Three Years After Oct. 7, One Place Remains for Jews to Go

The atmosphere at Gate 138 in Newark Liberty International Airport is uneasy on Saturday as passengers prepare to board United’s nonstop service to Tel Aviv.

The route had been grounded for five months after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, when rockets were launched across Israel, including toward Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport. United restored the service in March 2024, but suspended it once more at the beginning of the US war with Iran in February.

Now, after another six-month pause, flights to Tel Aviv are operating again.

And then came FlyDubai.

Three days later, I am making my way through Newark airport for what will be my 22nd visit to Israel in two and a half years.

In the aftermath of October 7, I became deeply unsettled by what I saw as the mainstream media’s confused and disillusioning coverage of the attacks. After 30 years as a journalist, I no longer felt certain I could separate fact from fiction. So I traveled to Israel myself, without handlers, an official itinerary or a government-approved agenda—just a camera and an open mind.

That journey became the documentary The Prophet, which follows Colonel Erez Eshel, a 55-year-old Israeli army reservist and former paratrooper who returned to the battlefield alongside his sons.

Three years after the Hamas attacks, as I make my way back to Tel Aviv, it is impossible to miss how dramatically—and understandably—the country has been transformed.

Once the aircraft climbs above the clouds, the tension gives way to something close to optimism. It feels distinctly Israeli. The crew, however, remain guarded.

Ten hours into the flight, we begin our descent. A flight attendant announces that Israeli security procedures require everyone to stay in their seats for the final 30 minutes, beginning about 180 miles from the coastline. The cockpit door will remain locked.

At Ben-Gurion Airport, the queue for travelers with foreign passports stretches ahead. Clearly, I am not the only international visitor who considers this a reasonable time to come to Israel. My taxi driver outside the terminal is far less hopeful. His 32-year-old son, he says, has reached his limit and has left the country permanently.

The driver himself plans to vote for “big change” at the next election. That tension—resistance mixed with fatigue, self-assurance alongside deep mistrust—can be felt everywhere. Underneath it lies an even more troubling reality.

On Monday morning, I arrive in Jerusalem to speak with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Pizzaballa was born in a small town outside Bergamo, Italy, and came to Jerusalem in October 1990 as a 25-year-old Franciscan priest during the First Intifada. At first, he spoke little beyond Italian, but he eventually mastered Hebrew well enough to teach the language and translate Catholic liturgy into it.

More than 30 years on, he is responsible for guiding the Latin Catholic Church through one of the world’s most politically charged and religiously complex regions. That experience makes him an unusually compelling person to question about Israelis, Palestinians and Christians. For more than 35 years, he has lived within all three communities.

The most significant observation he shares with me is also the most direct: everyone is suffering. Everyone.

He urges me to travel to Taybeh, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, so I can witness firsthand the growing hardship faced by Palestinian Christians.

If you haven’t spent time in the West Bank, you may not realize what a bizarre geographic jigsaw puzzle it is. The territory is carved into Areas A, B and C, sometimes in patches that make very little intuitive sense when you’re driving through them.

Area A is under Palestinian Authority civil and security control. Area B is under Palestinian civil administration with Israel retaining overriding security authority. Area C is under Israeli civil and security control. Israeli citizens are prohibited from entering Area A. I’m an American, so that prohibition doesn’t apply to me.

I drop a digital pin signaling my location to a trusted security contact.

On paper, the distinctions sound bureaucratic. On the ground, they can determine how safe you feel, who can travel where and what happens when somebody decides you don’t belong.

During a previous visit to Hebron, a Palestinian Authority officer in an SUV screeched to a halt in front of me, jumped out of his vehicle and grabbed me by the arms. I couldn’t immediately understand what the hell was happening. Then I realized what he was trying to establish. I reached for my American passport and assured him I wasn’t Israeli. And, yes, that I wasn’t Jewish.

Identity is not an abstraction here and the danger isn’t theoretical.

RELATED: Tennessee AG Won’t Say if Christa Pike Faces Execution Again

In March 2024, a 57-year-old Jewish Israeli entered Dhahiriya, an Area A Palestinian town near Hebron, reportedly to see a doctor. According to Israeli authorities and media reports, a Palestinian man attacked him after discovering he was Jewish, stabbing him in the abdomen. Thankfully, he survived.

