Something Broke on October 7
In February I wrote an essay prompted by the Ukraine War about conflicting views of history. On one hand, we had Fukuyama and the modernist Enlightenment faith in the teleology of progress and the triumph of liberalism. On the other, Joseph de Maistre, and the dark anti-modernist view that there was no teleology, and that human nature remained what it was, flawed and often violent. I expressed the view that I wanted to believe Fukuyama was right. I wanted to believe in human progress and the optimism of the Enlightenment.
And then 7 October happened, and I am reminded of this amazing passage in Voltaire’s Candide, which remains one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. Candide and his friend Cacambo had just encountered in South America a Black slave who had had several limbs removed by his master as punishment. Candide thought of his teacher Pangloss, an evangelist of Enlightenment optimism, whose motto was that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire writes:
“O, Pangloss,” cried Candide. “You never imagined this abomination. In fact, I finally must renounce your optimism.”
“What is optimism?” Asked Cacambo.
“Alas,” said Candide. “It is the madness of insisting that everything is good when one is doing badly.” He cried looking at this negro, and crying he entered Surinam.
The atrocities of 7 October, and the world’s response, which was to rally to the side of the perpetrators and attack the Jewish victims for striking back at their tormentors, have shattered my own optimism.
What I saw on 7 October was a reminder that almost 80 years after the Holocaust, which itself differed only in scale and industrial efficiency from countless other horrors perpetrated against Jews over more than 2,000 years, nothing has changed. The old atavistic hatred of Jews is alive and well. It was there for all to see on Twitter and Telegram: mass murder, gang rape, babies beheaded and stuffed into ovens. None of it was new; Jews had seen it all before, countless times. What was new was simply the quality of the images. The Einsatzgruppen carried no GoPros. Nor did Polish or Russian pogromists, the German mobs during the Hep! Hep! riots, the perpetrators of countless other massacres in Europe and the Arab world, the Roman Legions that destroyed Judea, etc.
The familiarity of the violence is precisely what prompted Prime Minister Netanyahu to make his now infamous reference to Amalek. The idea of Amalek in Jewish memory is simply that there are and always will be people who hate Jews and will seek to destroy Jews. This Jewish law itself commands Jews to remember. Once a year as part of the annual Torah cycle, Jews read aloud in synagogue a passage from Deuteronomy that includes the following:
Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt, how they surprised you on the road and cut off all the weak people at your rear, when you were parched and weary [from the journey], and they did not fear [retribution from] God [for hurting you].
Maimonides in his masterful 12th century compendium of Jewish Law, the Mishnah Torah, explains:
It is a positive command to constantly remember their evil deeds and ambush, to arouse hatred for them, as the verse states, "Remember what Amalek did to you". According to Oral Tradition we are taught: "'Remember'—with your mouths; 'Do not forget'—in your hearts," for it is forbidden to forget the hatred we have for them.
Indeed, Jews remember.
Of course, the very idea that there exists an unchanging hatred is itself contrary to Enlightenment optimism. Atavistic hatreds or, really, atavisms of all kinds are, by definition, anachronisms that humanity grows out of as it sheds its particularisms and embraces universal culture. That’s what many of us liberal heirs to the Enlightenment would like to believe. Yet October 7 was a reality check that revealed such optimism to be wishful thinking. Amalek lives. Worse, much of the world makes excuses for him. Indeed, the global hostility toward Jews that exploded that day is a reminder of how deeply anti-Jewish hatred still informs Christians and Muslims, as well as ostensibly post-Christian and post-Muslim “humanitarians” whose new religion is the Enlightenment. They identify Jewish rage in response to 7 October as the atavism, as an affront to human progress. It is the Jewish response that mobilizes their anger, not the horrors that prompted it. These would-be champions of Enlightenment values willingly let the authors and participants of 7 October off the hook, notwithstanding their obscurantism and extreme rejection of all Enlightenment values.
Again, none of this is surprising. Voltaire in his Essai sur les Mœurs, where he laid out the idea that human progress lay in transcending particularisms for the sake of universal culture and values, provided a new Enlightenment-era justification for anti-Jewish hatred. According to this view, Jews, rather than being cursed for rejecting Christ (or Mohamed, take your pick), are cursed for rejecting universalism and being an impediment to progress. This makes them nothing short of evil. In Voltaire’s words, Jews’ stubborn insistence on being different made them “enemies of the human species.” Voltaire was the father of antisemitism of the political Left.
So where does this all leave us? Cynical about progress; impatient with the moralizing and bad faith of self-appointed champions of international law who strive to hobble Israel. They remind me of the Hamas fighters who not only apparently raped 19-year-old Naama Levy but also appear to have cut her right Achilles tendon to keep her from running.
The honest among these “humanitarians” and experts in “proportionality” argue that Jews' right to fight back is conditional on their doing so according to certain rules that are never applied to others to nearly the same degree, if at all. They demand Jews respond to horror as if they were superhumans above pain and terror, and then condemn them for being merely human. They believe the Israeli army should sacrifice its young conscript soldiers in large numbers rather than avail itself of the means to minimize risk, lest it harm civilians. They engage in macabre debates about correct casualty ratios and judge the legitimacy of Jews’ actions according to their allegedly objective mathematical calculations. Perhaps they believe they’d do differently if they were in Israeli shoes, but they are lying to themselves. Meanwhile, their silence regarding Hamas’s complete disregard of international humanitarian law—or even just human decency—speaks volumes. And those are the honest critics. The well-meaning ones. The vast majority argue in pure bad faith and have only the worst intentions.
“The world has made progress since 1945,” people say, and the creation of the UN and the regime of international law intended to criminalize and somehow prevent from happening again the brutality of the Second World War. Has it? The world appears to remain what it always has been. China and Russia ignore international law; the United States insists on it when doing so serves American interests, as do France and Great Britain. The people who wish to destroy Israel could not care less about the pieties of the Nuremberg Tribunal or UN lawyers. The cruel irony is that the conventions largely drawn up in the aftermath of the Holocaust more often than not are weaponized against the primary victims of the Holocaust, Jews. This tells us that the old Enlightenment dream of perpetual peace remains a dream. Worse, it reminds me that, per Voltaire, that dream never had room for Jews anyway.