What I Learned Sitting with October 7 Survivors

By Malik Roberts
February 24, 2026

Recently, the inevitable finally happened.

I shook hands with two survivors of October 7, and I realized immediately: this was a place where history, trauma, and truth collided. I was the youngest person there—and the only Black face—and nothing could have prepared me for what I would hear. From the first words, the weight of what they endured hit me like nothing I had ever known.

The anger I felt was immediate—not just at the harrowing, unspeakable ordeals these two Israeli women endured—but at the absence of voices like mine in spaces where the rawest truths of survival were being shared.

One survivor gave me a lapel pin from Kibbutz Nahal Oz—the place where she and her family lived the day of the invasion. That gesture was immeasurable. It meant trust. Recognition. A bridge across experience. It reminded me that bearing witness is not passive—it is sacred work.

For both of the survivors, there was no distinction between Hamas and Palestinians. Their trauma left no room for nuance, and I understood why. It was personal. Immediate. Absolute. 

I shared how I had once been more pro-Palestinian than not. How the narratives I absorbed often misrepresented reality. How I had been led to believe the Palestinians were the metaphorical Native Americans of the region. How completely in the dark I was in regards to Zionism before October 7th happened. 

In that room, I realized that stories from afar cannot prepare us for lived reality. Ever.

As a tidal wave of odious demonstrations against Israel erupted all over the world, something in me just broke. News of the invasion, and the international reactions to the invasion, hit me harder than almost anything before it. I came to the realization that, once and for all, I had to do away with all of the lies, distortions, misrepresentations and half-truths about the Jewish homeland that I had been exposed to. Distrustful though I was about Israel, I knew even then that wiping out Israel would never, ever be the answer.

The survivors and I conversed about how deeply intertwined Jews and Blacks were in the fight to end segregation. We talked about how solidarity once crossed lines that today are almost irreparably fractured. And yet, even amid that history, I could not ignore the still-extant, self-contradictory dissonance in activist spaces where empathy for Israel is either muted or altogether absent. Not all of us harbor animus toward Israel—but fewer of us are willing to confront Israeli suffering honestly. That absence is perceptible, at best.

American democracy itself—however imperfect—could not exist in its current state if not for the extraordinary feats that Blacks and Jews did together sixty-odd years ago. Had there not been a March on Washington in 1963, I would not be alive today. Had there not been an American revolution in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, to name but two, we would not have an America.

I was unsettled by the stories I heard because both Jews and Blacks are the most terrorized, traumatized, and stigmatized peoples to walk the earth. The profound animus that has poisoned the relationships between us—relationships that were once fundamental to America’s moral and social future—is beyond belief. That history of solidarity has become ever more distant in the wake of October 7th.

And yet, the world did not pause for that intimacy. Antisemitism rages at a global fever pitch—after the war in Gaza ended; after the remaining hostages were restored to their families; after the attack on Bondi Beach; after Jews were brutalized, abused, and murdered on American soil post–October 7th.

We must also call out the ideology so many fear to name: anti-Zionism. It is not merely criticism of policy—it is antisemitism in mutation, amplified into its current, corrosive form. It denies Jews the indisputable right to exist on their homeland, it delegitimizes their lived experiences, and it disguises hatred as principle. That is not abstract. That is real. That is dangerous. And it demands moral clarity.

Dr. King perhaps never put it more powerfully than he did in a sermon back in 1957:

“You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate… The beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly becomes beautiful. The good becomes bad, and the bad becomes good. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater… But long before modern psychology came into being, the world’s greatest psychologist who walked around the hills of Galilee told us to love… because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.”

Rabbi Heschel said in a lecture six years later, “At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: ‘Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.’ While Pharaoh retorted: ‘Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.’

“The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses. Let us dodge no issues. Let us yield no inch to bigotry, let us make no compromise with callousness.”

And so we must love truth and justice, even while confronting hate in its most vicious forms. To deny antisemitism or to cloak it under the banner of anti-Zionism is to participate, whether knowingly or not, in the same distortion Dr. King described: the erasure of reality; the loss of objectivity; the inversion of good and evil.

Bearing witness to the survivors of October 7 reminded me that hatred is not abstract. It lives in rooms, in histories, in gestures small and large. And it is our responsibility to name it, confront it, and refuse silence. Anti-Zionism is not a debate—it is a moral line, and it must be recognized for what it is: antisemitism, plain and unvarnished.

We carry forward the work of love, witnessing, and truth. We must stand, unwavering, for empathy, for human dignity, and for the recognition that hate—whether cloaked in ideology or ignorance—destroys the soul of the world as well as the hearts of those it targets.

Experiences like this remind us that hate is never abstract. It lives in history, in rooms, in gestures, and it is our responsibility to see it, name it, and act with integrity.

Am Yisrael Chai.