In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas terror attacks on October 7th, Jewish communities around the world shared the shock of Israelis at the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. A year later, I wrote about learning of the attack in real time, hours after a Shabbat dinner, as the Israeli red alert app on my Apple Watch buzzed continuously. The barrage of alerts was so intense that I initially thought the app had malfunctioned. The pain of that day and the days that followed was shared by many who, despite being thousands of kilometres away, felt as if they too had been targeted and were left with a desperate sadness.
Over the past three years, the initial shock has turned into a relentless series of shockwaves, as if October 7th was an earthquake with reverberations that never end. For many Israelis and diaspora Jews, these three years have been dominated by denial, repeated antisemitic violence, and a deep sense of betrayal.
