On Simchat Torah three years ago, Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border fence and murdered some 1,200 people, including 46 Americans. They dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. The terrorists chose a Jewish festival of joy for their slaughter, and this week their admirers are building a festival of their own on the same date, celebrating the massacre of Israelis and mourning the Israeli response.
From Berkeley to Berlin and from Montreal to Wollongong, activist groups have scheduled vigils, marches and lectures for October 7. They share one vocabulary: “martyrs,” “resistance,” and the “Flood,” Hamas’s own name for the invasion. One American network has declared the date a national day of action and calls on every city to observe it. A Canadian offshoot of a designated terror group is hosting a discussion marking three years of the Toufan, Arabic for “flood.”
Three years on, the anniversary is being hijacked twice. The murderers are recast as martyrs, and the massacre is recast as a chapter of the Nakba, the “catastrophe” Palestinians say began with Israel’s founding in 1948. The inversion reaches all the way to the United Nations. The UN’s official Nakba page describes its 2024 commemoration as examining an ongoing Nakba “culminating in the current war on Gaza.” That war began when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7. In the UN’s telling, the massacre of Jews opens a Palestinian catastrophe. At a Catholic prayer service on the last anniversary, the mother of Jesus was recast as a Palestinian.
Hijacking the date
The Anti-War Action Network has posted an “October 7: National Day of Action” on its website. The network “calls on all cities nationally to mark another year of genocide and resistance.” Its lead slogan declares that resistance is justified when people are occupied. The network lists anniversary rallies on October 7 in Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Tulsa, and Zeeland, Michigan, where protesters will gather outside Woodward HQ.
In New York, the Palestinian Youth Movement is calling supporters into the streets for what it bills as an international day of action, to march for the living, for the martyrs and for Palestine. This May, on Nakba Day, a PYM New York activist promised a return to every inch of the land, from the river to the sea.
At UC Berkeley, the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter is promoting a lecture series billed as “Al Aqsa Flood Anniversary Talks.” The speaker is Mohamed Abdou, a former Columbia University visiting professor, who appears at Berkeley on October 6 and at the Claremont Colleges on October 7 as part of a tour he calls “Death to the Akademy.” Shortly after the massacre, Abdou posted: “I’m with Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”
According to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Claremont talk on the anniversary itself promises organizing lessons drawn from Gaza’s mujahideen, the Arabic term for holy warriors that Hamas uses for its own fighters. The Instagram promotion carries an inverted red triangle, the marker Hamas uses to tag Israeli targets in its propaganda videos, beside a drawing of a terrorist armed with a rocket-propelled grenade.
The most explicit event of the week is in Canada. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s Violent Extremist Threat Monitor, a Canadian offshoot of Samidoun promoted an October 7 event titled “Reflections on Resistance: A discussion marking 3 years of the Tou-Fan.” Tufan al-Aqsa, “the Al-Aqsa Flood,” is Hamas’s name for the invasion. Canada listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity in October 2024, and the U.S. Treasury Department designated it the same month as a sham charity raising money for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
In London, the University of London Coalition, a network of pro-Palestinian student groups, plans an October 7 march from King’s College London to University College London, passing the London School of Economics and SOAS. The Metropolitan Police publicly urged the organizers to change the date and said they cannot find anyone willing to take responsibility for the march. The Met is deploying more than 600 officers across the city this week. Union of Jewish Students president Raphi Leon answered the organizers with a single fact: “There are 365 days of the year.”
London’s students marched on the anniversary last year as well, one of a wave of October 7 rallies Reuters counted in Sydney, London, Paris, Geneva, Athens, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and Stockholm. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the planned protests “un-British” and said Britain had grown indifferent to antisemitism. The rallies went ahead days after a terrorist attacked a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, killing two men.
