Good context clarifies responsibility. Bad context dissolves it. After the massacre, too many reached for the second — not to understand what had happened, but to avoid saying it plainly.

“Context” is usually a sign of seriousness. Historians ask for it before they make judgments. Diplomats ask for it before they prescribe solutions. Journalists ask for it because the world is rarely improved by slogans, and almost never understood by them. Jews, perhaps more than most peoples, know the danger of tearing events out of history and pretending that memory does not matter.

But after October 7, the word changed.

It did not become false. It became corrupted. In too many mouths, context stopped being a tool of understanding and became a strategy of evasion. It was no longer what one reached for after first recognizing what had happened. It became the thing one reached for instead.

What must be named first

And what happened must still be named first. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists crossed into southern Israel and murdered around 1,200 people. They abducted 251 hostages into Gaza. They targeted homes, roads, kibbutzim, a music festival — the elderly, children, families, and young people who had gone out to dance. However one writes about the wider conflict, this cannot be absorbed into the anaesthetic language of a “cycle of violence.” A cycle suggests inevitability. October 7 was not inevitable. It was chosen.

Explaining history, or explaining away murder

This is where the argument matters. The problem was never context itself. History matters. Palestinian suffering matters. Failed diplomacy matters. Gaza matters. The future of Palestinians matters. But so do Jewish history, Israeli vulnerability, Hamas indoctrination, genocidal antisemitism, regional rejectionism, and the repeated refusal to accept that the Jewish people have the right to sovereignty, security and self-defense in their ancestral homeland.

Serious people should be able to discuss occupation, settlements, diplomacy, Gaza, Palestinian despair and Israeli security policy. But serious people must also be able to draw a moral line. After October 7, the first duty was not to produce a seminar on root causes. It was to name the atrocity.........

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