On Oct. 7 anniversary, standing with Israel means the free world’s salvation

There are rare moments when history illuminates the conflicts of our age and gives us a chance to choose good over evil.

Oct. 7, 2023, was this moment for our lifetimes.

That day, one year ago, we saw the devil on earth.

The Hamas terror group invaded Israel and carried out the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

With Iranian backing, they murdered, raped, wounded and tortured thousands of Israelis and foreign nationals, and dragged hundreds off to Gaza as hostages.

Since then, Israel has been fighting for survival and for justice.

There are still tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes in our country’s north.

Hamas is still holding 101 innocent Israelis, Americans and citizens of over 20 countries hostage in horrifying conditions.

Even as we do everything to achieve peace on our borders and bring our people home, Iran and its proxies have turned the massacre of Oct. 7 into a year-long attempt to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Yet developments over the past few weeks have made it irrevocably clear: The tide is shifting.

If Oct. 7 reminded us that we have no choice but to take genocidal antisemitism seriously, Israel’s categorical response has taught us something too.

Betting against Israel is a losing wager.

Indeed, Israel is on the front lines of the Western world’s self-defense against a tyrannical, illiberal, jihadist assault.

As terrorist leaders fall like dominoes, Israel is teaching everyone who will listen: Those forces of evil must be taken down. And they will be.

In 1983, the Hezbollah terror group sent suicide bombers to murder 220 US Marines and 21 other American servicemembers in their barracks in Beirut. The attack, which also claimed the lives of 58 French paratroopers, was the deadliest on the Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.

In July, Hezbollah’s despotic leader Hassan Nasrallah ordered missile strikes on Israel and murdered 12 Druze children playing soccer in the village of Majdal Shams.

Last month, this villain paid the ultimate price for his slaughter of Americans and Israelis.

Likewise Iran, as the head of this snake of terror, rattles a big saber.

But every day, it finds itself and its apocalyptic vision for the future increasingly isolated across the Middle East.

Turns out, Syrian, Lebanese and even Gazan citizens don’t enjoy being expendable pawns in Tehran’s insatiable quest for regional domination.

Instead, millions of decent and ordinary people want to join the Israeli-American sphere of strength, security, freedom and prosperity — catapulted into prominence by the Abraham Accords, through which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco courageously made peace with the Jewish state.

The Accords’ signatories have reaped staggering benefits. And the ayatollahs in Tehran have looked on, green with jealousy, as tomorrow’s Middle East leaves them behind.

On Oct. 7, they tried to torpedo this peace in the only way they knew — animalistic violence.

Through their proxy Hamas, they sent thousands of their most dangerous fighters, the Nukhba battalion — not to engage soldiers on a battlefield, but to gun down hundreds of young Israelis at the Nova music festival.

To torch villages, rape women, kidnap children and turn southern Israel into a wasteland.

For a year, everyone who pays attention has known that Israel didn’t start the fire, and never wanted this war.

Now, everyone knows something more: Such fights are not only ghastly, but futile.

Those who pick fights with Israel and the free world are signing their own warrants of death.

In the clearest way since the Hamas invasion, a picture is emerging of a new Middle East — with Gaza, Lebanon and even Iran liberated from the doomsday jihadist radicalism of their power-hungry “leaders.”

And so every single one of us has a choice.

Do we say no to the Iranian regime’s bloody and unwinnable assault on Israel?

Do we support the brave people of Iran in their quest to shed the shackles of dictators?

Do we admit that terror groups who scream “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” should be forcefully broken, not propped up indefinitely?

Do we internalize the fact that — for citizens of the free world — standing with Israel is self-preservation, while joining Israel’s enemies is slow-motion suicide?

It is time to choose. Time to support Israel and Western civilization against Iran’s radical Islamic axis of evil.

It will take work, but one year after the darkest day of our lives, we have a singular chance: To honor the memory of the fallen and guide our fractured world toward peace, justice and healing.

Ofir Akunis is Consul General of Israel in New York.