The attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, unfurled 5,678 miles from America’s shores; they impacted just a handful of American citizens.

Yet they may prove to be, in retrospect, one of the more significant events in our nation’s recent history.

Because that’s the day when many Americans woke up and realized, to our absolute horror, that we were living in a very different country than the one we had imagined.

Before Israelis could even bury their 1,200 dead or attempt to rescue 240 hostages, before the IDF launched its operation in Gaza, thousands of our fellow Americans took to the streets — not to mourn the victims, but to cheer for their executioners.

On college campuses, students gleefully waved the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah, terror groups with a long and benighted tradition of murdering Americans as well as Israelis, and took pleasure in pummeling and harassing their Jewish classmates.

In print and on the air, pundits indulged in preposterous conspiracy theories, including logic-defying tales of Israelis allegedly training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

And if we sought escape by watching our favorite actors or listening to our favorite rock stars, we too often found them wallowing in bloodlust — sporting, for example, a pin shaped like a red hand to honor a Palestinian mob that lynched two Israelis in Ramallah in 2000.

Daily life began to feel like that terrifying scene, early on in every zombie movie, when the folks who used to be friends and neighbors are suddenly infected by some brain-rotting virus that turns them all into ghouls.

It was a tough reckoning.

In the three years since, as Americans of good will have tried to make sense of the torrent of Jew hatred suddenly flowing all around us, we’ve had to grapple with two devastating truths.

The first was that there was nothing sudden or spontaneous about this explosion of hate.

Our institutions of higher education, we were now forced to realize, spent the last three decades doing away with the dispassionate analysis of observable reality — the better to engage instead in advocacy on behalf of murderous regimes, groups and ideologies.

This wasn’t merely disheartening: It meant that America’s next generation of leaders had been indoctrinated with rank bigotry, and that the inflamed ideology of those classrooms had already seeped into newsrooms, boardrooms and everywhere else in public life.

The second and more disturbing truth had to do with the precise nature of this inflamed ideology.

The hordes marching, posting, podcasting and protesting on behalf of “Palestine,” we came to realize, did so not because they hated Israel or even because they hated Jews: Their real target was America.

That’s why the goons repeatedly seek to disrupt all-American occasions like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting ceremony; why they block roads, clog up airports and interrupt major-league baseball games.

Their end goal has nothing to do with Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF.

They want for a cowering America, a dispirited America, a downtrodden America that will give in to whatever these bullies may demand.

It’s the same logic terrorists have applied from time immemorial.

And it’s been frightening to find out how many of our fellow citizens, on the left and on the right alike, could regard this profoundly un-American attitude as politically advantageous and culturally chic.

They’ve been lending their support to candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul el-Sayed, even as these politicians dial up the hateful rhetoric and vow to stand with, not against, the violent thugs. 

But we’ve learned something else these past three years as well.

We learned, as if we needed another reminder, that this great and godly nation will not be easily overwhelmed by bullies.

For every Hamas-loving moron on campus, we saw scores of families pledging not to send their children and their disposable income to universities that do little but poison young, fine minds with anti-Western dross.

We saw audiences walk away en masse from entertainers who indulged the Palestine nonsense — which is why Ed Sheeran, to name but one recent example, is now selling his concert tickets for pennies on the dollar.

We saw a presidential administration rise up and take action, getting serious about everything from holding universities accountable to deporting foreign nationals who come here merely to spread hate and violence.

When future historians study these last few years, then, the story they’re likely to tell is not one of moral decline but of American resilience and rebirth.

Oct. 7, 2023, they will likely find, was the day we woke up from decades of insidious indoctrination, fought back to remake our institutions and recapture our culture, and recommitted to telling ourselves the only story that matters: the story of American greatness. 

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.