> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When Never Again Happened Again - URL: https://goodoil.news/when-never-again-happened-again/ - Published: 2026-10-07T23:30:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T23:30:02.000Z - Description: Remembering 7 October 2023. - Author: Reproduced with permission - Tags: World Politics, History, Anti-Semitism, Israel [**Ashley Church**](https://ashleychurch.com/when-never-again-happened-again/?ref=goodoil.news) *Digital creator* A couple of weekends ago I travelled to Auckland to speak in support of a Holocaust memorial created by my friend Perry Trotter and his wife Dr Sheree Trotter – an extraordinary body of work, commemorating something that many of us learned about at school. It reminded us that the Holocaust, or Shoah, didn’t start with death camps. It began in the 1930s, during a time when Jews were excluded from employment, education and public life. A time when their businesses were boycotted, their synagogues burned, and their citizenship was stripped away. These events provided a backdrop to what came later. Mass shootings, in 1941, which destroyed entire Jewish communities and, by January 1942, the Wannsee Conference, which gave official endorsement to a mass extermination programme which was already underway. Jews were deported across occupied Europe, worked to death, starved, shot and murdered in gas chambers. By 1945, six million were dead. Children, parents and grandparents had been erased from families that would never be whole again. In 1947, in the aftermath of this obscenity, the newly created United Nations passed a resolution sanctioning the partition of the Holy Land into an Arab State and a Jewish State. In May 1948, a new Israel State declared independence – carrying an ancient national identity and the determination that Jews would never again be helpless before those who wanted them destroyed. Never again. At the time, those words carried such promise – a statement of confident defiance and a vow to ensure that no Jew would ever again be hunted, simply for being Jewish. And, for a long time, it looked like the world agreed. But that was before anyone had ever heard of October 7, 2023. At dawn, on that day, three years ago, Hamas-led terrorists breached the Gaza border, poured into southern Israel and embarked upon a murderous rampage in which they attacked homes, streets, communities and a music festival. In what was to become the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, over 1,200 people were killed, and 251 people were carried off into Gaza – some alive, some dead. Almost a year later, I visited three of the sites of those horrific attacks. The city of Sderot, Kfar Aza kibbutz and the site of the Nova Music Festival – and what I saw, and heard, changed me forever. In Sderot, terrorists had opened fire in the streets and overran the police station – murdering more than 50 people. People like Yaakov Mortov – a 66-year-old Russian immigrant who had built a new life in Israel. That morning he had been on a minibus – part of a group heading out for a day out at the Dead Sea – but a flat tyre had brought the group to a halt beside a bus stop. In the last photograph of Yaakov, he is sitting on a bench holding his walking stick. Shortly after it was taken, Hamas terrorists had arrived, shooting Yaakov and 12 other members of the group at close range. A day trip for seniors ended with 13 people lying dead beside a bus shelter. At the Kfar Aza kibbutz, 10 kilometres south of Sderot, I walked down an alley lined with apartments that were riddled with bullet holes and covered in bloodstains in places where people had lived ordinary lives. Terrorists had moved from home to home, killing residents and dragging others away. The echo of that horror was there in front of me. Among the victims were the Kutz family. Aviv and Livnat, their daughter Rotem and their teenage sons Yonatan and Yiftach were all murdered in their home. Their bodies were found together on a bed, Aviv holding them all in a protective embrace. Livnat was about to turn fifty. Rotem trained young soldiers. The boys played basketball and dreamed of becoming professionals. Aviv had organised a kite festival along the Gaza fence to express a desire for peace – a festival which was supposed to take place that very day. Instead, all five were buried together. The same horror unfolded at Nir Oz, where 35-year-old Tamar and 36-year-old Johnny Siman Tov had sheltered with their five-year-old twin daughters, Shahar and Arbel and their two-year-old son, Omer, who loved tractors, running on the grass and making his family laugh. Early that morning Tamar had messaged other mothers to ask whether everyone was all right. Later, she messaged again to report that she had been wounded. Finally, the last message came from Johnny – to his sister – saying “they’re here, they’re burning us, we’re suffocating.” Terrorists had fired at the safe-room door and set the house alight. All five were murdered. And then there was the Nova Music Festival. A site at which young people had gathered to dance and celebrate life was turned into a bloodbath – at which those young people were hunted across the festival grounds, along escape routes and into roadside shelters. Over the course of the day the terrorists killed 378 of them in and around the festival and abducted 44 more. When I visited that site a year later I witnessed a stark visible reminder of this carnage. A sea of flags on sticks, located on the precise location where people had been dancing, each bearing the face of someone murdered. Every face belonging to somebody. Among these was Karin Journo (zor-noh) – a 24 year old airport worker who had gone to Nova despite a broken leg. At 8.43 that morning, she sent her family a final text: “To the whole family, I want to say that I love you a lot, because I am not coming home.” Her father later said that his daughter hadn’t gone to war. She had gone to a party. And she had been murdered. Then there was the sexual violence. Women who were raped, gang-raped, then murdered. A survivor hiding near the festival described watching