The survivors in the Re’im shelter played dead for hours. Ms. Yosefzon was shot in the leg and her boyfriend in the arm. Their two other friends were dead. All the while, they could hear shooting and yelling in Arabic outside.

Eitan Halley, 28, a student, was drifting in and out of consciousness on the floor. He was full of shrapnel, and the fragments of someone else’s skull lay on his leg. Two of the friends he had arrived with had been killed. “I saw the face of death,” he said.

The survivors, just beginning to process the nightmare they endured, spoke in the days after the attack. Many described how spouses, children or grandparents were killed by the Hamas gunmen who had invaded their homes. Some were shot dead, others burned alive. In some homes, entire families were slaughtered or kidnapped.

“It’s like a 9/11,” said kibbutz secretary Alon Pauker, referring to Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, but with a difference: “You know everyone who died.”

Some of the survivors cried as they spoke, others were stoic. Some were enraged, their ire directed at the killers but also at Israel’s leaders, who they said had failed to fulfill their most fundamental duty – protecting them.

Like many Israelis, whose sense of security has been shattered by the attacks, they wanted to know how Hamas militants had so comprehensively breached Israel’s border defenses, and why the army they trusted had been so taken by surprise and taken so long to respond.

Anger at the government is intense. Some ministers who have tried to visit the injured in hospitals or displaced survivors have been berated and forced to leave.

The Israeli state “failed us totally,” said kibbutz secretary Pauker.

Even if its current leadership is effectively destroyed, she said, Hamas and its followers will continue to regard Oct. 7 as a victory. That’s partly because the group unquestionably succeeded in focusing the world’s attention on the Palestinian conflict, she said.

“It’s the first time I can remember that Hamas has become so prominent on a global scale,” Katz said. “So many people have already forgotten Oct. 7 because Hamas immediately changed the discussion. It put the focus on Israel, not themselves. And that’s exactly what they wanted.”

The emergence of so much racist, bullying trollery shows how deeply the thrill of self-actualization has tempted young people into a decadent waltz with an ancient and hideous hatred. This behavior is all the more appalling because it comes disproportionately from a privileged class of young men and women who are rationalizing their moral destitution for the sake of a transitory sense of self-satisfaction....

Anti-Semitism is not a cause that can be dismissed as a youthful indiscretion. It is not some innocent blemish that can be backspaced out of a résumé. Chanting “From the river to the sea” after a terrorist onslaught isn’t something that can be rinsed away later merely by adding “But I meant it in the good way.” Ripping down posters of missing children is a hateful and cowardly act, not some gallant moment of defiance (and not a life lesson any of us should want to impart to our own children). It is no defense to support a terrorist organization that calls for the eradication of the State of Israel while adding that you mean only the state itself, with no harm intended for the Jews who actually live there.

Anti-Semitism, even if adopted stupidly or indirectly, is a moral rot that today’s students will one day have to either recant or endure. Many of them, I wager, will eventually feel shame about what they thought were righteous actions. And I worry that they (like many of today’s extreme right-wing voters and activists in America) will find themselves so far up the tree of rationalizations that they will never be able to climb back down. After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.

Today’s students are generations removed from Holocaust survivors and veterans who fought in the Second World War. They did not grow up on the war stories recounted to baby boomers and Gen Xers, even millennials – or the lessons that came with those stories.

“I think the average kid sees it as old European history,” says Dara Solomon, executive director of the Toronto Holocaust Museum. “So if that’s the case, they probably do not understand that the formation of the State of Israel was because we needed a homeland because our people had been decimated. I don’t think they make the connection.”

If the Holocaust has made criticizing Israel challenging – or even unseemly – in the past, it’s becoming less of a factor as those events move further into history.

Ms. Burke at CIJA was conducting a training session for a city council group, including mayoral staff, in Ontario (she would not disclose the municipality) on Oct. 27 about antisemitism – not Israel. While discussing the Holocaust, Ms. Burke says, she was told by an attendee: “I cannot sit here and listen to the story that Jews are innocent and that Jews are oppressed.” That person left the meeting.

“I do believe that there is a before and an after that Oct. 7 marks that we didn’t necessarily sign up for – but that will be a part of our reality for many, many generations to come,” Ms. Burke says.

With the greatest respect to a lot of people who mean well, but are repeating horrific errors of the past: which side of 'contextualized' history do you want to be on 85 years from now?

Time for #NeverAgain to mean it. From me in @the_lineca: https://t.co/utxOqH1IGd #cdnpoli

— Harrison Ruess (@HarrisonRuess) November 13, 2023

To be clear, I don’t believe Israel’s campaign in Gaza constitutes genocide. But I do believe Israel has violated the humanitarian law and risks much graver violations if this war continues. At the same time, the threat posed by Hamas is clearly much more significant than the world had considered prior to now. Both of those truths require public pressure, government action, and Israeli reaction.

Figuring out how to amass public sentiment towards a humane and effective position, one that spares Gaza while rooting out Hamas, is one we must shuffle towards. We don’t need to all be saying the same thing, but we do need to figure out how to have that conversation without turning on each other.

