapons are wielded in spongy hands: hands that have absorbed whatever ideas surround them; clumsy hands that are wet and holed and hardly know how lethal those weapons are.
The Israel-Hamas War is particular to the Jewish nation, and it is also universal. Therefore, while the day of October 7 has closed, the war still rages on.
It rages on for Kurds being persecuted by ISIS factions in Syria. It rages on for Persians being slaughtered en masse by the Islamic regime in Iran. These innocent civilians of the Middle East are experiencing an assault engineered in the jihadi brain wiring of the October 7 massacre.
Antisemitism has never been a Jewish issue, but a societal one, and it is used to justify assaults beyond the Jewish people. That is why antisemitism does not end with the Jews, and why its reincarnation of anti-Zionism is not an issue pertaining to the Jewish state alone but to the free world.
The yellow ribbon, now blue and white, rests in our hands. We must tie it around our wrists, and our gates, in a knot of vigilance and vigor. That knot should be tight enough that it grants dignity and honor to the slain and the fallen, for in the hearts of their families, October 7 rages on forever.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, wrote on the day Ran Gvili’s body was recovered:
“Today I will not put tape over my heart on the outside. I will bind my cosmic tape around my battered heart on the inside… Today my prayers have changed from asking for return, to requesting that the universe grant us compassion, strength, hope, grace, and light as we figure out how to walk barefoot on broken glass. It can be done.”
The question is not whether we are ready for the day after, but what we do with it. Will we convince ourselves that the threat has passed because the captives have come home? Will we return to the complacency that made October 7 and October Hate possible? Will we avert our eyes from the genocidal forces in the Middle East? Or will we recognize that Ran’s return, while a moment of closure, is a call to ensure that the annihilationist creed is booted from our doorsteps and from the rungs of the acceptable?
The writer is co-author of the forthcoming book A Light Amid the Storm with Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter and serves as Young Leadership Research and Diplomacy Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.