Cecile E. Kuznitz
Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2024
“The fact that Israelis experienced such horrors meant that October 7 was not just a security failure; it shattered a fundamental promise of Zionism.”
The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre left Israeli society reeling in ways with which it has yet to come to grips. The Israeli television sketch comedy Ha-Yehudim Ba’im (The Jews Are Coming) recently featured a heartrending skit in which characters from Tisha b’Av 70 CE through the 1903 Kishinev pogrom to Simchat Torah 2023 described the violent attacks they endured, one character’s account blending into the next. It powerfully expressed the widespread sense that the “Black Sabbath” of October 7 was just the latest manifestation of antisemitic violence dating back millennia.
The October 7 attack has repeatedly been called a “pogrom,” a term originally describing an episode of mob violence against Jews in the Russian Empire that has come into wider usage to refer to anti-Jewish riots throughout the diaspora (all of the post–Second Temple scenes in the skit save one—the Hebron attack of 1929—happened outside of Israel). There are certainly characteristics of the Hamas massacre that bear comparison to pogroms, including the one in Kishinev, which also featured indiscriminate mob violence, murder, and rape, though rarely at anywhere near the same scale. However, despite the common belief to the contrary then and ever since, pogroms were not organized or perpetrated by Russian authorities. Nor were they the product of careful strategic planning, as the Hamas massacre clearly was.
It has often been pointed out over the last year that more Jews were murdered on October 7, 2023, than on any day since the Holocaust. Moreover, the attack certainly bears comparison to aspects of the Holocaust, including mass shootings carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) and the sadistic attacks of some Christian Poles on their Jewish neighbors, which involved mob violence, the hunting of people in their own homes, rape as a weapon, and the merciless killing of children. … [To read the full article, click here]