'The Road to October 7': The long centuries of hatred that led to Hamas’s attack - review

In his meticulously researched work, Medoff demonstrates how the visceral Jew-hatred embedded in Hamas philosophy fits into a centuries-long pattern of persecution inflicted by a succession of oppressors on the Jewish people.

He argues that it is not human nature to butcher innocent people, rape and sexually mutilate defenseless women, or behead children. “For thousands of human beings to perpetrate such atrocities, there has to be intensive indoctrination.”

“The road to October 7,” he writes, “wound its way through long centuries in which young people who were nurtured on hateful religious and nationalistic teachings grew up to become perpetrators of atrocities against Jews.”

Medoff also pursues the theme of education in a different direction. He discusses at some length the failure of a range of US academic institutions, post-October 7, to oppose blatant antisemitism among both academic staff and the student body, and not protect Jewish students from intimidation.

Medoff, who is in his mid-60s, was born in the US. A historian of the Holocaust, Zionism, and American Jewish history, he is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC. The institute focuses on America’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, promulgating its message through both scholarly and more popular projects.

Medoff received his PhD in Jewish history from Yeshiva University in New York City in 1991 and is a fellow of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.​

In a recent media interview, he was asked about some research results that he includes in The Road to October 7, revealing how some American universities developed friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He was asked how those findings connected with pro-Hamas protests on campus.

“The common denominator,” he replied, “is their leaders’ indifference to antisemitism. In the 1930s, Harvard, Columbia, George Washington University, Wesleyan, and others ignored Nazi antisemitism as they built friendly ties with the Hitler regime, which included inviting Nazi representatives to speak on their campuses. In the aftermath of October 7, these same universities ignored the waves of antisemitism by some of their own students, including the genocidal calls for the annihilation of millions of Israeli Jews.”

Medoff divides his book into “The Present” and “The Past.”

In “The Present,” he documents Hamas’s rise, its invasion on October 7, and the systematic “hate education” in Palestinian society. He also lists the Western enablers that failed to respond adequately to Hamas’s atrocities, such as US universities, human rights NGOs, and some women’s organizations. ​

In “The Past,” he argues that Hamas’s methods and ideology echo medieval anti-Jewish persecution, czarist and Ukrainian pogroms, the Holocaust, and a century of Palestinian Arab terrorism. In the light of his historical survey, he explicitly frames October 7 as “1,500 years in the making,” linking current Islamist and Arab anti-Israel sentiment to an “eternal war against the Jews.”

Antisemitism is indeed a consistent phenomenon within the history of Western civilization. At different times, and under varying circumstances, outbursts of antisemitic violence have been motivated and justified by a wide variety of rationales – religious, political, racial, social. Medoff concentrates on the undeniable persistence of antisemitism over the centuries rather than on the distinct causes and dynamics of each episode.

In his media interview, Medoff highlighted one aspect of antisemitic violence linking the Hamas monstrosity with medieval practice – the parading of what he called “trophy victims.”

“Going back to medieval times,” Medoff said, “we find descriptions of pogromists parading the corpses of their Jewish victims. It’s a way of boasting of the killer’s achievement. And it’s also a way of inflicting a final indignity on the victims, by demonstrating complete physical supremacy, even in death. Parading victims has been a very common feature in the history of Palestinian Arab violence against Jews. Modern technology has given us a new twist on this old horror – perpetrators of the October 7 atrocities used their cellphones to livestream what they were doing to the Jews.”

Medoff’s central argument in The Road to October 7 is that the Hamas pogrom and hostage capture on that day are best understood not as an aberration, nor solely as a product of contemporary geopolitics, but as the latest episode in a “centuries-old international war against the Jewish people,” driven by enduring antisemitic ideology and indoctrination.

All the same, he ends his book on a positive note. Finding optimism in the existence of a Jewish state and a powerful Jewish army that constantly confounds Israel’s enemies, he writes: “The statelessness and helplessness that characterized Jewish existence through centuries of crusades, pogroms, and mass murder are phenomena of bygone eras. The war against the Jews may be eternal, but that does not mean that the Jews will lose that war.”

The Road to October 7 provides deeply researched context to a horrific event that can never be expunged from Israel’s history. To gain a deeper understanding of that event, this volume is indispensable.