By Ron Raskin.
In a few days, Israel will remember the October 7 massacre: 1,200 people killed and 251 taken hostage—Jews, Bedouin, Thai, Nepalese, and others.
But October 7 isn’t just about the numbers. It’s about the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity — about a nation that went to sleep in a familiar, relatively safe world, and woke up to a new reality where an existential threat suddenly became real.
Terror is not something new to Israelis. During the Second Intifada, almost 800 Israeli civilians were killed in shooting attacks, suicide bombings, and other attacks targeting buses, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, and other civilian locations.
Israel is also no stranger to missiles and rockets. In the two decades before October 7, there were something like 20,000 rocket and missile launches toward Israel. Scale that to the size of the United States to get a sense of what that means. Rockets had almost become another form of weather in Israel: “Tomorrow, we expect light to moderate rocket activity in this area.” That is part of how and why Iron Dome became so famous.
But despite all of this, Israelis largely trusted that their security was under control. They believed that the IDF and Shin Bet would ultimately deal with these threats and contain them.
October 7 was a completely different story.
It was a Genghis Khan-style attack, deliberately brutal and extensively documented by Hamas itself. And the message every Israeli understood was painfully clear: surrender, and perhaps we will spare you. Resist, and expect no mercy.
Suddenly, Israelis realized that many of the threats they had previously regarded as theoretical—150,000 Hezbollah missiles, large-scale ground invasions, attacks from multiple directions, and the possibility of simultaneous assaults on several fronts—were no longer theoretical. The question was no longer whether they could happen, but only when and under what circumstances.
The feeling that your borders are no longer defensible, while facing an enemy that is an order of magnitude larger and deeply committed to your destruction, pushed Israeli society to the brink of collapse.
People all over the country were looking for wooden boards to lock their safe rooms from the inside. Thousands rushed to obtain personal weapon licenses. Around 150,000–200,000 Israelis left the country in the aftermath, and millions applied for foreign passports. Some turned to violence. At its core, the basic contract between the state and its citizens had been shaken: If the state cannot protect its people, then what exactly is the state for?
And that simply left the state with no choice but to go to war — against the Iranian ring of fire: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shiite militias in Iraq, and ultimately against Iran itself.
This is not exactly the picture you often get from large parts of the Western media: a heartless monster that gets bitten by a mosquito and responds by destroying everything around it, as if it were simply blowing off steam.
But why is this broader context so rarely part of the Western discussion?
After 9/11, the United States and its allies went to war in what became known as the “War on Terror.” A war we lost. The reason is that this was never simply a war against terrorism. It was a war against Islamism—a conflict over ideology, and ideological conflicts are ultimately fought not only over territory or flags in Baghdad, but over people’s minds.
When the stick did not produce the desired result, the West gradually turned toward the carrot: building bridges with Muslim societies and trying to create the conditions under which violent ideologies would eventually lose their appeal.
The underlying assumption is fairly straightforward: violent societies cannot sustain themselves indefinitely because they eventually collapse under the weight of poverty and hardship. But this takes time, and thus mainstream Western policy became focused on buying time at almost any cost.
And that is where the interests of Israel and those of Europe and the United States began to diverge.
Israel ran out of time and out of options. Europe and the United States, by contrast, are much larger and geographically more distant. They can afford to buy time in ways that Israel cannot.
And so the West decided to distance itself from Israel, using increasingly blatant anti-Israel propaganda to buy some more time. The propaganda also had another goal: to keep Western society itself in check and avoid its own collapse through a slide toward violence.
And so here we are—in a heavy fog of different conspiracy theories about Israel, to the point where many people in the West can no longer tell where the facts end and the myths begin.
But any brainwashing machine has one basic flaw: to sustain it, you have to keep building bigger and bigger lies, inflating the bubble until, at some point, reality simply slaps you in the face. And when that happens, the bubble bursts, and the world around you changes.
As the saying goes: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” (Abraham Lincoln)