The Orwellian rewriting of the October 7 massacres

On October 7, 2023, 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza. In proportional terms, that would be the equivalent of roughly 8,400 killed and 1,750 kidnapped in Britain. Nor can those numbers convey the suffering of the victims of rape and other sexual violence.

And then came the Orwellian plot twist. Before the dead had been buried, while the hostages were being brutalised in Gaza, and as Israel’s military response was taking shape, the account of what happened began to change, manipulated by Hamas and its allies, enablers, and useful idiots in the West. History was turned on its head. The deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust was blurred, rationalised, justified, celebrated, and, in certain quarters, dismissed as a false-flag operation.

I saw this again recently when I addressed a large university audience in Europe. Fifteen students, strategically positioned around the room, offered a case study in chanted slogans substituting for thought. They robotically repeated accusations of “Nazi-like genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “settler-colonialism”, more intent on reinforcing one another’s certainties than examining the outrageous, unexamined claims they made.

More consequentially, over time, some governments that should have known better began sacrificing high-minded principle for street-level politics. Students at so-called elite universities in the US and UK revealed how little they knew, or cared, about the facts. Too many media outlets seemed quicker to question the evidence staring them in the face than to scrutinise Hamas’s fictionalised claims. Organisations that professed universal concern for women and children were conspicuously missing in action, or raised the evidentiary threshold to new heights, when the victims were Israeli. And the United Nations once again showed how far it had strayed from its founding ideals. It was not until September 2025 that the General Assembly endorsed a declaration condemning Hamas’s October 7 attacks, while some ostensibly neutral UN staff working on relief efforts in Gaza were revealed to be Hamas sympathisers or even moonlighting as Hamas terrorists.

Hamas had announced its intention to destroy Israel long ago. On October 7, its attackers acted on that aim with unprecedented ferocity, in full view of the world, in some cases gleefully recording and sharing their crimes with family and friends. Yet, in the story that took hold in many quarters, democratic Israel became the villain, the aggressor, and even the alleged perpetrator of genocide. Terrorist Hamas, meanwhile, was sanitised as a resistance movement and its reports treated as gospel. Its killers were romanticised as freedom fighters and, in some circles, all but fetishised.

Western capitals rightly supported Ukraine as it defended itself against Russia’s illegal invasion. Yet too many could not, or would not, recognise Israel’s need to fight back powerfully against the aggressors on its own border. Instead came sanctimonious lectures from Dublin to Madrid, Paris to Oslo, and Brussels to Ottawa, as if Israel were confronting a foe that cared a whit about the laws of war.

Strip away the rhetoric, and what many seemed to be saying was something else: for the sake of our streets, our electoral fortunes, our domestic political pressures, and our wider Middle East interests, appease. Sacrifice your interests for ours. Trust the untrustworthy. Be good Christians (!) and turn the other cheek.

Then, in September 2025, London, Paris, Ottawa, and Canberra recognised a Palestinian state without agreed borders, a unified government, or control over its territory – while hostages remained in Gaza. What a sense of timing! What an unearned gift! What shameless pandering!

Meanwhile, amidst this diplomatic circus, history, geography, and reality all got upended.

First, history. Before the attack, Israel maintained neither settlements nor a permanent military presence inside Gaza. It had dismantled its settlements and withdrawn its forces 18 years earlier, giving Gaza’s leaders their first chance ever to chart the strip’s future. They could have chosen Dubai or Singapore as a model. Alas, they did not.

Second, geography. Striking how collective amnesia sets in whenever there is discussion of Gaza’s “encirclement” by Israel. Lo and behold, Gaza has a second border. It’s with Egypt, an Arab and Muslim-majority country. Yet many neglect this inconvenient fact. Why does Egypt maintain such a formidable Gaza border fence, topped with layers of concertina wire?

And third, reality. The “experts” in government, universities, social media, and think tanks presume to know exactly what Israel is not supposed to do. But what, precisely, would they have had Israel do after October 7? Leave a genocidal foe in power on its doorstep? Abandon the hostages, some of whom would endure brutal captivity for more than two years? Defer to Hamas’s use of civilians to shield its fighters and ignore the vast armed infrastructure it built above and below ground? Pretend that Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood had no interests of their own in the conflict? It is easy to preach restraint and question strategy from a distant armchair. It is harder to say what Israel should have done against an enemy determined to destroy it.

Yet for all the second-guessing, all the libellous accusations of genocide, Israel demonstrated two things: military resolve and an effort to limit civilian harm.

It fought a war on seven fronts to weaken its declared enemies and restore the power of deterrence. In that fight, it showed any number of wobbly, flaccid Western nations what valour, patriotism, and resilience look like.

To be sure, there were tragic civilian deaths. Every such death is an incalculable loss. Israel nevertheless sought to minimise civilian casualties as best it could in an immensely difficult, weaponised, and confined environment. In fact, Israel risked the lives of its own soldiers in that effort rather than relying solely on air power. It also permitted humanitarian assistance, albeit with interruptions, much of which, alas, was seized by Hamas for its own use and profit.

Hamas started a war. It was a naked act of aggression. And then, along with fellow travellers, it methodically convinced much of the world that it was the innocent victim of the very war it began. George Orwell, where are you?

David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and author of ‘Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know’ (Oxford University Press, 2025)