One day in October that we have to keep remembering

Documentary maker Dan Reed's new film focuses on just one of the kibbutzim attacked on 7 October, as he explains to Guy Walters why the memory must never be allowed to fade

- Guy Walters

We all know what happened a year ago in Israel – or at least we think we do. When we recall the multi-pronged Hamas attacks on 7 October, a horrific collage of gruesome images comes to mind. The idea of listing them seems lurid, almost grotesque – there is surely no need to endlessly replay them. But then perhaps there is. Ever since that day in which some 1,200 were killed, there has been a strange process of minimisation.

This has come in different forms, the most egregious being outright denial, with the conspiratorial claims that the attacks were either faked, or were false flag operations conducted by the Israelis to justify an assault on Gaza.

Then there is the suggestion that the attack was not mounted on that large a scale. This is quite simply not true, as there were terror assaults on at least 20 locations, and carried out by some 6,000 members of Hamas. To put that into perspective, that is more manpower than two brigades of the British Army. Furthermore, this suggestion of a small scale negates the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 rockets that were fired into Israel that day.

The final form of minimisation is more passive, and is perhaps the most common, and that is the act of partial forgetting. A year has gone by, during which so many other horrors have happened in the Middle East. Direct comparison between the number killed on 7 October, and the tens of thousands killed in Gaza is routinely made.

The implication of such a comparison is clear – the bigger the number, the bigger the crime. This, of course, is to evaluate morality with all the nuance of a football score. As the images of the horror dim in the mind’s eye, the massacres of that day are thought about in a more abstract form and there can be a tendency to not think about those numbers as actual people.