Our history stolen: How October 7 is being taken away from us

We tend to think of history as a clear sequence of events, but the reality is messier. What we consider significant about the past is almost always shaped by hindsight. Major headlines can fade to footnotes, while seemingly minor events emerge as turning points once we understand their full context. This backward-looking perspective doesn't just influence what we remember - it can be weaponised to fundamentally reshape historical narratives.

The October 7th attacks on Israel offer a stark illustration of how quickly historical truth can be distorted. In the immediate aftermath of that autumn morning, the world watched in horror as the details emerged: families murdered in their homes, young people gunned down at a music festival, entire communities devastated. The raw footage, testimonies, and evidence painted an unambiguous picture of the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Yet barely a year later, this historical record is being systematically erased. 

Walking through university campuses today, one encounters a parallel universe where victim and aggressor have been inverted. At City, University of London, walls are plastered with posters proclaiming, “October 7th: One Year of the Genocide in Gaza,” while student groups circulate oversimplified infographics that distort complex geopolitical realities into reductive narratives. Rallies are held to reframe a day of mass violence, and academic departments release statements conspicuously devoid of historical or contextual nuance about the conflict's origins.

This isn't simply a matter of competing interpretations or differing viewpoints. What we're witnessing is a deliberate assault on historical memory - a coordinated attempt to rewrite a trauma while its wounds are still fresh. The strategy is as simple as it is effective: saturate the discourse with enough selective facts and contextually dishonest information, and even the most thoroughly documented atrocity can be buried under a fog of false moral equivocation and deflection.

This phenomenon reveals a troubling intellectual drift in how certain ‘progressive’ spaces have come to approach historical truth, particularly in academic and cultural circles.

What may have started as a noble quest for inclusive storytelling has morphed into a relativistic approach that treats historical facts like optional menu items—to be selected or discarded based on ideological preference.

The paradox is striking: progressive movements that traditionally positioned themselves as defenders of truth against power have, in many instances, adopted the very techniques of historical manipulation they once critiqued. This isn't limited to fringe activists - it has found purchase in prestigious academic institutions, where complex theoretical frameworks about power and narrative are sometimes deployed not to illuminate truth but to obscure it.

This ideological approach to history operates through several mechanisms. First, it positions all historical narratives as equally valid "perspectives," deliberately conflating the difference between interpretation and fact. Second, it employs a simplified framework of oppressor and oppressed that flattens complex historical realities into predetermined categories. Third, it selectively applies principles of historical criticism, subjecting some sources to intense scrutiny while accepting others uncritically when they align with preferred conclusions.

The result is a kind of historical relativism that serves ideological ends while claiming the mantle of progressive values. Events are not evaluated based on evidence or witness testimony, but on how well they fit into pre-existing narratives about power structures and systemic oppression. When historical facts prove inconvenient to these narratives, they are not merely reinterpreted but actively denied or inverted.

This approach is particularly insidious because it masquerades as a pursuit of justice. By co-opting legitimate tools of historical analysis—examining power structures, questioning dominant narratives, centering marginalised voices—it transforms these critical methods into instruments of historical distortion. The result is a framework that can rationalise almost any historical revision, so long as it aligns with prevailing ideological preferences.

For the Jewish community, this distortion has reached a grotesque zenith. What was once unthinkable—celebratory street parties in Britain following a terrorist attack—has become a disturbing reality. The October 7th attacks exposed a stark moral fracture, where some progressive voices seemed more interested in weaving a hierarchical narrative of victimhood rather than acknowledging mass murder.

Seemingly, this moral confusion finds its intellectual foundation in an emerging hierarchy of victimhood—a framework most starkly illustrated in the article draft that led to Diane Abbott's expulsion from the Labour Party. Her writing exposed how deeply this distorted worldview has penetrated even mainstream political thought. By attempting to categorise and rank different forms of discrimination, such thinking doesn't just betray the fundamental principles of anti-racism—it actively enables new forms of prejudice to flourish under the guise of progressive politics.

For Jewish students like myself, the consequences of this have been profound. New data produced by ‘Intra-Communal Professorial Group (ICPG)’ now show that 70% of Jewish students are concealing their Jewish identity on campus as anti-Semitism has increased threefold since 2022, according to data published by the CST group.

Just recently, at Queen Mary, University of London, a vigil conducted by Jewish students commemorating the anniversary of the October 7th massacre, required security intervention as a mob of students surrounded the ceremony with threatening anti-semitic chanting towards the attendees.

Such incidents have become increasingly commonplace, as similar incidents were reported across UK universities, with Jewish student life forced to go underground, as event information is passed in a tightly guarded, Samizdat-style, communication.

The double standard that has emerged defies even the most irrational strains of progressive ideology. Consider this: progressive commentators like Rivka Brown would rightly condemn any celebration of civilian deaths from 9/11 or the Bataclan Theatre attacks as morally repugnant. Yet when it comes to Israeli victims, a troubling exception has been carved out—one that speaks to a deeper, more insidious prejudice lurking beneath the veneer of progressive politics. This selective application of empathy, this carefully constructed blind spot when it comes to Jewish suffering, reveals not just hypocrisy but something far more disturbing: the resurrection of age-old bigotries dressed in the fashionable clothes of contemporary political discourse.