Joshua Hoffmanis a 35-year-old entrepreneur and author who has written three books, one about Israel and two about the Jewish world. The latest, “Journeys of the Jewish Spirit,” is available on Amazon. His newsletter Future of Jewish is the ultimate newsletter about Judaism and Israel.
The grief of October 7th still haunts every Israeli soul.
It wasn’t just a failure of security or intelligence; it was a shattering of our national innocence, the brutal end of a belief that goodwill could protect us.
And yet, in the face of one of the worst atrocities in Jewish history, there are those among us — the Israeli leftist elite — who continue to point fingers not at the monsters who crossed the border with murder in their hearts, but at their own people.
I can’t forgive that.
The problem is not just Hamas. It is Israel’s own elites, the NGOs, the academic class, the so-called humanitarians — those who have spent decades undermining victory, pursuing policies of enriching and placating Palestinian Arabs based on “the hope that being nice will win reciprocal gestures.” Each has spectacularly failed. Instead of acknowledging this failure, they double down, desperate to preserve their moral vanity.
If you want to be taken seriously — truly, sincerely — then start here: No failure of the Israeli army (and yes, there was one) caused October 7th to happen. No single act of an Israeli politician caused October 7th to happen. No Israeli politician or citizen is responsible for the deaths, the suffering, the pain, the torture, the starvation, the beatings, the abuse of the hostages for every one of these last 511 days.
You’ve accused the wrong people, the wrong country. You’ve maligned the innocent, brought down generals, charged soldiers with impossible tasks, and judged our leaders as failures for not releasing hostages they aren’t holding.
There is one single entity responsible for everything: Hamas, the regime that rules Gaza with sadism and genocidal intent. The evil comes from there — and from Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria. That evil isn’t theoretical or political; it is operational, strategic, and relentless.
Could the IDF have responded faster? Probably. Did they just release detailed information about where the breakdowns were? Yes. But had there been a breakdown in communication with no attack, no one would have died. The existence of Hamas made the cost of that breakdown a massacre.
If you want to know who could have “brought them home” alive, look to the United Nations and every so-called human rights organization that sat in silence, complicit, while Israeli hostages suffered in darkness.
And if you insist on blaming the IDF and the Israeli government, then you must also hold accountable those who opened their homes to our enemy, those who lobbied for gestures of goodwill, who told the world — and our enemies — that Israel is a country of peace-loving weaklings. That we have no spine for war. That we’ll compromise endlessly, no matter how many of our children bleed.
Let’s not forget: The modern State of Israel was founded by the Left. From the Mapai Party to Labor Zionism, the Left dominated Israeli politics and society for the first three decades of the country’s existence. It built the kibbutzim, the Histadrut (Israel's largest trade union and a powerful social movement), the socialist economy, the government-run monopolies. It laid the groundwork for the physical state — and for many of the long-term dysfunctions that would follow.
And while it deserves credit for nation-building under impossible odds, we must also be honest: the Israeli Left had no idea how to govern in the treacherous Middle East. Its view of geopolitics was naive. It believed that utopian ideals and collective farms could stand up to regional hostility, that moral posture could compensate for security vigilance, and that neighborly gestures could melt decades of genocidal intent. That illusion cost lives — then, and now.
Economically, its policies were equally disastrous. The command-and-control structure it imposed on Israel’s economy created inefficiency, corruption, and bloated bureaucracy. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the country had been rocked by two bouts of massive inflation, culminating in a near-total economic collapse. At its worst, inflation reached over 400 percent annually. The shekel was worthless. The average Israeli couldn’t keep up with prices that changed weekly, sometimes daily.
It took a dramatic shift away from the leftist economic model — led ironically by coalitions the Left hated — to save the economy. Only when free-market principles were introduced did Israel begin its transformation into the start-up nation, a global leader in technology and innovation.
So when today’s Israeli Left speaks with such moral superiority — as if they alone understand the soul of the nation — we must remember: They have failed before, and they are failing again. They built the early state, yes, but they nearly buried it under ideological rigidity and economic mismanagement.
What’s more, the Israeli Left (a minority after all) has spent decades trying to convince the world, and the rest of Israel, that peace comes from surrender, that empathy will melt away hatred. That if we just humanize our enemy, they will stop trying to dehumanize us.
It was a beautiful dream. But October 7th killed that dream. And the Israeli Left’s unwillingness to face that truth — their insistence on mourning the collapse of their ideology more than the collapse of our safety — is a betrayal I cannot overlook.
On October 14, 2023 — exactly one week following October 7th — I said to my Israeli cousin: “Just watch, in a few weeks or months the Israeli Left will take to the streets, wailing and screaming about how the real crime isn’t what Hamas did to us, but how our own government responded. They’ll say the hostages are being forgotten, that the war is immoral, that Bibi is the devil, and that somehow, somehow, Israel is to blame for all of this.”
And sure enough — they did. Like clockwork. As if the bodies weren’t still being identified, as if the screams of that day had faded into background noise, they reemerged not with unity, but with slogans. Not with a vision for victory, but with recycled protests and righteous outrage aimed not at Gaza, but at Jerusalem.
The Israeli Left, in its current form, has not only failed to process the lessons of October 7th; it has exploited this war to reassert its own failed ideology. Every development in this war, every tragedy, every difficult decision has been twisted into another excuse to demonize the Israeli right.
The hostages — those we all pray for, cry for, march for — have become, for many on the left, not a symbol of our shared pain, but a political weapon. Instead of focusing solely on the inhumanity of those who hold them captive, they direct their fury inward, using the hostages as a bludgeon against the government, as if Israel is the jailer, not the victim.
They cheered the resignation of the Shin Bet chief not because it offered clarity or accountability, but because it gave them one more scalp in their campaign against a government they loathe — a loathing that runs deeper than policy differences. It’s not really about Netanyahu anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s about the Israeli left’s total inability to reconcile with a nation that has, time and again, rejected its utopian vision in favor of realism and resilience.
In their worldview, the true enemy isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis — it’s the right. It’s the settlers. It’s the religious. It’s the Zionist who believes in Jewish power and defense and sovereignty. And that hatred has blinded them. It has made them incapable of unity, incapable of reflection, incapable of change.
This has nothing to do with holding leaders accountable and everything to do with salvaging a broken ideology. They do not oppose the war because they think it’s unjust. They oppose the war because it confirms what they most fear: that their decades-long program of appeasement, withdrawal, and moral relativism has utterly failed.
Ultimately, we gain nothing by blaming each other — nothing, that is, except offering our enemies a victory they could never achieve on the battlefield.
But blame is not the same as accountability. And if the Israeli Left wants to regain the moral high ground they so desperately cling to, they must start by acknowledging who attacked us, who raped, murdered, and kidnapped us — and who didn’t.
Forgiveness starts with truth. Until then, I can’t forgive you.