In Europe’s gaze, October 7 risks becoming a footnote - opinion

But for Israelis, October 7 is not merely what came before Gaza, just as Gaza cannot be reduced to what came after October 7.

I found myself thinking about this in an unexpected place: a bookstore in Braga, Portugal.

Fernando Pessoa once imagined Europe as a human body. In “The Field of the Castles,” Portugal’s great modern poet describes the continent reclining on its elbows. One elbow is Italy. The other is England. Europe looks outward through Greek eyes. But the face doing the looking is Portugal.

“Enigmatic and fateful she stares,” Pessoa writes in Richard Zenith’s translation, “Out West, to the future of the past.”

Then comes the final line: “The staring face is Portugal.”

In that Portuguese bookstore, I wondered what Europe’s staring face now sees when it looks toward Israel.

Before me was a table of books about Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza, most in Portuguese translation. Each could be judged on its own merits. Together, however, they told a story.

There is nothing illegitimate about these books. Palestinian accounts belong on European bookshelves. So does criticism of Israel.

What interested me was the collection. A reader encountered Israel mainly through conflict, accusation, and catastrophe. Palestinian perspectives were abundant. The two authors born in Israel, Bartov and Pappé, were deeply critical of their country. Gaza dominated the visual landscape.

What was harder to see was October 7 as an event in its own right.

Where were the communities of southern Israel, the Nova music festival, the hostages, and their families? Where was Hamas? Where was the vulnerability October 7 implanted in Israeli political consciousness?

The point is not that every bookstore must achieve ideological balance. Nor is one table in Braga a verdict on Europe. But an arrangement shapes what a passerby sees first. Accumulation creates meaning. When books selected for attention point predominantly in one direction, curation becomes part of the argument.

Then, close to the center of the table, my eyes stopped on one word.

Holocaustos.

October 7 was not wholly absent. Kepel’s book treats it, but under a word that reframed it before the reader met it as an event in its own right.

To the left was Bartov’s book. The American edition, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is titled Israel: What Went Wrong? Its front cover contains no reference to the Holocaust. The Portuguese edition by Ideias de Ler asks instead, O que correu mal com o meu país? (“What Went Wrong with My Country?”), with a subtitle: “Entre a memória do Holocausto e a violência do presente” (“Between the memory of the Holocaust and the violence of the present”).

BARTOV IS a historian of the Holocaust, and Holocaust memory is central to his analysis of Israel, so the subtitle reflects the book. But the Portuguese edition carries the Holocaust on its front cover, where the American edition does not.

The Holocaust, therefore, surfaced twice on this table, in different books and for different reasons. Nothing placed an equal sign between Gaza and Auschwitz. Kepel and Bartov are not making the same argument.

But cultural associations rarely need an equal sign. Few words in Europe carry greater weight than Holocaust.

For decades, the Holocaust occupied a distinctive place in Europe’s relationship with Israel. Zionism preceded Auschwitz by decades. Yet the murder of six million Jews on European soil inevitably shaped that postwar relationship.

The Holocaust also became part of the vocabulary through which Europe came to understand itself. Never Again acquired a universal meaning, expressing an obligation to resist persecution, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

There is something essential in that universalization. Jewish historical memory cannot demand indifference to Palestinian suffering. October 7 cannot provide Israel with immunity from moral judgment, political criticism, or international law.

But universal lessons depend on preserving the particular.

If October 7 survives chiefly as the beginning of what came afterward, something has been lost. Its victims become characters in another narrative. The same is true in reverse. Palestinian deaths and destruction in Gaza cannot be treated merely as an appendix to October 7.

The challenge is to hold both without allowing either to subsume the other.

There is a profound difference between allowing the Holocaust to sharpen our sensitivity to human anguish and making it the template through which the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is understood. The first draws a universal moral responsibility from the past. The second risks merging radically different histories.

Pessoa’s phrase, “the future of the past,” suddenly seemed less strange.

Europe’s catastrophes do not remain safely behind it. They travel forward and shape how Europeans understand wars generations later. Sometimes this produces empathy and insight. Sometimes it obscures as much as it reveals.

Israel occupies an unusual place within this inheritance. It is a Middle Eastern country deeply entangled with Europe. Europe looks at Israel and sees another state, but also Jews, Auschwitz, nationalism, colonialism, human rights, and its own unresolved arguments about power and responsibility.

The small table in Braga captured that entanglement.

As the third anniversary of October 7 approaches, the question is not which tragedy Europe should recognize. Acknowledging October 7 cannot mean blindness to Gaza. Confronting Gaza cannot make October 7 a footnote. And the Holocaust cannot make every contemporary catastrophe an echo of Auschwitz.

These histories touch one another. They do not become the same story.

Pessoa imagined Portugal as Europe’s face, staring enigmatically toward “the future of the past.” Europe still carries its past in its gaze. When it looks at Israel through its darkest chapter, it must take care that what came before illuminates what it sees rather than rearranges what it remembers.

The staring face is still Portugal.