The Road to October 7

Q: What do you mean when you say that there was a very long road leading to the attack of October 7?

Medoff: The horror of October 7 can’t be separated from the centuries of anti-Jewish violence that preceded it. The Hamas killers and gang-rapists were following closely in the footsteps of those who have been torturing and murdering Jews around the world since medieval times. There are obvious similarities in their methods, ideology, and the hate-filled education on which the killers were reared.

Q: When you say “hate education,” do you see a common thread in different educational systems through the centuries?

Medoff: Education is one of the important common denominators in anti-Jewish violence, historically. When the medieval Crusaders were children, they were taught that all contemporary Jews deserved to be punished for the death of Jesus. Pogromists in Czarist Russia and Chemelnicki’s Ukraine were taught the same thing. The Palestinian Arab terrorists who rampaged through Hebron in 1929, like those who rampaged through southern Israel in 2023, were raised in schools and mosques where they were taught that Jews are evil and need to be destroyed.

Q: What about the Nazis? How did they weaponize education?

Medoff: As soon as the Nazis rose to power, they changed Germany’s school curricula to reflect Nazi beliefs and purged all teachers who failed to go along. An entire generation of young Germans—like entire generations of Palestinian Arabs—was inculcated with violent antisemitism.

And Nazi education did not stop at the end of the school day. After school hours, millions of German children were active in the Hitler Youth movement. Later, Hitler Youth members were involved in many atrocities during the Holocaust. Alumni of Hamas and Palestinian Authority schools and summer camps carried out October 7.

Q: Is this part of the eternal “nature vs. nurture” debate, regarding how children develop?

Medoff: I would put it this way: No child is born an antisemitic murderer. The ideas that lead to such behavior have to be taught. For a group of people to carry out the methodical, large-scale torture, rape and massacre of defenseless Jewish civilians, they have to be inundated, for years, with hateful ideas in their schools, homes, and religious institutions.

Q: Recently you’ve written articles about the Palestinian Authority’s summer camps. How do those camps fit into the bigger picture?

Medoff: Last year, the Palestinian Authority ran 65 summer camps, attended by 65,000 boys and girls. What goes on in the camps is a continuation of what goes on during the school year, but with a summer flavor. While American kids are playing ball and making arts and crafts in their summer camps, Palestinian Arab kids train for real war—some of the camps include actual military training. American campers paint pictures of animals and flowers. In PA camps, the kids paint maps of all of Israel labeled “Palestine.”

The kids in American summer camps idolize sports figures. Palestinian Arab campers are taught to idolize suicide bombers, airplane hijackers, and the butchers who carried out the Munich Olympics massacre. You can bet some of the perpetrators of October 7 attended PA or Hamas summer camps.

Q: Another parallel between antisemitic violence in past centuries and the Hamas attack, which you explore in The Road to October 7, is the parading of what you call “trophy victims.”

Medoff: Going back to medieval times, 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 cell phones to livestream what they were doing to the Jews.

Q: Let’s talk about the responses in America to the Hamas attack and the Gaza war, which you discuss in detail in The Road to October 7. How do you account for the extreme positions taken by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch?

Medoff: It’s important to remember that Amnesty and HRW were deeply biased against Israel long before October 2023. Back in February 2022, for example, Amnesty issued a report accusing Israel of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.” And HRW smeared Israel with the false “apartheid” charge even earlier than that, in April 2021. So with their longstanding predisposition to attack Israel, it’s no surprise that they would continue that pattern after October 7, regardless of the facts.

Q: What about American feminist groups? Wouldn’t you think they would have been concerned about the barbaric Hamas attacks on Israeli women?

Medoff: According to their own declared principles, groups such as MeToo International and the National Organization for Women should have been the first to denounce the October 7 atrocities. Instead, they at first said nothing, then they stalled, then they issued weak both-sides-are-guilty statements. It appears that their political biases take priority over their feminist principles.

Q: In The Road to October 7, you unveil your new research concerning American universities that developed friendly relations with Nazi Germany. How does that connect to the pro-Hamas protests on campuses today?

Medoff: The common denominator 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.

Q: There’s always some lag time between when a book is written and when it’s published. Has anything happened recently that would change what you wrote in The Road to October 7 when you finished the manuscript?

Medoff: Sadly, everything that has happened in recent months has only reaffirmed what I documented in the book. The new details of Hamas’s starvation of Israeli hostages only proves, again, its incredible barbarism. Antisemitism, sometimes thinly disguised as anti-Zionism, has become increasingly acceptable in the mainstream culture. The Palestinian Authority continues to act as a cheerleader for Hamas, and is indoctrinating young people to carry out another October 7. And some American feminist groups continue to betray their own principles by refusing to speak out against Hamas atrocities against Jewish women.

Q: The situation sounds hopeless.

Medoff: I know it sometimes feels that way. But despite it all, I remain basically optimistic. The Jews have endured much worse over the centuries, yet we survived and ultimately have thrived despite it all. Today there is a strong Jewish state and a strong Jewish army. Think about that in the context of what the Jewish people suffered just eighty-five years ago, when Jews were weak and stateless, and you realize how blessed we are today.

Dr. Rafael Medoff new book, The Road to October 7, is published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.