The quiet revolution. https://t.co/VjVWxIbOGV

— David Jacobs (@DrJacobsRad) November 12, 2023

In Toronto now. Tens of thousands here including from the #TorontoUkrainian and #TorontoIranian communities to #StandwithIsrael #BringthemHome pic.twitter.com/12QGMKQR9C

— Linda Frum (@LindaFrum) November 12, 2023

At the Stand For Israel rally in Washington DC, a sea of posters for the hostages taken by Hamas. pic.twitter.com/d47DHOWqZN

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 14, 2023

It is possible that if Israel dismantles Hamas’s infrastructure and military capacity and demonstrates that terrorism is a dead end, a new peace process could begin in the Middle East. But a cease-fire that leaves Hamas in power and eager to strike Israel will make this harder, if not impossible. For decades, Hamas has undermined every serious attempt at peace by launching new attacks, including the October 7 massacre that seems to have been designed, at least in part, to disrupt progress toward normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

3 weeks ago I said on @cnn Hamas was purposely operating under hospitals, schools, refugee areas as it’s key to their operations & they want to draw IDF in. This is integral to the terrorist playbook & it was the approach of AQ & ISIS. It’s no surprise. https://t.co/tkcJBsLwIf

— MarkHertling (@MarkHertling) November 14, 2023

According to veteran analyst Ehud Yaari of Channel 12 in Israel, the US has given the IDF the green light to go into hospitals and clear out the bases underneath, whether they are evacuated or not. This may be what Israel is getting in return for allowing fuel into Gaza.

— Shaiel Ben-Ephraim (@academic_la) November 14, 2023

Two predictions about this war that have not played out so far:

1. Everyone said a ground op into Gaza would greatly increase the casualties on both sides, but the opposite has happened – far less innocent Gazans have died from ground forces in the last few days than they did when the air force was busy preparing the battlefield. Most of the people dying now are Hamas. Just as important, far less @IDF soldiers have died than anyone expected, notwithstanding the tragic few we’ve already lost. They've also been able to safely evacuate 200,000 more Gazans from the northern strip – Gazans that Hamas was shooting at in order to get them to stay and die as human shields. The slow and steady strategy seems to be working well for everyone (except Hamas). Again, this is only true at this point, but the larger point is Americans forgot that Gaza isn’t Fallujah while Europeans forgot that Israelis aren’t blithering cowards. All of which goes to show why @Israel should continue to ignore the naysayers and stick to the business of eradicating Hamas, haters be damned.

2. Everyone said Israel would ruin its ties with the Arab world, but not a single friendly Arab country has chosen to do so. In fact, Saudi Arabia said it intends to continue pursuing relations with Israel. It also called for the hostages to be released at the Arab League/OIC summit this weekend. Additionally, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti and Saudi Arabia all voted against a proposal that wanted to: cut ties, disrupt oil supplies to Israel and its allies, prevent the transfer of US equipment to Israel from bases in Arab countries, prevent flights to and from Israel using Arab countries’ air space, and form a joint mission to put pressure on Western nations for a ceasefire. Numerous Arab countries rejected all of that. Just as we should reject all of the NGOs, government quacks, armchair quarterbacks and keyboard commandos who don’t know the first thing about how to survive in the Middle East.

Just to expand on both points a little more after seeing some comments…

The reason IDF casualties have been lower than expected is because ground forces are mostly staying above ground. They haven’t gone chasing after Hamas into the tunnels and don’t seem like they will at this point unless they get specific intel about the hostages. Otherwise, the strategy has been to wait until Hamas comes above ground to challenge them.

This is where the IDF has some superiority now because it first cleared the area with munitions before turning over every stone with soldiers, and is fighting with combined forces like never before. Ground troops are able to call in whatever kind of airstrike they need within minutes as soon as they need one. Military officials say the coordination between the air, land and naval forces is unprecedented. What I meant by “Gaza isn’t Fallujah” is that even though they’re both instances of urban fighting, it’s still a different terrain and a different enemy, therefore it's not a 1:1 analogy.

It’s not so much the difference between US and Israeli forces (both are extremely capable) than it is the fact that Israel's been living next door to Hamas for decades and is very familiar with fighting them. It also has lots of real-time intelligence from numerous sources. We’ve had 44 casualties after 2.5 weeks of fighting. It’s still meaningful to Israelis as a small country, but it’s not the hundreds that were expected by this point. Of course, this can all change. Let’s hope it doesn’t.

As for the Arabs, the reason they haven’t issued anywhere near the amount of opposition as one would expect is because they don’t oppose what Israel is doing – they want it to finish the job. They need to put up some measure of protest publicly to satisfy their citizens, but those Arab governments who voted against that resolution consider Hamas a threat and Iran the biggest threat.

Israel needs to eliminate Hamas first and foremost for the future safety of its own citizens and to get the hostages back. But it also needs to re-establish its strategic deterrence and show its allies, including potential ones, that it’s a military partner they want on their side. This is not to say the Arabs don’t care about Palestinian suffering. They do. They just care about their own survival more. Which is why they’re not only glad Israel is getting rid of a peg in the axis of evil that targets them too, whether through Islamic fundamentalists at home or the larger Iranian threat in the region, they also respect that Israel is doing it fiercely and masterfully. That is how you win friends and influence people in the Middle East.