The project of the USC Shoah Foundation founded by Steven Spielberg has been collecting video testimonies of the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, adding them to the collection of Holocaust survivors’ testimony. It clarified for me the devastation of October 7. We now have a generation born to survivors of the slaughtered and burned of the Holocaust, facing again a tragic devastation – this time in our sovereign land, with the strongest army in the Middle East. A start-up nation – tiny in territory and population, but huge in its capacities in so many areas. The Phoenix that survived and rose in 1948 built an innovative and distinct state. And in one day we experienced a terrifying traumatizing destruction. Unimaginable inhumane cruelty of the Hamas murderers has marked the reality of our lives since October 7.

And all of us here our hearts are broken, shattered by unfathomable grief. Post- Holocaust Boomers who are now facing the old-time hatred rise in their old age, in the 21st century.  We witness an unprecedented wave of antisemitism – and in the most unexpected places, led by America’s elite universities.

We are also facing a corrupt and fundamentally destructive leadership in Israel, which sowed hatred and reaped a horrific massacre, kidnapping, and hostages; a leadership that to this day has not taken any responsibility for its failure and continues to enjoy the benefits of power to the fullest that works only to save itself from the long hand of the law. And the state? Let it burn. And it really burned. In the flourishing western Negev with blood everywhere. Land do not cover their blood…

And the IDF and the defense establishment also failed disastrously, but at least its leaders offered letters of resignation the next day and set out courageously– tragically late – to defend the country and the people with a decision to atone for the disaster – and a promise to resign.

We are now led by a failed, immoral and irresponsible leadership that brought a flourishing country to an unprecedented calamity, for which both our children and grandchildren will pay for years to come.

For the past 70 days – all of us, this entire nation mobilized in a civic burst of mutual responsibility and endless generosity, while living with unbearable pain, sadness and shock that do not go away.

It is the people of Israel, its civil society that is stepping up with compassion and courage that give me hope, an ancestral hope of three thousand years.

Matia Kam is an Israeli writer and commentator.