Not so long ago, you could see them, you could meet them, because they lived among us — as grandparents, as neighbors, as partners, as friends, as the man down the street who seemed perhaps older than he was. In time, perhaps, you came to know their stories: the story of the tattoo on the old woman’s arm, the story of the grandfather who was drafted and found himself half a world away shocked by a camp and the machinery of death. Public-school teachers would hand you books with titles like Number the Stars or The Diary of a Young Girl, and you would know there was a lesson within, summed up in two simple words of command: Never again.
But the generation that survived the powers of evil, and that saw its works and tore them down, has mostly passed now, and so one year ago today it happened again. The horrors of Oct. 7th, 2023, were a grim dredging-up of every tableau of the Holocaust — Jews hiding in basements, Jews tortured to death by laughing men, Jews killed for being Jews — with the added element unique to the culture and mores of the Palestinian perpetrators, Jews hauled off as slaves to be held for ransom, raped and worse.
The story does not end there. If Oct. 7, 2023, showed that the hatred and evil of murderous antisemitism was alive and well, then on Oct. 7th, 2024, we know that the Jewish state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust still remembers the command that most of the world forgot: Never again. One year ago today, depraved Hamas gunmen roamed Israeli communities looking for innocent men, women and children to kill. Today, there is nowhere in Hamas’s home territory that Israel’s soldiers cannot reach — and Hamas’s own sponsors and partners in would-be genocide, in Lebanon and Yemen and Iran, have learned that Israel’s reach is operationally infinite. Never again, you see, is not just a sentiment. It is also an imperative to be strong.
Well, Israel is strong.
Americans are in this fight. We are in it, whether we wish to be or not, because the men who hunt Jews will hunt us as Americans too. It is a lesson we should have learned long since, that for the fanatics who believe the central achievement of jihad is to complete the work of the Third Reich, America and the Jews are one and the same. They view it as a civilizational fight, and therefore we should too. Our men and women are already in combat for it: in the vast spaces of Iraq and Syria, where Americans contend with Iranians and their proxies; and in the sealanes between Africa and Arabia, where Americans fight a long twilight struggle against Iranian subordinates doing their utmost to sink a United States Navy ship. We are also in it when the Iranians launch one of their drone-and-missile strikes on Israel — twice now — and American airmen, soldiers and sailors do their part to defeat the assault.
The threat in the past year is not just abroad; it is at home as well. A killing hatred of Jews showed itself in the murders and horrors perpetrated in southern Israel — and it was met with exultation by the homegrown enthusiasts for our enemies, most especially in academia. One year later, this remains a stain on American life and civics, and we have a moral imperative to scour it cleanly from our public square. One can be American, or one can be a partisan of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, et al. It is impossible to be both.
Americans are in this fight, but the American regime to date has been halfhearted and dilatory in the pursuit of our interests and the support of our friends. The public priority of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris throughout has been to contain the conflict, as if compromise was possible when the explicit agenda of the aggressor party is plain extermination. That’s why they have pulled the U.S. military’s punches versus the Houthis, which has resulted in the first U.S. Navy operational defeat since the Second World War in the loss of the Red-Sea shipping lanes; that’s why they have squandered American prestige negotiating with Hamas and that’s why, even now, they are lobbying the Israelis to be gentle with the Iranians. Incredibly, President Biden is exerting himself to preserve the Iranian nuclear-bomb program from destruction. The operational excellence of the American armed forces are marred and obscured by the strategic incompetence of its civilian leadership.
The point, after all, is not to contain the conflict. It is to win it. Our enemies are right about one big thing: This is a civilizational fight with existential stakes. One year after Oct. 7, 2023, Israel understands it. Americans understand it. What America needs is leadership that understands it too. We must do it out of self-interest. We must do it to be worthy of our grandfathers who beat the same evil. And we must do it because never again is a challenge not just to Israel, but to us.
Brooke Leslie Rollins is the President & CEO of the America First Policy Institute and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council
Lee Zeldin (R) represented Suffolk County in the House of Representatives from 2015-2023 and ran for New York Governor in 2022. He currently serves as Chair of America First Policy Institute’s Pathway to 2025 Initiative and China Policy Initiative.
