We often view his­to­ry through sin­gle moments. Assas­si­na­tions, rev­o­lu­tions, dec­la­ra­tions of war or peace.

In real­i­ty, the moment mere­ly reveals a truth that was long ignored. The assas­si­na­tion of Mar­tin Luther King Jr laid bare a deeply divid­ed coun­try despite the veneer of a march towards har­mo­ny and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.

Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine showed us that Cold War inse­cu­ri­ties and bit­ter feuds were nev­er solved. And Octo­ber 7 showed us the post-Holo­caust plat­i­tudes about “Nev­er Again”, and the pride in suc­cess­ful Aus­tralian mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, were hard­ly worth the air they were uttered into.

On Octo­ber 7, 6000 Gazans invad­ed Israel by land, sea and air with the pre­cise aim of killing every man, woman and child they encoun­tered. The meth­ods of killing, includ­ing burn­ing alive, tor­ture, decap­i­ta­tion were as much about sat­is­fy­ing the sav­age instincts of the killers as it was about caus­ing chaos.

What Octo­ber 7 real­ly achieved was to show us what was always there. It revealed that the Israeli belief in man­ag­ing the con­flict with the Pales­tini­ans through mil­i­tary and tech­no­log­i­cal prowess was a doomed cop-out that would nei­ther avoid war nor deliv­er peace.

It showed that tyran­ni­cal regimes can rid­dle our soci­ety with para­noia, sus­pi­cion and big­otry by pump­ing social media con­tent that repack­ages old libels about child-killing, blood-thirsty Jews. It showed that if you present seem­ing­ly ordi­nary peo­ple with a suit­able vil­lain they will hap­pi­ly release all their angst, con­fu­sion and resent­ment upon it. And it showed us that west­ern gov­ern­ments are so paral­ysed by polls, fac­tions and plain old incom­pe­tence, that they are inca­pable of stop­ping a cri­sis that unfolds with com­plete pre­dictabil­i­ty.

Look­ing back on the past two years since Octo­ber 7, Jew­ish Aus­tralians have been forced to deal with every­thing from the ter­ri­fy­ing to the absurd. Cru­el nurs­es, ter­ror attacks co-ordi­nat­ed and exe­cut­ed by some com­bi­na­tion of com­mon crim­i­nals, Iran­ian gen­er­als and crim­i­nal mas­ter­minds. A small busi­ness turn­ing Jews away want­i­ng to hire jump­ing cas­tles for a school fair.

Degen­er­ates cel­e­brat­ing mass slaugh­ter on our streets. Hate preach­ers. Hamas-themed kids par­ties. A tradie threat­en­ing to kill young Jews for dis­play­ing the flag of Israel. A pro-Pales­tine buf­foon rid­ing a horse with irri­ta­ble bow­els up and down anoth­er.

Some­thing else was revealed by Octo­ber 7. A com­mu­ni­ty doesn’t know what it’s made of until it is severe­ly test­ed. And Australia’s Jews, stand­ing with friends and allies through­out this mar­vel­lous nation, have shown what they are real­ly made of. Even as their liveli­hoods were threat­ened, their place in soci­ety chal­lenged, their free­dom to sim­ply iden­ti­fy as Jew­ish was turned into an act of brav­ery or defi­ance, Jew­ish Aus­tralians stood strong.

Now, two years on, despite every­thing, we remain unflinch­ing­ly patri­ot­ic and proud to be Aus­tralian, decent in the face of provo­ca­tion, cool in the face of fire­balls. We remain unbowed, unbro­ken, unbeat­en.