terrorists rape a woman and mutilate her body. Others describe atrocities that are simply too graphic to remember – but remember we must. Eden Yerushalmi (yeh-roo-shall-me) was 24 and training to become a Pilates instructor. She had been working behind the bar at Nova. When the sirens sounded, she called home to say that the festival was closing and that she would be home soon. About an hour later, she called her mother again, crying: “They’re shooting at me!” Her sisters stayed on the phone as she hid in a car beside two murdered friends, pretending to be dead. Much of the time they listened in silence. Occasionally, Eden whispered that she could hear her friends’ blood dripping. They urged her to concentrate on their voices. Eventually, she escaped from the car and found shelter in bushes, where she hid for hours. In a separate, recorded call to police, she pleaded: “Please find me, okay?” But help never reached her. Still on the phone to her sister, she heard her attackers approaching. Her final words were: “Shani, they caught me.” Then the line went dead. She was taken into Gaza and eventually murdered with five other hostages in a tunnel. When her body was found she weighed just 36 kilograms – starved and eventually shot by the men holding her captive. 22 year old Shani Louk – a German-Israeli tattoo artist who loved music, travel and dancing – was also taken into Gaza. Footage showed her dancing at Nova before the attack – but later, her body was displayed in the back of a pickup truck in Gaza, surrounded by armed men. Her parents waited seven months before her remains finally came home for burial. Hersh Goldberg-Polin had just turned 23 and wanted to travel the world. The night before, as he left the family home, he told his mother, “Love you, see you tomorrow.” At 8.11 the next morning, she received two messages from him: “I love you.” Then: “I’m sorry.” She called him immediately – but the phone was never answered. He had made his way to a roadside shelter where a grenade had blown away part of his arm before he was taken alive into Gaza. His parents campaigned relentlessly for his return, but in August 2024 he was murdered with five other hostages in a Gaza tunnel. In fact, it was to be over two years before the final 20 living hostages were returned on 13 October 2025 – 738 days after capture – but 38 of those taken alive into Gaza were killed in captivity. Every one of them had a family waiting for them back home. There are those who say that 7 October didn’t happen in a vacuum. And they’re right. It didn’t. But let’s recognise its cause for what it was. It wasn’t a revolt against occupation. Israel had removed its settlements and permanent military presence in 2005\. Hamas seized control in 2007 and had ruled Gaza for 16 years before the massacre. It wasn’t the inevitable consequence of a territory receiving no help. International donors had poured assistance into Gaza. Israel supplied electricity and water and facilitated food, aid and employment. Hamas invested in weapons and tunnels while preparing to murder the people across the border. It didn’t happen because statehood had never been proposed. Proposals stretching back to the 1930s have repeatedly been rejected or left unrealised by Palestinian and Arab leaders. Nor was it a spontaneous response to a sudden incident. This was a prepared assault – meticulously planned over years by an organisation whose founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction and invokes the killing of Jews. But the context in which we must understand 7 October 2023 goes back much further – finding its roots in a hatred of Jews that reaches back more than 2,500 years. Hamas didn’t invent it – they simply repackaged it in religious duty, cultivated it through propaganda and taught it to children through indoctrination and military training. Antisemitism – the hatred of Jews – is a spiritual evil. Like an infection, it spreads through minds and hearts as people absorb and repeat it. No political agreement will end it. Only vigilance can defend against it. And as Jews, Christians and people who recognise it – we have a responsibility to act in the face of it. And, unlike 1930s Europe, we can’t claim that we didn’t know about it. We can’t retreat behind the excuse that we’re only one person. We are communities, churches, organisations and voters. Together, we have voices that can be heard. We can’t change what happens in Israel – but we can absolutely shape what is tolerated here. We can challenge Jew-hatred in conversations and on social media. We can stand beside Jewish neighbours, attend rallies, report threats and demand that schools, employers and public bodies confront intimidation. Next time you’re unsure about the extent to which you can make a difference – remember the faces on those flags at the Nova music site. Remember a father holding his family as they were shot, children trapped in a burning home, and a young woman whispering into a telephone while her friends’ blood dripped beside her. Let the Jewish people here see that their neighbours are prepared to stand beside them. Let those who would bring this hatred here hear our answer: not on our land. Not on our watch. We reject any attempt to rewrite what happened, minimise the atrocities or make the murdered responsible for their own deaths. We remember what happened. That it was Hamas that crossed the border. Hamas that entered those homes. Hamas that hunted those young people. No institution, politician or commentator has the moral right to erase that responsibility. We cannot restore the lives that were stolen. But we can keep their names alive, tell the truth about their deaths and oppose the hatred that killed them. When others distort the story, we must speak. When Jewish people are threatened, we must stand beside them. And when doing so costs us something, we must remember what it cost those who we honour. **The dead cannot answer those who would erase their suffering. We can. We must. And we will.** This article was originally published by [ashleychurch.com](https://ashleychurch.com/when-never-again-happened-again/?ref=goodoil.news).