After October 7th: No Atonement Before Repair

After October 7th: No Atonement Before Repair Donna Robinson-Divine (bio) Keywords October 7, Israel, Hamas, Gaza War, Massacre, Judicial reform, Zionism, Jewish state, Jewish and democratic values, Jewish people As of this writing, it is impossible to know how Israel's war against Hamas will end. But what we do know is that October 7th was at once a massacre, a celebration of savagery, a blood libel, and a terrifying rupture of the Jewish state's fundamental commitment to its citizens. For hours, the besieged residents of the Gaza Envelope communities called for help and waited for the army to end the slaughter. That sufficient numbers of soldiers arrived too late to stop the murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings lives in the minds of Israel's citizens and no less in the country's public consciousness. There is no prescribed atonement for such a cataclysmic rupture. But Israelis have shown quite decisively that they want not only a thorough investigation of the reasons for such massive failures but also a reckoning to begin repairing the breach. The savagery unleashed on 7 October brings ever more barbaric acts into view as hostages who have returned talk about what happened to them and cast the country's population into mourning for losses felt acutely and personally. That so many men, women and children are still unaccounted for strains the emotional resources of families who do not know whether to prepare for a burial or for a campaign to release their relatives from captivity. With so many still unable to perform the necessary rites of closure, it is a pretense to believe order has been restored. Hamas killers attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. The sheer glee with which Hamas killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. A 'performativity' added an extra layer of depravity to an atavism already on full view. End Page 74 Tales of horror and of uncommon acts of bravery have leached into popular discourse and will endure as stories laced with a bitter twenty-first century irony but shaded with the dread of 1948 looming in the background. For the first time since Israel's War of Independence, battles raged on land within the borders mapped, however tentatively, in 1949. A titanic struggle for safety and security is no longer behind Israelis who had to evacuate homes and communities in the country's north and south and can still not return. "The words of the prophet" may not, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, be "written on the subway walls," but the graffiti surrounding the streets of Tel Aviv pays tribute to resilience, to the fallen, and also to the communities that collapsed into chaos and fear. Nothing is presumably the same in Israel since October 7. Perhaps, but the October 7 massacre took place in a country already engulfed in turmoil caused by the governing coalition's intention to transform the judiciary and weaken its authority. Never did Israelis seem so polarized, presumably descending into adversarial tribal identities—Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi, Religious versus Secular. Never did the time and circumstances seem more ideal to their enemies, arrayed along the country's borders, for unleashing their brutality to take down the Jewish state. Because Israel was mired in domestic disputes, a battle plan coiled around unbridled barbarism was expected not simply to have a devastating effect, it was also aimed at triggering a total collapse of the country's political order. Ironically, as much as the footprint of ten months of protests became a fault line for divisive conflict, it also laid the groundwork for unity and cohesion. For the very groups opposing the government's agenda instantly repurposed their activities to help the people who survived the brutal assaults and to double down on their commitment to protecting the state and to rebuilding trust in its institutions. How did what appeared to be a society on the verge of collapse turn into a country united in its will to endure? Even if a massacre on this scale could not have been imagined or...