And Now Everything is Worse

It’s two years since October 7, and everything is worse.

All told, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 more captive. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.

But a shocked Israel mobilized to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry. It has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure — and its landscape — to rubble, shrapnel and sand.

The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again. And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.

In Israel, the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages — despite polls showing broad support for that — have bitterly divided society and exacerbated fissures that existed before Oct. 7. Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war, forgoing opportunities for a cease-fire even after the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership to keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.

October 7 happened on a Saturday. By the time I taught my undergraduate class on Monday, at least one undergrad was already prepared with a set of arguments justifying Hamas that would have also justified the murder of every person of white, black, and Asian heritage living on the North American continent. Other students were angry, but for me this was a teaching moment, not an anger moment. We talked things through, discussed some parallels with Ukraine (I had just returned from my trip two weeks previous) and I made the point that what was going to happen next was going to be worse than anyone could possibly imagine, a prediction that has unfortunately come true.

Over the week that followed a lot of folks who should have known better decided that they most defiantly would refuse to know better. I saw protestors making straightforward arguments that would have justified the murder of my own children, wherever they could have been found. At this early stage I saw not nearly enough grappling with the fact that Hamas had set in motion a series of events that was going to result in horrific outcomes in Gaza and elsewhere. It was evident from me early on that there might be an imaginable world where earnest protest could constrain Israel’s retaliation, but that world was not the world we lived in.

And so for two years the worst people in the world have played out the script that was written on October 7, and everything is worse for the Palestinians. Everything is worse for the Iranians, and everything is worse for Americans, too; one need not invest too deeply in the factional conflicts around “Genocide Joe” or the continuing debates on swing-state polling to recognize that the Democratic coalition was badly fractured by October 7 in ways that were difficult to redress by November 2024. And today horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC.