A few weeks ago, I met Ofir Amir in Berlin. He is the co-founder and producer of the Nova Music Festival in Israel. Like me, Ofir is from Offenbach am Main before emigrating to Israel. Now he is organizing an exhibition that will be shown at various locations around the world, including Berlin, to commemorate the events and, above all, the victims of Oct. 7.
We talked about that day, the massacre, which Ferdinand von Schirach described in precise and unbearable words in WELT: "Videos show two dead Israeli female soldiers who were apparently shot directly in the vagina. One photo shows the body of a woman who had nails hammered into her thighs and groin area. A festival visitor testified that she hid under a tree during the massacre and covered herself with grass because she had been shot in the back. She said she saw a woman's pants being pulled down to her knees. A man stood behind her and raped her. Every time she tried to pull away, he stabbed her in the back with a knife. According to the witness, another woman was raped by a terrorist while another man cut off her breasts with a box cutter. In Be'eri and Kfar Aza, the bodies of women and girls were found in six houses. They were naked, mutilated and bound. On that day, 1,139 people were murdered. Among them were 695 civilians, including 36 teenagers and children. A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children."
Ofir himself was seriously injured by shots to his legs. He survived only because he was able to hide and then simply got lucky. Now he is trying to cope with the trauma by organizing his memories.
Since this conversation about the events of Oct. 7, I keep asking myself how Ofir Amir can bear what happened after Oct. 7. How he can bear that victims are turned into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims. That more and more often, it is concealed who started this war, what is action and what is reaction. How he can bear it that justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged. How he can bear what I can hardly bear, even though I am neither a victim nor a relative of victims.
Specifically: How do Ofir and millions of Jews around the world bear the fact that cookies were distributed and celebrations were held on the streets of Berlin on the evening of Oct. 7 and thereafter? That the people of Tehran celebrated the attack with public fireworks? That there was no distancing of the civilian population in Gaza, but instead cheering and desecration of Jewish corpses, which was then proudly captured in photos and videos and shared on social media?
How can Ofir bear that only a few weeks after the massacre, long before discussions about the appropriateness of Israeli retaliatory measures had begun, a representative survey by Harvard University found 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believed that the "killing of 1,200 Israelis was justified by the perceived grievance of the Palestinians"? Or that in an open letter signed by 144 Columbia University professors, the Hamas attack was described as "the exercise of the right of resistance of an occupied people against a violent and illegal occupation"? In a survey by The Economist, one in five young Americans aged 18 to 29 believed that the genocide of six million Jews was a myth.
How does Ofir cope when Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, along with two presidents of other universities, is questioned in the U.S. Congress about whether the "call for genocide against the Jews" on the Harvard campus violates the university's rules of conduct, and she repeatedly gives evasive answers that it depends on the context?
How does Ofir feel about French President Emmanuel Macron not participating in the large demonstration against anti-Semitism in Paris on November 12, 2023? Macron explained at the time that he had "never participated in a demonstration" in order to distract from the fact that he was probably afraid of the reactions of many of his increasingly radical Muslim voters.
How does Ofir feel about the fact that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada that the Israelis were doing "the dirty work" for us in the Middle East, but then, just a few weeks later on Aug. 8, 2025, massively restricted arms deliveries to Israel? Merz thus changed a basic principle of German state policy that had never been questioned by any German chancellor since Konrad Adenauer -- including Helmut Schmidt, Gerhard Schröder and Olaf Scholz -- despite much justified criticism of Israeli domestic and foreign policy. From now on, unconditional support for Israel's right to exist is effectively subject to conditions. Hamas has been strengthened. And the suffering of civilians on both sides will be prolonged.
How can Ofir bear it that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen finally declared on Sept. 10, 2025, that the EU Commission would suspend its bilateralaid payments to Israel, and shortly thereafter also recommended sanctions to Israeli ministers -- thus tipping the scales in the opportunists' domino game with a vengeance to the wrong side of history? In future, the EU will therefore be less supportive of those who fight terrorism in Israel and Europe, and more supportive of those who side with the terrorists. From 2021 to 2024, the EU was the largest donor offoreign aid to Palestinians with a "bilateral allocation" of 1.36 billion euros. This money benefited not so much the poor people in Gaza as the construction of tunnels and the arming of terrorists. And two years after the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, the EU went one step further: On April 14, 2025, the European Commission proposed "multi-annual comprehensive support program of up to €1.6 billion for the recovery and resilience of the Palestinian territories." Indirectly, the EU is thus subsidizing not the democratization of a region, but the prolongation of a war.
And how does Ofir feel about UN Secretary-General António Guterres' statement on Oct. 24, 2023: "It is important to note that the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum"? And in Sept. 2025, France, Belgium, Monaco, Luxembourg, Malta, Andorra, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal voted at the UN General Assembly for the formal recognition of a Palestinian state? This means that Palestine is recognized as a state by 157 of 193 UN member states, even though a large part of the Palestinian population is ruled, or rather tyrannized, by the terrorist organization Hamas, a dictatorial power that abuses its own people, civilians and especially children as human shields for military installations in order to produce images for a global propaganda battle. The lesson for terrorists and autocrats around the world is encouraging: recognition of a state that is an unjust regime does not come as a reward for establishing the rule of law, for peace, and for the release of hostages, but as a reward for the barbarism of Oct. 7.
And finally, how can Ofir and millions of Jews bear the fact that, as a consequence of this political blindness on the part of Europe and large parts of the democratic world, anti-Semitism is on the rise again in the Trojan horse of the woke movement? After Oct. 7, anti-Semitic crimes skyrocketed worldwide. In Germany alone, almost 1,000 cases were recorded between Oct. 7, 2023, and Nov. 9, 2023. The number of incidents recorded by the Research and Information Center on Anti-Semitism (RIAS) in 2023 was almost 83 percent higher than in the previous year. The French government reported over 1,600 anti-Semitic incidents in 2023, compared to around 400 in 2022. And in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a sharp increase in reported anti-Semitic incidents to more than 8,800 in the same year.
In 2025, Jews will also be killed in Washington and Manchester because they are Jews.
What will happen in Gaza during this historic week in Oct. 2025, whether Donald Trump will succeed where Europe failed to end the dying through a policy of solidarity and strength, is still unclear. What is clear, however, is that when it really mattered, Europe and large parts of the free world failed. The old anti-Semitic propaganda poison is still working: Once again, the Jews are to blame for everything. Even for their own murder.
I don't know how Ofir copes with this. I only know what conclusion he has drawn from it all.
After a long conversation in my office on Sept. 17, we walk through the sunny late afternoon in Berlin on Lindenstraße to the Jewish Museum, where a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany is taking place that day. Shortly before we arrive at the venue, which is guarded by snipers and police vans, I ask Ofir if he can imagine the Nova Festival taking place again in Israel one day, despite everything. After a moment's hesitation, Ofir says, "Yes. Otherwise, the terrorists would have won. We will dance again."