Are we stuck reliving over and over the nightmare of October 7?

This is a segment from The “Days of Future Past” Edition.

And now it’s time for our second discussion.

So Linda, we just heard another song, one of hundreds, about October 7th.

Are we stuck on October 7th?

It’s a good question.

You know, a New Year’s Eve post on Facebook by a Jerusalem oncology nurse and writer named Carol Warady captured something profound, a characterization ratified by the fact that the post was liked and shared a bazillion times and plagiarized even more.

It read in its entirety, quote, “I was caught off guard when I saw that today is New Year’s Eve.

Here in Israel, it is October 86th.

” Carol Warady’s post was funny because it was true and also poignant because it was true and also heartbreaking because it is true.

Three months have passed since October 7th, which is not a long time, but it is not a short time either.

And it still feels like it was just yesterday.

More important, it seems like a Rosetta Stone that makes sense of most everything we are seeing, hearing, doing, and feeling.

The news is still filled with stories of tragedy and heroism from October 7th.

Soldiers tell reporters and also their folks and one another that the reason they’re risking their lives is because of October 7th and the need to ensure that nothing like October 7th ever happens again.

Journalists say whatever decisions they’re making are motivated and justified by the massacres of October 7th.

Social media is filled with stuff about October 7th.

There are songs about October 7th, poems about October 7th, movies about October 7th, plays about October 7th, and gallery shows about October 7th.

No doubt part of the reason why October 7th remains omnipresent in our lives is because its direct impacts are present and so current.

Unfortunately for the families and friends of the 1,200-odd people who were murdered on that day, three months is hardly enough time for grief and mourning to much diminish.

They are still here in a day-to-day way.

To that number, one can add the couple of hundred soldiers who have died in IDF operations in Gaza since October 7th.

The new grief and mourning over them also accrues to October 7th in some way, as they also died because of October 7th.

Add that to the 133 remaining hostages being held in Gaza, who are a matter of moment-to-moment worry and concern and whose stories keep us tethered to October 7th.

For some people, especially abroad, the story of Gaza in 2023 and now 2024 has moved almost completely beyond October 7th.

For most of those people, the story of Gaza is the story of the 22,000 Palestinians who have died since October 8th, of whom maybe 14,000 are not Hamas fighters, of whom maybe 7,000 are children, along the more than a million people who have been driven from their homes, lots of which have in any case been destroyed.

And of course, that has got to be one of the most important and awful and tragic stories of Gaza.

And of course, it is not an either/or thing.

All of these stories are stories about Gaza that matter now and deserve attention.

Still, there are those who believe, and maybe they’re right, that most of us Israelis are somehow stuck on October 7th, and that this makes it hard to take good measure of all that has happened since.

To put it bluntly, there are those who think that living and reliving the brutalities of October 7th hardens our hearts in a way that diminishes our ability to take into account the terrible suffering of Palestinians.

So my question, Alison, is do we have an October 7th problem?

Are we groundhog dayishly trapped into living and reliving October 7th?

If so, why?

And is it a bad thing?

Can and should we try to free ourselves?

Or is the omnipresence of October 7th in our lives no more than what we owe the dead, the injured, the kidnapped, those driven from their homes, living in hotels, and all those whose lives were changed forever on that day?

I don’t think that if we are caught in an October 7th obsession, which some of us are, many of us are, I think a lot of it depends on our personalities, whether we’re the type that takes something that powerful and fixates on it full-time or not.

We all, you know, care for our mental health in different ways.

I feel like it’s perfectly logical and natural that we’re fixated on it.

I mean, those of us who lived through September 11th would never be saying 90 days later, why aren’t we past it?

Why didn’t we get over it?

You know, even then, you know, there were no hostages in terms of the missing and the identifying of the bodies.

That also dragged on and on and on.

And it was at the center of the American, at least, I can’t speak for the rest of the world, consciousness for much, much, much longer.

And that was, you know, an ongoing thing.

And also, what are we going to do about it?

I mean, first of all, you know, the story has not been fully told.