In Germany, the Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine reports anti-Israel demonstrations scheduled for October 7 in Berlin, Duisburg, Frankfurt, Hanover and Cologne. In Hanover, a group calling itself Intifada Hannover will march from the main train station under the slogan “Resistance until victory,” beside a map covering the entire Land of Israel. In Berlin, a demonstration called Down with Colonialism promotes itself with an image of a large excavator tearing open a border fence, the method Hamas used to breach the Gaza barrier on the morning of the massacre. That same afternoon, the Central Council of Jews in Germany will hold a memorial for the victims at Bebelplatz.
In Sweden, Lund Students for Palestine will march across campus at noon on October 7 under the banner “It did not start on October 7th,” the same message the marchers in Duisburg and Cologne will carry. The march demands an academic boycott of what the organizers call the genocidal state, followed by an evening fundraiser.
In Missouri, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is following the money. She has opened an investigation into SJP’s fundraising, issuing civil investigative demands to National SJP and the University of Missouri chapter for records of every charitable dollar raised from Missourians. Missouri, Hanaway said, “will not be exploited as a cash conduit for terrorists in the Middle East.” Her office recalls that National SJP greeted the massacre with a “Day of Resistance” toolkit hailing the attack as a historic victory for the Palestinian resistance. That toolkit was the first draft of the anniversary now being observed on campuses across America.
Celebrating the Shahid martyrs
The anniversary events share one honor roll. At the University of Texas at Austin, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is promoting an October 7 vigil on the South Mall Lawn that invites students to honor the martyrs as an act of resistance. The announcement ends with “Glory to the martyrs.” At UCLA, SJP scheduled a martyrs’ vigil for October 6 and a march from Bruin Plaza on the anniversary. At Howard University, a flyer for a “Vigil for the Martyrs” pairs three years of genocide with three years of resistance. All three were documented by researcher Melissa Brodsky, who tracks the anniversary organizing on her Substack, The Lioness Writes.
At the University of Toronto, student groups planned an October 7 vigil titled “Honoring Our Martyrs” on the steps of Sidney Smith Hall. On October 3, the university told the organizers the event could not go ahead, citing safety and operational concerns, an unsuitable space, and online calls for counter-protests. Last year, administrators at the university’s Mississauga campus urged the organizers of an event with the same title to change its name or its date, and the organizers refused.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs warned that some Canadian campuses will mark the anniversary by “honouring the terrorists as ‘martyrs’ and calling for intifada.” Casey Babb, a national security expert at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told The Jerusalem Post that the anniversary events “feel like celebratory gatherings to honor our murderers.” Hillel Ontario CEO Jay Solomon was blunter: “There is no justification for honouring those who murdered, tortured, and kidnapped innocent people.” Other Canadian campus events are going ahead, including a gathering at the University of British Columbia and a rally at McGill University’s Roddick Gates in Montreal.
The honor roll extends to Hezbollah. MEMRI documented a Windsor, Ontario, mosque commemorating the second anniversary of the death of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. On September 26, an account affiliated with the mosque posted: “We will remember the Great Martyr of Lebanon & #AlQods worldwide & call for justice for his sacred oppressed blood.” Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.
In Sydney, a vigil is set for Town Hall on October 7, the third straight year the venue has hosted an anniversary vigil. NSW Premier Chris Minns branded this year’s vigils obscene. In 2024, the Palestine Action Group billed its Town Hall vigil as mourning twelve months of genocide and terrorism, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it “incredibly provocative.” Last year, on the eve of the anniversary, organizers spelled out “Stop Genocide: 730 Days” in candles on the Town Hall steps, counting the days from the massacre itself. The same week, a group called Stand for Palestine Australia held an event in the suburb of Bankstown titled Glory to Our Martyrs.
South of Sydney, the Wollongong Friends of Palestine advertised their October 7 vigil as a moment to remember the martyrs and all those who continue to resist. Michele Goldman, CEO of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, said that holding such an event on October 7 is “like remembering Al-Qaeda on September 11.”
The group’s spokesperson, Anke Klevjer, removed any doubt about whom the vigil honors. She told the Illawarra Mercury that “martyr” was meant in its Arabic sense, shahid, for Palestinians who died in a noble cause since that day. The honored dead, she said, include those killed during “legitimate forms of resistance against the illegal Israeli military occupation.”
The word carries a precise meaning. In Islam, a shahid is one who dies fighting in the path of Allah, promised a place in paradise and exempted from the ritual washing given to other dead. Hamas calls its suicide bombings amaliyat istishhadiya, “martyrdom operations,” and the Palestinian Authority’s Martyrs Fund pays monthly stipends to the families of terrorists killed while attacking Israelis.
In Gaza, the men killed during “resistance” are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, and by the organizers’ own definition they belong on the honor roll. Hamas’s shahid earns his title by the lives he takes, and the honor roll is written in Jewish blood.
October 7 as Nakba
The second hijacking runs through the Palestinian calendar. Every May 15, Palestinians and their supporters mark Nakba Day, set on the day after Israel declared its independence in 1948. Since the massacre, Nakba Day and October 7 have been fusing into a single story.
The movement’s writers say so openly. In a 2024 column in the Saudi daily Arab News, Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestine Chronicle, wrote that the Nakba had faded as a cause until “Oct. 7, however, changed all of that.” In his telling, the massacre made the world remember 1948.
Nakba Day now celebrates the massacre. This May, the ADL counted more than 30 Nakba Day protests across America, several openly supporting October 7. In Seattle, protesters chanted “death to Zionists” behind a banner reading Long Live Operation Al Aqsa Flood. The organizers, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, SJP, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Within Our Lifetime, are the same groups running this week’s anniversary events.
The October 7 events return the favor. California State University, San Bernardino lists an SJP vigil on its official calendar that invites students to “commemorate the lives lost since the beginning of the settler-colonial project,” with no mention of the 1,200 people murdered on the date it chose. In Cape Town on Saturday, Palestinian journalist Sharif Moosa answered anyone who raises the massacre: “What about October 7th? Well, what about 100 years of colonisation?” May 15 now honors the Flood, and October 7 now honors the Nakba.
The United Nations gives the Nakba an official home. Since 2023, General Assembly resolutions have mandated an annual UN commemoration every May 15. October 7 gets a statement from the Secretary-General’s spokesman. UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said that António Guterres, weeks after the massacre, “effectively gave legitimacy and justification for what Hamas did.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani brought that calendar to City Hall. This May, his office produced an official Nakba Day video declaring that the Nakba continues to this day, apparently a first for a New York mayor. UJA-Federation of New York answered that the refugees “exist because 22 Arab states launched a war to destroy Israel.” Last year, as a candidate, Mamdani marked October 7 by calling the massacre a war crime, then accused Israel of genocide in the same statement. Wednesday will show which date the mayor of the largest Jewish city in America treats as the catastrophe.
The hijacking has reached the altar. On the second anniversary, at an interfaith prayer service at the University of Notre Dame, Sister Annie Killian, a Dominican nun and vice chair of Pax Christi USA’s national council, told worshippers that the two years of war extend a 77-year Nakba of occupation and dispossession. She noted that October 7 is the Catholic memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary, and described the mother of Jesus as “a Palestinian Jewish woman” who raised a Palestinian Jewish son under Roman colonial occupation. Jesus, she said, is found today under the rubble of Gaza with his crucified people, a phrase borrowed from the Bethlehem Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac. Her reflection closed with the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the words Free Palestine. Pax Christi USA’s own introduction to the prayers called the October 7 terrorists militants, and Sister Killian called the Gaza dead martyrs.
Mary and her son were Jews of Galilee and Judea. The name Palestine came later, imposed by the Roman emperor Hadrian, who renamed the province Syria Palaestina after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE in order to erase the Jewish name from the map. Calling Mary a Palestinian adopts the vocabulary of the empire that destroyed Jerusalem. Casting Gaza as the crucified people and Israel as Rome is replacement theology in its oldest form: the Jews lose their own story, and their enemies inherit it.
