This week marks three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. An anniversary usually measures how much time has passed. For the families of those murdered that day, Oct. 7 is something else: A nightmare that never entirely ends. It survives in the empty chair, the photograph on the wall, and, for some, in the final words of someone they loved.
For the family of Libi Cohen-Meguri, those words came over the telephone.
Libi was 22. After being shot while fleeing the Nova music festival, she called her family. The call lasted eight minutes. As her parents came apart on the other end, Libi became the calm one. She told her mother to stop screaming and listen. She said goodbye to the people she loved, one by one, and told her mother to keep being a good mother to her brother and sister.
MAMDANI’S OCT. 7 STATEMENT ISN’T PRO-PALESTINIAN. IT’S PRO-HAMAS
Eventually, Libi got onto the road and pretended to be dead. Then she told her mother the gunmen were coming back to shoot her again.
Her family heard the gunfire.
I cannot hear that story without feeling profound sadness. But after the sadness comes something else.
Anger.
Three years later, I don’t want all of that anger to disappear.
Popular culture has given us a tidy picture of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Real grief is not so orderly. The American Psychological Association notes that people do not necessarily move through those stages in sequence.
Nor am I arguing that anyone should remain trapped in rage. Anger can consume a life. Grieving people deserve to heal, to laugh again, to love again, and to live without feeling that joy somehow betrays the dead.
But not all anger is the same.
When an unavoidable disease takes someone we love, we may rage at fate: Why her? Why now? Why us? There may eventually be peace in letting go of that anger because no human being chose the illness.
Oct. 7 belongs to a different moral category. A United Nations commission found reasonable grounds to conclude that members of Hamas’s military wing and other Palestinian armed groups intentionally attacked civilians at Nova and elsewhere. These were not simply terrible deaths. Human beings chose to inflict that suffering on other human beings.
Call the response moral anger: Not merely anguish that something awful happened, but outrage that someone deliberately chose to do it.
The wound may heal. The moral verdict need not.
I’m not arguing for hatred. I’m arguing against indifference.
No one has a duty to remain emotionally raw forever. But I do think we have an obligation to preserve our capacity for moral outrage — to recognize deliberate cruelty as intolerable even after the immediacy has faded.
Because time does something dangerous to atrocity.
First, there is horror. Then a headline. Then an anniversary. Then a chapter in a history book. Eventually, a 22-year-old woman bleeding on a road while saying goodbye to her mother risks becoming one more name among thousands.
Memory preserves what happened. Moral anger preserves our judgment about what happened.
But anger cannot be the endpoint. If it merely burns inside us, it accomplishes nothing. It has to become resolve.
My own part is modest. I am a retired physician and a writer. I’m not going to track fugitives across continents or prosecute war criminals. I have words, so I use them.
Others have different parts to play: Preserving testimony, investigating crimes, prosecuting perpetrators, defending innocent people, teaching the next generation what happened.
Different roles. The same refusal to look away.
Those who deliberately murder, torture, abduct, or terrorize innocent people must be prevented from doing it again and held accountable wherever possible, however long that takes.
History teaches us why persistence matters. Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945. Adolf Eichmann escaped and lived in Argentina under an assumed name until Israeli agents captured him in 1960. He was tried, convicted, and executed in 1962.
Thank God there were Holocaust survivors who refused to decide that enough years had passed. Simon Wiesenthal spent decades pressing governments to find and prosecute Nazi perpetrators who had escaped justice.
Oct. 7 was not the Holocaust, and it does not need to be equated with the Holocaust for the lesson to matter.
We said “Never Again” after the Holocaust. But those words were never a prediction that evil itself would disappear. Human beings cannot make that promise.
“Never Again” is a promise about us.
It means that when deliberate cruelty returns, we will recognize it. That fatigue will not make us indifferent. That politics will not make us avert our eyes. That the passage of years will not transform atrocity into something we simply learn to tolerate.
We cannot promise that evil will never return. We can promise not to become accustomed to it when it does.
And that brings me back to Libi.
She did not spend her final minutes teaching anyone how to hate. Quite the opposite. While bleeding, frightened, and facing death, she used what remained of her life to tell the people she loved that she loved them.
Her last act was love.
Our response need not be hatred. But neither should it be forgetfulness.
I WAS TAUGHT TO HATE JEWS AS A CHILD. OCT. 7 IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THAT HATRED WINS
Grief asks us eventually to live again. Justice asks us not to become indifferent. Those duties are not contradictory.
She said goodbye with love. We should remember with anger — and turn that anger into the fortitude to make “Never Again” mean something.
Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