There has not been a full investigation.

People who were responsible have not been held accountable, reasonably and understandably so, because we’re in the midst of engaging of a war.

But I think that so many things remaining open questions, I think, lead people to think about it even more.

And just basically, fundamentally, I’ll steal this off of something that I heard on the radio this morning.

The basic responsibility of a country and a country’s leaders, and especially the state of Israel and with the history of the Jewish people, is number one, to protect its citizens’ physical safety, and number two, as a greater mission to keep the Jewish people safe in a way that they were not in the diaspora, to, you know, a secure Jewish presence.

Those two things should be top of the priority list of the country.

On October 7th, both of those missions failed miserably.

And at least the second, you know, seems to be a continuing failure when you look at what’s going on in the north of the country and all of the displaced people.

There is a fundamental breach of trust, faith, belief in the basic, basic understanding between a country and its citizens, and particularly the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

And so therefore, I don’t think it’s overkill for people to be really fixated on what happened on October 7th, what went wrong, what continues to go wrong because of it, and for people to feel it fully, completely.

And you know, the only thing I can think of to end it is going to be one, full accountability and really understanding what happened, really, really understanding who did what, who didn’t do what, and how the story played out.

And number two, time.

You know, we look at September 11th and we see, you know, what has become clear, less clear, softened with time.

I’m sure for the families who lost people, you know, it’ll never be okay.

But you know, that’s how I see it.

I don’t view it as overkill.

I don’t view it as a problem, at least for the moment.

We are, like you said, we are understandably traumatized, for sure.

I got no judgment of anybody, maybe a little, except myself, about this, how we’re dealing with this stuff.

I don’t know what—we’ve never been in this situation before.

I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like.

It’s not surprising that it’s so easy to get so just completely enveloped by this, but I will just say, speaking for myself at least first, I think I have an October 7th problem.

My head is just filled with these horrible images that I can’t get past, and I break out in tears at random times, seemingly, at that lecture that I mentioned in the introduction to the show by Karine Nahon.

Like one of the students stood up to ask a question, and she just burst into tears while she was asking the question.

And for me, what’s problematic about it is that, first of all, it just feels horrible.

I don’t know if that’s bad.

I can live with that.

I understand it.

But also, I think—like, last night I came across this article in The New Yorker, this new article in The New Yorker about how people in Gaza are starving.

And I read this article, and it was very upsetting.

And probably there are people that would say that it had propaganda in it.

To me, it seemed completely persuasive that it’s just like, how can it be that we’re not letting enough food into Gaza?

Why don’t we flood Gaza with food?

So obviously Hamas is going to take half of it.

Hamas is going to take whatever they need and more.

But why don’t we just fill Gaza with so much food that Hamas doesn’t have any use for it, and then everyone has some food to eat?

And I posted it on Facebook in Hebrew, because I didn’t want it to be part of some anti-Israel thing.

I posted this thing in Hebrew saying, “Why don’t we just give—I understand why we don’t want to give fuel to Gaza, because fuel keeps these tunnels going, and fuel goes straight to Hamas.

And as far as I know, it doesn’t help anyone but Hamas.

But why don’t we flood Gaza with food?

” And I put it out there, and then a minute and a half later, but already after a couple people had commented, then I took it down because I was just freaked out by the whole thing.

I mean, it was just shaking over this Facebook post, and I just didn’t have the tools.

I felt like, am I selling out?

What about all those people who died?

What about those beautiful children, those beautiful young people running away and being murdered and being raped in the Negev?

Why do I have an opinion about this?

But then can I not have—I’m fucked up.

And I think that part of the fucked up is being stuck in that world of images from that day.

I mean, the only thing I would say is that I think that because we are stuck in October 7th, we’re not able to see the suffering of the people in Gaza.

And I think it’s a mistake.

In other words, I mean, I have friends in Gaza who I have been in touch with.

I have somebody who I even send money to.

I hope I’m not going to get arrested for this.

And I send money for her and her mother’s medicine kind of thing.

I think that I want to somehow hold both of these things at the same time.

