The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews

The Road to October 7 examines what paved the way for the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and its aftermath.

Part 1, ＂The Present,＂ documents the Hamas invasion, the rise of Hamas, the education of Palestinian Arab children to hate and kill, the diplomatic decisions that helped enable the attack, and the propagation of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish libels.

Part 2, ＂The Past,＂ analyzes how in both method and ideology, the Hamas assault echoed the pogroms in medieval Europe, Czarist Russia, and Ukraine; the Holocaust; and a century of Palestinian Arab terrorism. It also examines select American universities’ cultivation of friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s (the same universities that tolerated pro-Hamas protests after October 7) and October 7 as a turning point in the long history of antisemitism.

Readers will emerge with important insights on the Hamas attack, antisemitic education in Palestinian Arab society, pro-Hamas groups on U.S. campuses, the responses of women’s and human rights organizations to mass sexual violence, misconceptions and fabrications about Israel’s conduct in the ensuing war, and why October 7 needs to be viewed as one segment of both the century-long Palestinian Arab war and the centuries-old international war against the Jewish people.

Rafael Medoff is founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and coeditor of the institute’s online Encyclopedia of America’s Response to the Holocaust. He has written more than twenty books, including The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (JPS, 2019) and America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History (JPS, 2022).