I try to meet Father Bashar Fawadleh in Taybeh. We can’t manage that. The roads are closed. A giant orange gate blocks our path and Israeli soldiers tell us very roughly that we are under no circumstances going to Taybeh today.

This is normal, according to Father Bashar. Over the phone, he tells me that Israeli settlers have been entering private Palestinian-owned groves east of Taybeh, taking olives and damaging trees. Families around Taybeh depend on those trees for income, but also as a connection to land their families have lived on for generations. Again, that’s normal, except now people are leaving.

Unemployment in his community is above 30 percent. Tourism has collapsed. Movement is difficult. Ordinary life, difficult already, has become even harder. Palestinian Christians here, he says, feel abandoned and endangered. By everyone. 

It’s a feeling, I’ve come to see, that Israelis and Palestinian Christians share.

Zalli Jaffe, the deputy president of Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, pushes back hard on any suggestion that Israelis ignore or dismiss instances of settler violence against Palestinians. ‘I want nothing more than for the Cardinal to come to the Great Synagogue and meet my congregation and witness that we denounce assumed settler violence in the most forceful of terms,’ he tells me. ‘Anyone who harms innocent Palestinians should be dealt with in the harshest of terms. We fight barbarism, not innocent people.’

On Tuesday, I arrive at Ganei Yehoshu’a in Park HaYarkon in Tel Aviv, where roughly two thousand fresh-faced 19-year-olds wheel their suitcases onto the grass, stack them in piles and separate into circles – ready to embark on what may be the biggest adventure of their lives.

They are the newest class of the Ein Prat Leadership Academies, founded by my documentary subject, Erez Eshel. He is more famous for this than for fighting: he founded the pre-military academy movement, and for more than 25 years Ein Prat has shaped the next generation of leaders in Israel and around the world by developing character, moral integrity and a drive to bring good into the world. 

And there, greeting this newest class of recruits, is Erez.

‘Our name is freedom,’ he tells the recruits. ‘We are the ones who want to practice the idea of a free society. We say we are optimists. But it’s much more than optimism. We are people of Tikvah — of hope.

‘The difference between an optimist and someone who has Tikvah? An optimist says everything will be all right. Someone else will be there. There will be miracles.

‘The people of tikvah say: If we are together, we will build the abilities. We will build the strength. We will build the commitment. And we are not afraid of…’

He stops and considers it.

‘Nothing.’

If there is one thing Israelis and Jews around the world increasingly seem to agree on, it is that they are – once again – just three years after October 7, seen as international public enemy number one.

The Anti-Defamation League’s latest Global 100 survey, released in January 2025, found that 46 percent of adults worldwide – an estimated 2.2 billion people – held what the ADL classifies as deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes. That’s up from 26 percent when the survey began in 2014. The methodology is specific: respondents are considered to hold antisemitic attitudes if they say at least six of eleven negative stereotypes about Jews are ‘probably true’ or ‘definitely true.’

The survey measures hostility toward Jews; it doesn’t establish that Jews are literally the world’s ‘number one’ target. But spend enough time in Israel and the distinction can start to feel academic.

In a world where antisemitism is growing, there may ultimately be nowhere else for Jews to go.

Foreign Jews are buying in. Purchases of Israeli homes by overseas buyers rose 18 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to the Finance Ministry, with French buyers up by more than half and British buyers up 54 percent.

Now Israelis look at the United States, once an indispensable ally, and see something different: younger Americans whose attitudes toward Israel are markedly different from those of their parents; an increasingly partisan argument over Israel; protests in American streets and on college campuses; and political rhetoric that would have been difficult to imagine coming out of mainstream American politics a generation ago.

To Israelis already convinced that history has taught them not to depend on anyone else for their survival, that is proof of their suspicion.

The question I’m trying to answer now is what that means for Israel’s relationship with the United States and with the rest of the world.

Has the experience of October 7, the wars that followed and the explosion of antisemitism abroad convinced Israelis that international approval isn’t unattainable if they are to weather this storm? What happens when the country that has long regarded the US as its savior begins to wonder whether that relationship is permanent?

Two other cab drivers said to me, no joke: ‘We don’t need you. You need us.’ They feel like they don’t need anyone anymore.

I leave the country with an even more unsettling question: After all that Israelis and Jews have endured, would the world ever leave them to survive on their own?