In Israel, Every Day is October 7. In the U.S., Every Day is October 8.

Ever since witnessing an ecstatic pro-Hamas celebration in Times Square just 24 hours after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I thought nothing could surprise me. Then to commemorate the one-year anniversary of those atrocities, the Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it?” Klein asks. “Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?”

As someone who encountered gruesome videos of Hamas’s “cynical exploitation” and “weaponization” of Israelis’ trauma exactly a year ago, watched as terrorists referred to terrified Israelis in the South — those who just happened to be most likely to oppose “settlements” — as settlers and dogs, and heard firsthand from people who witnessed livestreams of family and friends held at gunpoint, most of them murdered or taken hostage, I found the premise grotesque.

It was particularly appalling because beyond the therapeutic effect of creating artwork, the cri de cœur that motivated the art installations from Tel Aviv to American college campuses, “kidnapped” posters across the globe, the Nova Exhibition, online maps of the massacres, and documentaries about October 7, is the denials of the trauma itself. And the feeling that since that horrific day, we have been abandoned. That we are profoundly alone. That every day in Israel is October 7^th.

Given the depth of depravity of what happened that day, some Jews initially believed the world would finally stand with Israel. I didn’t. But I did think that everyone would at least condemn the atrocities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Israel has faced obscene denialism and false accusations while young people across the globe celebrate monstrous barbarism and valorize those who perpetrated it. Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Where is the world’s outrage? Where is the world’s empathy? Where are the calls for Hamas to return our stolen souls? Where is the Red Cross? Where are the organizations and so-called allies with whom we stood, we marched, we campaigned? It’s #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

American college students have borne the brunt of the rise in antisemitism. Days after the massacres, rapes, and kidnappings, when antisemitic student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) used images of motorized hang-gliders to advertise their anti-Israel demonstrations, I wanted to believe that they didn’t know what really happened. When they used the same image to advertise celebrations of their “resistance” and “martyrs,” marking the one-year anniversary, they no longer had an excuse. “Happy October 7^th everyone!” at least one school’s SJP posted on Instagram. They all refer to the massacres by the name the terrorists use for it, “Al Aqsa Flood.” To mark the anniversary, the openly pro-Hamas student group “Within Our Lifetime” (WOL) organized demonstrations, calling them “Students Flood NYC for Gaza.”

Last semester, Columbia University student activist Khymani James publicly declared, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” His anti-Zionist student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) issued an apology for his remarks. This year, the group apologized to him for its “so-called apology,” which, they declared, “does not represent Khymani or CUAD’s values or political lines.”

That was apparent when CUAD celebrated a recent terrorist attack at a light rail station in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. Terrorists murdered 7, including the young mother of a baby, and wounded at least 16. The group referred to the horrors as a “bold attack” and a “significant act of resistance” that “reached deep into the heart of settler-colonial territory, further destabilizing the Zionist regime’s claims to security…”

Almost a year after going to the October 8 Times Square demonstration, I went back to the scene of the crime. This time, there were signs glorifying not just Hamas, but Hezbollah. There were also more activists, more keffiyehs, more police, and more of the same familiar chants calling for the eradication of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people.

“There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” (Bonus points for harking back to the Nazi “final solution.”) “Palestine,” if they got their way, would extend “from the river to the sea,” making everything within Israel’s current borders as Jew-free as the Palestinian territories. If you thought they wanted an end to the shootings, stabbings, beheadings, suicide bombings, rapes, tortures, kidnappings, burning people alive…etc., you’re sadly mistaken. “Globalize the intifada.” “Long live the intifada.”

To hear the media tell it, though, especially when demonstrators add “ceasefire now” to their chant list, they’re “anti-war activists.”

This year, while students across the country attempted to hold anniversary vigils for the victims of October 7, terrorist-sympathizers celebrated the same events within earshot. As if that weren’t enough, anti-Zionist posters now include images of red anemones, the symbol of Israel’s South — where the atrocities happened. This is especially galling because survivors of October 7 see the red anemone as a symbol of their connection to the land. Many now have tattoos of the flower to remind themselves of resilience, possibility, and hope.

Relatedly, a chant that stood out to me as I left the Times Square anniversary celebration is “Hey hey, ho ho; Zionism has got to go.” Maybe because it seems banal compared to the others, it doesn’t get much attention. But in some ways, it’s more illuminating. We all know that for terrorists and their supporters, intimidation, harassment, and unimaginable violence is their love language. “From the river to the sea” is a threat. “Intifada” is a call to arms. But “Zionism has got to go” is something else.

Our connection to our ancient, biblical, historical, and permanent home is intolerable to those who hate the Jews. Perhaps that’s why student-jihadis now appropriate not just the date of the worst massacre of Jews in most generations’ living memory, but’ symbols too: In addition to red anemones, there seems to have been a proliferation of Anti-Zionist charms and t-shirts sporting maps of Israel.

That our connection to the land predates the birth of Mohammed, that we are the prototypical indigenous people and our presence in the land has been continuous, that we acquired the land through purchases and other legal means, that the majority of Israelis have relatives who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries, that the only non-colonial, non-imperial sovereign power that has ever existed in that land was, and is, Jewish, and that the State of Israel came about in exactly the same way as countries that don’t face delegitimization campaigns, all puts the lie to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are “white settler-colonialist” robbers and thieves sent from Europe who stole land rightfully owned by ethnic Palestinians in 1948 — a time when there was no such designated ethnic group.

The Zionist-hating chant illustrates how antisemitic terrorists intend to take more from us than our land. They want to rob us of our hopes and dreams, too.

Maybe that’s why we always end up singing Hatikva when confronted by those who wish to destroy us — as if to say, “you might take our ability to live in peace today, but we won’t let you take our hopes and dreams.” As long as the heart within the Jewish soul yearns, and toward the East, an eye looks to Zion, our hope is not yet lost. Our hope is two thousand years old: To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

A day before Klein’s poisonous piece, the New York Times published a fawning article about a student-founder of WOL, one of the anti-Zionist organizations behind many of the activities that make campuses hostile to Jews. “Pro-Palestinian Group Is Relentless in Its Criticism of Israel, and It Isn’t Backing Down,” the headline reads. The goal of WOL, to be clear, is to destroy Israel “within our lifetime.” Calling that “criticism of Israel” is like referring to the defacing of priceless artwork as “criticism of Monet.”

WOL “has galvanized pro-Palestinian activists who are calling for the end of Israel,” the subtitle reads, “and [are] facing accusations of antisemitism.” The message seems to be: Let’s be reasonable. They don’t hate Jews. They just want to destroy the home of more than half of them — the one country where Jews aren’t a minority. Can you believe they’re accused of being anti-Jewish? The poor dears.

In the past year, I noticed a chant I don’t remember hearing before. It’s in Arabic, and it means “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab.” Anyone who thought this would finally put an end to the nonsensical claim that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” wasn’t about the destruction of Israel might be right. It seems we’re all on the same page now: It is a call for the annihilation of Israel.

But get with the program; calling for the destruction of Israel is now merely “criticism.” To quote from Dr. Strangelove: Our source is the New York Times. 

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky, an Associate at Harvard University, serves as Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute and Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University. In addition to The Jewish Journal, her work appears in Psychology Today, The Guardian, Politico, Sapir, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the United States Air Force Academy, and writes the Habits of a Free Mind newsletter. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky