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And many continue to fail.
"Anniversaries clarify. Three years after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, we see that Hamas didn’t simply intend to kill 1,200 men, women and children; wound another 1,500; and seize 251 hostages, holding some of them underground for 843 days. Nor did Hamas only seek to destroy the Jewish state in a war that brought additional deaths, including some 70,000 Palestinians.
"No, Hamas’s greater ambition was to challenge the very premises of Western civilization—our collective ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, truth from falsehood.
"Oct. 7 was a moral test. All too many have failed it.
"True, Western governments condemned Hamas’s atrocities and pledged support for Israel. Yet within hours of the attacks, pro-Hamas voices on social media began celebrating or rationalizing the pogrom. Pro-Hamas protesters marched in Western cities.
"The flags of the Palestinian Authority and of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, could be seen amid pro-Hamas crowds from Times Square to Trafalgar Square. Pro-Hamas activists occupied campuses and harassed Jewish students. Antisemitic hate crimes spiked in places where Jews had long enjoyed freedom and safety.
"The divergence was astonishing. As Israel responded with purpose, resolution and force, Western societies began buckling under domestic and international pressures to reward evil and punish self-defense. Between 2023 and 2025, Israel destroyed Hamas’s leadership, tunnel networks and supply lines; blew up Hezbollah; and set the conditions for the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. At every point, Western governments condemned Israel’s tactics, pleaded with Israel to end combat and stepped up calls for a Palestinian state.
"The IDF was defeating terrorism on the battlefield, yet Israel was disarmed before the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize its actions and even its existence. Not even the U.S., Israel’s closest and most important ally, could resist the assault.
"President Biden was known as a supporter of Israel. He traveled to Israel not long after Oct. 7 and helped protect Israel from Iranian attack in spring 2024. But Mr. Biden wavered as the war went on. His administration slow-walked supplies. His vice president warned the IDF against entering the city of Rafah because, she said, she had “studied the maps.” Mr. Biden sanctioned Israeli settlers—while allowing terror-sponsoring Iran to sell oil.
"Mr. Biden’s actions were meant to appease the anti-Israel forces roiling the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. All he did was whet their appetites. What was once a fringe cause of the global left—stopping aid to Israel and “freeing” Palestine from Jewish sovereignty—became a defining issue for the Democratic mainstream.
"Democrats’ responsiveness to the academy and to mainstream media, particularly social media from which young voters receive news, guaranteed that the party would try to cater to what it saw and heard online. For many in Gen Z, Palestine turned into a generational cause, the next big social movement now that same-sex marriage, trans rights, climate change and BLM have fizzled out.
"No one stopped to consider that this movement was based on lies. Take your pick. There’s the falsehood that Israel “occupied” Gaza, where no Israeli had set foot voluntarily since 2005. There’s the calumny that Israel is an apartheid state, when Israel is the only pluralistic democracy in the Middle East. There’s the media storyline, complete with doctored photographs, that Israel starved Gazans of food, while video evidence clearly showed Hamas raiding aid convoys for its own nefarious ends.
"Then there’s the despicable lie that Israel is committing a Palestinian genocide. It’s the grossest moral inversion yet, whereby the onetime victims of 20th-century Nazis, and the intended victims of 21st-century Islamists, are transformed into alleged perpetrators of the same crime planned against them. Only the most ignorant, blinkered or malicious mind could liken Israelis to Nazis while conveniently overlooking Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who share both the Nazis’ goals and their tactics.
"Frazzled brains and topsy-turvy consciences are everywhere at the United Nations, the center of anti-Israel activity since the General Assembly adopted the “Zionism is Racism” resolution in 1975. Yet the toxic ideas, attitudes and arguments that once were cabined within Turtle Bay have spilled out across the Western world, seeping into left-wing politics and deeper into the Democratic Party.
"When President Trump took office in 2025, Israel won renewed support from its most powerful ally. Mr. Trump’s inauguration set into motion a series of events, including the June 2025 attacks on the Iranian nuclear program in Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer, that culminated last October in an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and the release of all living and dead hostages.
"Paradoxically, however, Mr. Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pummeling of Iran and its proxies strengthened anti-Israel opinion inside the Democratic Party. Within weeks of the hostage deal, New York City elected a mayor who sounded more like a U.N. secretary-general than a machine pol. Zohran Mamdani repeated all the slanders against Israel, pledged to arrest Mr. Netanyahu and recently released a strategy to combat antisemitism that neither defines the ideology it purports to fight nor recognizes the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish hate. Mr. Mamdani’s social media post marking the Oct. 7 anniversary devoted one paragraph to Israel’s losses—and three paragraphs to accusing Israel of every crime in the book.
"Mr. Mamdani spawned a crop of anti-Israel Democratic House candidates who will almost certainly win in their deep-blue districts next month. His ideological cousin is Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, who refuses to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, gave a mealy-mouthed response after a Muslim man attempted to drive a car into a synagogue preschool and wouldn’t condemn the IRGC while speaking to a Persian-American student. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter says Mr. El-Sayed’s race is a tossup.
"A tossup—what an apt yet bleak description of today’s moral stakes, of the present situation wherein so many Americans can’t distinguish between what is real and what is fake, what is good and what is bad, what is justified and what is lawless. Three years after Oct. 7, Israelis can spot the difference between friends and enemies and act appropriately. Many in the West can’t.
"That must change. Every day since Oct. 7 brings a fresh assessment of our ability to see plainly and to choose the right side. Be sharp. This exam isn’t over."
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