The piece has been pub­lished in the Aus­tralian Finan­cial Review by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

In the months before he died lead­ing the res­cue mis­sion to free Israeli hostages at Entebbe, Yoni Netanyahu, the old­er broth­er of Israel’s prime min­is­ter, was despon­dent. He had observed that his coun­try­men, who craved peace and accep­tance in their region above all else, had suc­cumbed to delu­sion. In let­ters to his broth­er, Yoni warned that the hatred against Jews liv­ing autonomous­ly in the Mid­dle East was so ingrained, so vis­cer­al that peace was a mirage. “We believe because we want to believe,” he said.

Many things changed for­ev­er fol­low­ing the mass atroc­i­ties of Octo­ber 7. The lives of the sur­vivors, the psy­che of the nation, the resolve of the Jew­ish world. More than any­thing, it marks the end of delu­sion.

The peo­ple of Israel believed that the hor­rors Hamas inflict­ed upon them were beyond the realm of the pos­si­ble. Many cat­a­stroph­ic sce­nar­ios had been envis­aged. A third intifa­da of sui­cide bombers, a nuclear Iran com­mand­ing Hezbol­lah to begin a war on Israel’s north­ern bor­der. Per­haps even anoth­er con­ven­tion­al war launched by Syr­ia on the Golan Heights. But cer­tain things were impos­si­ble. Israeli inge­nu­ity and rest­less devo­tion to build­ing, invent­ing and solv­ing meant that cer­tain things, had for­ev­er been left behind, con­fined to the annals of human bar­barism we find in muse­ums and books of his­to­ry.

The rape of young women beside the warm corpses of their friends was not pos­si­ble. The dis­cov­ery of forty infants and babies slaugh­tered in their cots, some behead­ed, was not pos­si­ble. Par­ents cov­er­ing the mouths of whim­per­ing chil­dren as uni­formed killers searched for Jews door to door, was not pos­si­ble. Par­ents burned alive in front of chil­dren, chil­dren in front of par­ents, the sur­vivors dragged into a sav­age cap­tiv­i­ty, was not pos­si­ble. The vio­la­tion and exe­cu­tion of cap­tives broad­cast to the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies on their phones was not pos­si­ble.

This delu­sion, our believ­ing sim­ply because we want­ed to believe, is no more.

As Jews, we are raised with a belief in basic human­i­ty. Every human being is endowed with dig­ni­ty and a soul. This is per­haps the most fun­da­men­tal tenet of Judaism, from which all oth­ers flow. That too has been shown as delu­sion. No human being with a soul or dig­ni­ty could bring them­selves to car­ry out the crimes to which we bear wit­ness.

As Aus­tralians, we also clung to cer­tain delu­sions. I see that now. We did not believe it was pos­si­ble for some of our fel­low Aus­tralians to see the same footage and hear the same accounts as we have, and rejoice. We believed, that no mat­ter the depth of feel­ing, trib­al­ism, bonds to ances­tral lands or kin­ship with one’s co-reli­gion­ists, no Aus­tralian could learn of these atroc­i­ties and utter words such as “today I’m smil­ing, I feel hap­py,” and for oth­er Aus­tralians to respond with “God is great,” in a for­eign tongue.

Any lin­ger­ing delu­sion that the anti­se­mit­ic mob belongs to anoth­er time and anoth­er place is gone with the scenes that dis­graced our entire nation. “Gas the Jews” chant­ed by a mob of dozens at the steps of our most icon­ic land­mark is a vision that will long haunt us unless it is dis­placed by some­thing more hor­rif­ic still. Aus­tralians Jews now not only look at what is hap­pen­ing in Israel with hor­ror, we are look­ing over our shoul­ders.

Many have sought to place these events in the arc of Jew­ish and human his­to­ry. To be sure, they are the dead­liest and most trau­mat­ic events since the near anni­hi­la­tion of Euro­pean Jew­ry. These are words I write with­out embell­ish­ment but with absolute dis­be­lief. The sadism and rel­ish of the crimes invokes the Nazi killing squads that threw can­dy at Jew­ish chil­dren as they flailed in ter­ror in a pit of quick­sand. They invoke the Cos­sack horse­men and Cru­saders who hacked open the stom­achs of preg­nant women and flung their unborn chil­dren to their dogs.

And they bring to my wea­ried and tor­ment­ed mind the words of two Jew­ish poets, Agnon and Bia­lik who wrote poet­ry to process the destruc­tion they could not unsee. Agnon wrote of his despair after a mas­sacre of Jews in Hebron by their Pales­tin­ian neigh­bours in 1929. He said of the Pales­tini­ans, “now my atti­tude is this. I do not hate them and I do not love them; I do not wish to see their faces.” Bia­lik reflect­ed on the slaugh­ter of Jews in Kishinev, now Moldo­va, in 1903. He wrote, “Arise and go now to the city of slaugh­ter, into its court­yard wind thy way, there with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head, behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mur­al clay, the spat­tered blood and dried brains of the dead. Tomor­row the rain will wash their min­gled blood, into the run­ners, and it will be lost, in rub­bish heap, in stag­nant pool, in mud. Its cry will not be heard. And all things will be as they ever were.”

Only this time, I know things will nev­er be as they ever were.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-CEO of the Exec­u­tive Coun­cil of Aus­tralian Jew­ry