What if . . .

. . . the world had not failed the moral test.

. . . found on Facebook:


Peter Himmelman

Counterfactuals are difficult.

It’s hard to predict how things would have turned out if the actions we took — the things we said, or didn’t say — had been different. And yet, there is merit in this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. In the best cases, problems would cease to be repeated; solutions to longstanding issues would be found more rapidly.
Let’s wind the clock backward to a date that for many people is a kind of before-and-after denominator.

October 7, 2023.

It was then that the world was handed a moral test.
It was not a complicated test — at least not for some of us.
It was brutal in its clarity: Terrorists stormed into Israel, slaughtering civilians, raping women in unspeakably brutal ways, burning families alive — and dragging nearly 250 kidnapped victims across the border into Gaza. Yes, for a few brief hours, the world held its breath. The bodies were still being counted. The blood hadn’t yet dried. Israel had not fired a single shot.
And then, all too quickly, much of the world chose to act.
Not to mourn for the dead.
Not to fight for the kidnapped victims.
But to blame the victims.
Rallies broke out in the streets of America and around the globe — not to condemn the carnage, the awfulness of the pogrom — but to condemn the Jews. To say out loud that the massacre was “arousing.” “Exciting.” “Justified.” “A Zionist hoax!”
Imagine if the world had chosen differently.
Imagine if, after October 7, the response had been one of moral clarity and courage.
What might have been?
1. What if, immediately after October 7, protests had broken out — not against Israel — but against Hamas, with tens of thousands in Times Square demanding "Bring Them Home!"?
2. What if Michelle Obama, who once vigorously campaigned for the kidnapped girls of Boko Haram, had raised her voice for Abigail Mor Edan, the 4-year-old orphan dragged into Gaza and the other kidnapped children?
3. What if women's rights advocates like Gloria Steinem and Emma Watson, had launched an international outcry over the mass rapes — and demanded the release of women hostages like Yarden Roman-Gat and others?
4. What if, aside from Bono, musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish (name your rockstars) had sung out for the kidnapped — dedicating concerts to their return, saying their names from the stage?
5. What if all the living American presidents — Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden — had appeared together at the White House to call for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages?
6. What if the UN Secretary-General António Guterres had issued daily demands for Hamas to release the kidnapped civilians, rather than suggesting that Israel was to blame for the "context"?
7. What if, at the Academy Awards, actors like Steven Spielberg, Natalie Portman, and Dwayne Johnson had stood silently for one minute in honor of the murdered — and the abducted still tortured in darkness?
8. What if journalists like Christiane Amanpour, Anderson Cooper, and the New York Times editorial board had reminded their audiences, day after day, that civilians were still being held underground, without Red Cross access, medicine, or sunlight?
9. What if the United Nations' women's rights bodies — UN Women — had launched an immediate global campaign, condemning the mass rapes committed by Hamas, demanding justice for Israeli women brutalized on October 7?
10. What if student groups had filled campuses not with Hamas flags, but with posters of the kidnapped — and held candlelight vigils, as they did for other victims of war and terror?
11. What if the International Red Cross — and its president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger — had fought as fiercely for hostage visits in Gaza as they have for prisoner access elsewhere, instead of falling nearly silent?
12. What if Hollywood voices like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, and Pedro Pascal had used their fame to say: Bring the hostages home. No conditions. No excuses.?
13. What if Jewish public figures like Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky had put aside their politics for one moment to say that Jewish children deserve life and freedom — full stop?
14. What if major news outlets — CNN, BBC, NPR — had placed the images and names of the hostages on front pages every single day until they came home?
15. What if Meta, X, and TikTok had made hostage posters unavoidable, instead of allowing their mass deletion under the excuse of "community guidelines"?
16. What if Amnesty International’s Agnès Callamard and Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth had begun every report on Gaza by naming the war crime of kidnapping civilians, and demanding their release?
17. What if religious leaders — Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Imam Mohamed Magid — had stood together to demand the hostages' freedom in the name of universal moral law?
18. What if world leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Rishi Sunak had organized marches not just for free speech or climate action — but for the kidnapped, whose lives hang by a thread?
19. What if women’s rights advocates like Malala Yousafzai and Tarana Burke (#MeToo founder) had called global attention to the girls and women still held hostage — some of them brutalized, unseen, unheard?
20. What if the world had remembered — not forgotten or ignored — that Hamas’s founding charter openly calls for the genocide of Jews, and understood that leaving hostages to rot is part of the same war that they started? What if the world’s only Jewish State had not become the lightening rod for the world’s scorn? What if? What if..?
But none of these things happened.
Instead, the world turned its animus toward Israel— and the hatred is only getting worse.
Here’s my answer to those counterfactual questions:
The war that Hamas started would have ended long ago. Hamas would be eradicated. The people they stole would be back home, alive —as would thousands of Gazans.
The very war that the world claims it cannot countenance — the very war that has students protesting on college campuses, that the keffiyeh-draped masses continue to rail against in the streets, blocking freeway traffic, preventing people from getting home by train and by air, screaming until their voices are raw — that war would have been over by now.
Hamas — which has held its own people hostage — would have lost its lifeline, its support, its most critical ally: a global population willing, and often eager, to offer succor to a virulent, radical Islamist terror group.
But as we know, none of these things happened.
Instead, the world turned away from ending the war the right way, the easiest way— and, in their silence as to its true cause, they are instead prolonging it.
Even as you read this, kidnapped people remain in Gaza.
Most have died.
All are dying.
Dying unseen.
Dying alone underground.
“I’m only an individual,” you say.
“I don’t have a platform.”
“Yes, you do.” I say in return.
Today, everyone does. Whether it’s four people or forty thousand, it all matters.
We all matter.
Courage matters.