One year ago today, Texans awoke to the most-terrible news. Terrorists and killers were, on that bright Saturday morning, swarming into Israel’s towns, communities, neighborhoods, and homes — and commiting acts of murder, torture, rape, and kidnap that have not lost their ability to shock in the year since. It was the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, and the most-shocking terrorist act since September 11th, 2001.
Texans have an especial reason to remember this, on the first anniversary of those events. First and foremost is our own humanity, which compels us to sympathy and aid toward the victims of barbarism and cruelty. Second is our own Texas history and identity, which roots us in an understanding that anarchic and even evil neighbors in a hard land entails constant struggle: the right to exist is intrinsic and also never guarenteed. The great T.R. Fehrenbach wrote that Texas and Israel are alike in this sense, the two Lone Star republics, and he was right. We are alive to the dangers of an ungoverned frontier — whether it is on the Llano Estacado in the nineteenth century, or the Rio Grande in the twenty-first — and so we feel profoundly the crisis and pain inflicted upon our Israeli brothers and sisters. It could be us.
Of course we have another reason to remember, rooted in the inescapable fact that the massacres of October 7th, 2023, were an act of antisemitism that revives the worst memories of the Third Reich. Texas works because Texas exemplies a conservative toleration, grounded in law and liberty, that allows a flourishing of faiths and peoples within it. Jewish Texans, many of whom are our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and many of whom have endured real and personal grief in the war that began one year ago, are with us in that great Texas story — and so we are with them now.
The full lessons of October 7th, 2023, will ultimately be a matter for history. But we know a few of them already. The one worth noting here is that liberty and civilization require a constant defense. That’s our work. We do it in the halls of governance — but elsewhere it unfolds upon the field of battle.
Today, in both sorrow and resolution, we remember.