I want to hold what happened on October 7th, but I also want to hold the suffering of the Gazans.

And I think there’s this sort of hardening of people’s attitudes that, well, the Gazans—Aguito Levy wrote about this in Haaretz—no one cares about the suffering of Gazans because it’s all Hamas’s fault.

We have nothing to do with it.

It’s just Hamas, and they all support Hamas, which I know just isn’t true.

And if Hamas didn’t put rockets in schools, then Israel wouldn’t bomb the schools.

So in one case in the Mrazi refugee camp, Israel admitted that it used a much larger bomb than it needed to, and 100 people were killed.

What about all the other cases that are not being talked about, that are not being admitted?

And we talked about this a while ago, where I said Israeli media is not showing the destruction in Gaza, is not showing the stories in Gaza for the most part.

And if they do, it’s sort of very briefly.

I watched a seven-minute piece on CNN by Clarissa Ward, where she went into Rafah and went to a field hospital, and it was heartbreaking.

And I think we need to watch those things and know those things, too.

So it’s more complex, but maybe we need to not only deal with October 7th, but also what happened October 8th and afterwards.

Right.

But those two things don’t negate each other, is what I’m saying.

I’m saying that you can, you know, there is room for both.

That other podcast I do, I interviewed Shireen Falakhsab, who writes for Haaretz, and she sits, she’s a Druze Israeli.

She sits and she reports on what’s happening in Gaza, including to friends, family, people she knows, what’s on the ground in Gaza.

And at the same time, she lost friends and family, people she knew on October 7th, and has people in the military here.

And so many people who listen to my interview with her, especially, you know, from abroad.

Wow, you know, someone can really feel the pain of this and that at the same time.

It’s not contradictory.

So, again, I don’t see anything wrong with continuing to cope and wrestle with and struggle with how October 7th could have happened.

I don’t think that you can’t, you know, it has to be binary, that either you’re in this pain over what happened to Israel and continues to happen to Israel and Israelis and what happens to Palestinians.

Just, you know, I don’t know how related it is, but sometimes it’s harder when you hear the hostage stories.

Some of the hostages who have come back have talked about being held in people’s homes, families, children, you know, Gazan civilians who are really in the thrall of Hamas, you know, basically treating them inhumanely and in their homes.

Again, in the vein of hardening your hearts as much or more than the October 7th atrocities have hardened mine hearing kind of those stories about, you know, not armed, scary soldiers with masks and explosive belts, you know, harming, threatening, mistreating Israelis.

But you know, families, men, women and children, that’s, you know, that’s a problem.

I think that those narratives tend to harden the Israeli heart against the plate of the Gazan civilians, which is just horrible and heartbreaking.

Well, I might not be right about this, but I don’t want to let stand the statement which a lot of people say, and obviously a lot of people abroad say that Israelis just don’t care about Gazan civilians and what’s going on in Gaza.

That hasn’t been my experience at all.

And I like everyone that I’ve, everyone that I come across, I like try, lately I’ve been tried to talk to about that.

And everyone thinks that, that I’ve spoken to, I know that not everyone in the country does, but everyone that I’ve spoken to thinks that it’s horrible what is happening to Gazans.

And you start the conversation talking about children because everyone knows children can’t be guilty of anything.

But then also others as well, everyone knows this.

It’s just hard to know what to do about that.

And I sort of, so I, maybe I disagree with you, Linda, about Israelis attitudes overall, but I agree with you that I think that the October 7th makes it harder.

Like myself, I feel confounded by this.

I feel like so, so overwhelmed with this immediate grief and it’s hard to know exactly what to do.

And somebody says, look, you know, the only reason the IDF is in Gaza is to make sure that another 1200 people aren’t killed and dozens and dozens of people raped two years down the line or four years down the line.

And I have these images in my head and my head is filled with these images and I don’t know how to, I don’t know to say that that’s not true and that that’s not something that big enough to justify all the horror that’s going on.

It just, it just, it feels, it, ugh.

That’s how she feels.

Noah, man of words.