Three years later, the conflict is still shaping politics through competing claims about what must be remembered.

Israel is marking three years since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, with ceremonies, memorials, and protests across the country. The attack killed roughly 1,200 people and resulted in 251 Israelis and foreign nationals being taken hostage. The anniversary arrives amid continuing violence in Gaza, where Palestinian deaths were reported again Wednesday, and amid a wider regional escalation involving Houthi attacks on Saudi targets.

That combination is what makes this day politically difficult. It is not only an anniversary. It is a live argument about responsibility, proportionality, memory, and the uses of grief.

For many Israelis, the central fact is straightforward: October 7 shattered the country’s basic promise of security. Communities near the Gaza border were attacked, families were killed, and hostages were taken into Gaza. The state failed in its first obligation, protecting its citizens, and the consequences have not ended. The anniversary is therefore less a historical commemoration than a continuing emergency.

The right reads that emergency as a mandate for force. Its argument is that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate from weakness with an organization that deliberately targeted civilians and still holds hostages. From this perspective, international criticism often appears detached from the realities of terrorism, regional power struggles, and the danger of leaving Hamas intact. The lesson of October 7 is deterrence: if Israel does not establish overwhelming costs, the attack will be repeated.

That position has emotional power because it begins with an undeniable crime. It also carries a practical concern that should not be dismissed. Governments cannot protect citizens by treating threats as abstract moral puzzles. They must make judgments about force, intelligence, borders, and retaliation under pressure.

But the right’s argument often becomes less convincing when its definition of security expands without limit. If every military operation is justified by the original attack, then October 7 stops being a reason for action and becomes a permanent authorization for it. That is not a security doctrine. It is an open-ended political instrument.

The left begins elsewhere. It acknowledges the horror of the Hamas attack while emphasizing the devastation in Gaza, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the displacement of families, and the asymmetry between the parties. The anniversary, in this account, cannot be separated from the years of occupation, blockade, settlement expansion, and the absence of a credible political horizon. Remembering Israeli victims without naming Palestinian suffering is seen not as incomplete, but as part of the structure that made the conflict possible.

This view also has force. Civilian protection cannot be selective. A government’s grief for its own citizens does not reduce its obligations toward civilians under its control or within the reach of its military operations. Nor does Hamas’s criminality erase the distinction between combatants and civilians.

Yet parts of the left make a different mistake, one that mirrors the right’s. Context can become explanation, and explanation can become evasion. The history of the conflict matters. It does not make the intentional murder and kidnapping of civilians morally ambiguous. A politics that cannot state this clearly loses credibility with the very people it hopes to persuade.

The centrist narrative is less dramatic but more demanding. It holds several facts together at once: Hamas committed mass atrocities; Israel has a right to defend its population; Palestinian civilians retain equal moral worth; military power cannot substitute indefinitely for political strategy; and accountability must apply to all sides. This is not a compromise between two slogans. It is an attempt to preserve reality when each camp wants only the facts that support its case.

That middle position is often criticized as timid. In practice, it may be the hardest one to maintain. It requires distinguishing between explanation and justification, between self-defense and revenge, between a military objective and a political fantasy. It also requires accepting that empathy is not a scarce resource. One community’s suffering does not diminish another’s claim to be mourned.

The less obvious lesson is that October 7 has become a contest over sequence. Each side wants its own catastrophe to appear first. Israelis begin with the attack and see everything afterward as consequence. Palestinians and their supporters begin with the conditions that preceded it and see the attack as part of a longer system of violence. The argument is not only about facts. It is about which facts are allowed to function as causes.

That matters for leaders well beyond the region. Organizations, companies, and political movements routinely build narratives around an originating injury. Once established, the injury becomes a license to reinterpret every later decision as necessary. The danger is familiar: a valid grievance can become an operating system, and an operating system built around grievance eventually loses the ability to distinguish protection from perpetuation.

The test of this anniversary is therefore not whether one side can make the stronger case for its pain. Both can. The test is whether remembrance can produce a politics capable of ending the conditions that keep generating new victims.

Three years after October 7, the most urgent question is not which community deserves memory. It is whether memory will remain a form of moral attention, or become another weapon.