Three years on, the West has apparently finished taking its lessons from October 7 and is running with them. Unfortunately, they are all the wrong ones.
What has it learned? That Jews are baby-killers, bent on genocide. That the only obstacle to a two-state solution is the “settlements”, rather than the Palestinians, who rejected a state of their own in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, and chose terror instead.
It has learned that Jews are demonic, to be marginalised, bullied, driven out and – as we saw in Manchester last Yom Kippur, and on countless other occasions – murdered. And it has learned that hatred of the only democracy in the Middle East is the one bigotry you can not only harbour without criticism, but can wear as a badge of pride.
Even many of those on the right side of the argument have been reading the wrong story. Antisemitism has generally been boxed off as a problem for Jews, to be addressed by Governments and societies out of compassion but not self-concern. That is another bad lesson.
It is true, of course, that the 1,200 people who were butchered that day, the women who were raped and mutilated, and the men, women and children taken as hostages were mostly Jews and Israelis, targeted not for their state but their personhood.
But – as I argued in the foreword to the paperback edition of my latest book – treating October 7 as a story about Jews is like concluding that global warming is all about polar bears. The mammals may get it in the neck first, but the real message lies in what it says about the world.
So to the anniversary. Like the Holocaust, so much has been written about October 7 that it has taken on a grim familiarity. That is dangerous, because it replaces the truth with cultural assumptions, creating the illusion that we have understood something when we have merely grown used to talking about it.
So here are seven lessons that the West should have learned from that dreadful day, and the ones we should strive to live by and teach to our children.
1. No concession buys an escape from hatred
2. Evidence cannot shift a verdict that has become an identity
Consider the polio campaign. In September 2024, around 560,000 children in Gaza were vaccinated during pauses in the fighting that Israel had co-ordinated. Consider, too, the leaflet drops, the aid Israel sent in and the soldiers it deployed into Hamas’s tunnels to avoid killing civilians from the air.
The fact that “genocide” is a lie is so obvious that one can only conclude that those who propagate it are fundamentally mendacious. Too often, the lie has become a badge of political belonging and supposed moral purity rather than the conclusion of a reasoned argument. Disagree, and you are morally suspect yourself.
The same reflex works in reverse. In March 2024, a UN team led by Pramila Patten found “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape and gang rape took place at several locations on October 7. Despite the deplorable understatement, large parts of the Western Left still prefer not to accept her findings, even as they demand that women are believed in all other contexts.
In its most vivid recent expression, the fact that a long-discredited Cold War slogan can find a fresh generation of believers in the Green Party tells you everything you need to know about the power of identity over evidence.
3. The enemy’s true battlefield is our minds
Hamas could never defeat Israel in a conventional war. So it planned to murder Israelis, provoke a devastating response and exploit the resulting Palestinian suffering to isolate the Jewish state by way of propaganda.
Once again, this is not specialist knowledge. The fanatics simply ignore it, making themselves profoundly complicit. In messages reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2024, Yahya Sinwar described civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices”, invoking Algeria’s war of independence. How much clearer do they need it to be?
The obscenity is that genuine Palestinian grief becomes currency for the very organisation that brought catastrophe upon them. Of course, a dead child remains a dead child. Recognising Hamas’s strategy does nothing to diminish that child’s humanity; it makes its exploitation of the death all the more revolting, and gives the act of parroting the propaganda a cost in blood.
Propaganda works mainly by selection: show the rubble, delete the strategy that produced it, erase the hostages and Hamas, and present what is left as the whole truth. We all know this. But some of us are so whipped up by hatred, so blinded by herd thinking, or so in need of social belonging that they turn a deaf ear. Cowards.
4. Winning the shooting war is not enough
Israel’s instinct for self-reliance runs deep. The state grew out of an older Zionist movement that reacted with defiance to centuries of persecution, then absorbed Holocaust survivors and almost a million Jews driven out of the Arab world. Its story cannot be reduced to a single refugee experience. But the knowledge that nobody will come to the rescue is central to its culture.
That knowledge was earned. In 1939, the St Louis carried 937 passengers, almost all of them desperate German Jewish refugees, from Hamburg across the Atlantic, only to be turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada. Britain and other European countries eventually took them in, but following the Nazi invasion of the Continent, 254 were murdered. Little wonder Israelis have a certain jadedness towards the world.
Yet a central truth cannot be erased: survival is paramount, but in the longer term, international opinion shapes arms supplies, diplomatic cover, trade and support from allies, without which survival gradually becomes far more difficult.
In April, Pew found that 60 per cent of Americans now view Israel unfavourably, up from 42 per cent in 2022; the share who view it “very” unfavourably has nearly tripled. What if a Democrat wins the presidency next time around? Closer to home, Britain’s sanctions may herald a broader Western movement to isolate the Jewish state economically and thereby weaken it militarily.
Despite its instincts, therefore, Israel needs sustained, credible communication: evidence published fast, explanations people can follow, human stories, and honest acknowledgement when things go wrong. No communications operation can stop the hate. Equally, perfectly defensible conduct cannot speak for itself if nobody explains it.
5. A society that despises itself is easily manipulated
The massacres of three years ago exposed the failures of Israeli intelligence, the repercussions of which, whether political, cultural, military or psychological, have yet to fully play out. The West’s reaction to it, on the other hand, exposed something far more dangerous: a civilisation that had lost the ability to distinguish between the arsonist and the fire brigade, and has jettisoned its instinct to defend itself.
Young digital natives are not stupid, but they are certainly very vulnerable to manipulation. An education that teaches that Western power is inherently oppressive and “resistance” inherently virtuous leaves people dangerously ill-equipped to judge a movement like Hamas, or the danger it poses to them.
The result is a grotesque inversion. Barely a month after October 7, young people on TikTok were swooning over Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, which claimed the US was to blame for making 9/11 necessary. They simply lacked the resources to see through it. There was a lesson in there: generations who have grown fat and bored on the freedoms of liberal democracy tend to fetishise those that would exterminate them.
The answer is: up with us! In other words, better history and greater moral confidence. Teach the young to distinguish criticism from self-loathing, liberation from religious tyranny, and sympathy for civilians from hatred of the Jews. Above all, teach them that weakness does not automatically confer virtue, any more than strength proves guilt.
6. Never accept erasure as the price of belonging
A few days after October 7, I went to synagogue and was astounded to see the rabbi arriving without his kippah. Afterwards, the congregation was only permitted to leave in small groups, attended by security guards. In the coming months, families removed the mezuzot from their doorposts and children hid the blazers that marked out their Jewish schools.
I understood the fear. But I also felt something deeper: the spiritual insult of being forced to disappear in your own country. No other minority has to do that. Why should we?
Of course, the fear was not irrational. In 2025, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents, the second-highest total after 2023. The attack on the Manchester synagogue was the first fatal antisemitic atrocity on British soil since the CST began keeping records. Today, on the anniversary, students plan to march from King’s College London to UCL, despite the Metropolitan Police begging them to choose another day.
Sorry, but f**k them. My injunction to “never hide” is not a demand that a child confronts a violent mob; nor is it a rebuke to a frightened parent making a difficult calculation. The responsibility lies with the intimidators, and with the authorities whose job it is to stop them. But Britain’s Jews cannot accept concealment as a permanent condition.
Stand up. Speak. Demand protection. Fight, if need be. Wear your identity with pride wherever you can. A country in which Jewish safety is bought only at the price of invisibility is no home of ours.
This lesson applies to mainstream Britons, too.
7. Remember our friends
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