I look at this day very differently than most people. I have to. For my own mental health. There is no debating that October 7, 2023, will go down as one of the darkest days the Jewish people endured in a long history of persecution. Nothing will change that. At the same time, as someone who experienced the effects of terror on our family, I spent the last three years reminding myself that we are going to be okay. I spent all day, every day, trying to avoid seeing or even reading about the atrocities—something that, as you can imagine, is not easy to do given that I spend so much time on social media. But again, my mental health. I can’t read about those details. It’s beyond my emotional threshold. Now, I’ll pause here and ask you, whoever you are, to think carefully about whether you’re able to see a different perspective on this day, or whether it’s too raw for you and my finding the light at the end of the tunnel would offend you today. If a positive perspective is not what you’re able to read right now, that’s fine. Keep scrolling. If you think that now, on this day, it is inappropriate to seek positivity, that’s fine. It is what I, and so many others, need right now, but again, if it’s not for you, keep scrolling. If, however, you’re like me and you need a reason to hope, to even smile, keep reading. I contemplated myself whether to share this today but I decided that we need this today more than ever. I’ll say it again. None of what I’m about to say negates the fact that 10/7 was a terrible and devastating day. Okay, you’re still here? So here is my perspective on these past three years, starting from that dark day when the world changed 180 degrees. “October 7 was the darkest day in our history.” I’m sorry, but as devastating as that day was—and it was extremely devastating—the above statement is not true. Not even close. What was the holiday of Purim? It commemorates an actual attempted genocide of the Jewish people. It was the ruler of an empire agreeing to annihilate us. We were done. Or we were supposed to be done. Today we celebrate that day. What was Hanukkah? It commemorates a war we were not supposed to win. And today we celebrate. As the joke goes, so many of our holidays can be summarized as: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.” Now let’s get down to the details and how the three years of miracles began on that day. I’m not a mathematician. Are you? Well, I’d like an explanation of the math on that day. Roughly 6,000 Gazans crossed into Israel on October 7, according to later Israeli assessments, including approximately 3,800 trained Hamas terrorists. They entered a country smaller than New Jersey. In many places they had hours before substantial military forces arrived. They carried enormous quantities of weapons and ammunition and had one central objective: kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible. Think about those numbers. If every one of the approximately 3,800 trained terrorists had killed just one additional person, the death toll would have been several times higher. They could have continued deeper into Israel. Some of the terrorists carried plans and maps for targets far beyond the Gaza border communities. At Re’im, for example, an overwhelmingly outnumbered local security team, police officers, armed residents, and off-duty soldiers fought approximately 100 terrorists. Their stand not only saved people in Re’im; investigators later found maps of Nevatim Airbase on terrorists who were stopped there. Similar stories unfolded throughout the south. Ordinary Israelis grabbed weapons, drove toward the fighting, rescued strangers, treated wounded people under fire, and stood between terrorists and communities while the military command structure struggled to understand what was happening. How many thousands more would have died without them? I can’t use the word “miracle” to describe October 7 itself. That day is simply too dark. But I also can’t look at what could have happened and not feel overwhelming gratitude that it wasn’t even worse. More than 1,200 worlds were destroyed. More than 1,200 families will never be the same. And 251 people were dragged into Gaza. Those numbers could have been dramatically higher. For that, I am grateful. But let’s actually examine the miracles we experienced on that day and all the days that followed. Thank you to my friend @RationalSettler for compiling so much of this unbelievable list. I asked him to make a list of all the miracles. It took him days but he made it. I’ll share the link to his document in the comments below. Okay, here we go. In the three years since October 7, 2023, Israel has absorbed a massacre, a multi-front war, and repeated ballistic-missile barrages. And yet here we are. Our enemies’ leadership has been decimated. Our borders are dramatically different. Our currency strengthened. Our markets reached extraordinary levels. Operations once dismissed as impossible actually happened: the pager operation, the destruction of Hezbollah’s leadership, hostage rescues in broad daylight, strikes deep inside Iran, and the elimination of some of the most heavily protected enemy commanders in the Middle East. Economists can list causes. Generals can explain tactics. Engineers can explain interception systems. Intelligence officers can explain years of preparation. And we should absolutely give them all the credit they deserve. But as a believing Jew, I can also look at the cumulative gap between what could have happened and what actually happened and see something else. I see the hand of God. So what happened on 10/7, and what could have happened? On October 7, Israel’s military and intelligence systems suffered a catastrophic failure. And then something extraordinary happened. Soldiers, civilians, reservists, police officers, medics, security teams, and ordinary people filled the vacuum. People drove SOUTH. Think about that. While terrorists were still roaming southern Israel, Israelis got into their cars and drove toward them to rescue people they had never met. Local security teams, sometimes consisting of a handful of people, fought dozens of heavily armed terrorists. Police officers fought until their ammunition ran out. Medics treated people while under fire. Parents defended children. People opened their homes to strangers. An entire nation mobilized almost overnight. And then came the missiles. Israel’s aerial-defense system went into the largest and most complex real-world test in its history. For the first time, Israel’s different aerial-defense layers operated simultaneously in combat—Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, and other systems—against rockets, cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles arriving from multiple directions. And then came the night of April 13, 2024. Iran directly attacked Israel with more than 300 aerial threats, including roughly 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Think about that. More than 300 weapons launched toward a country the size of Israel in a single night. The reported interception rate? Approximately 99%. Not one of the approximately 170 Iranian drones crossed into Israeli territory. Not one of the cruise missiles crossed into Israeli territory. Ninety-nine percent. Read that again. NINETY-NINE PERCENT. If you had written that into a movie script before it happened, people would have told you it was unrealistic. And that was only the beginning. The war in Gaza was fought above and below ground against an enemy that had spent years preparing tunnels, rockets, booby traps, weapons caches, and the October 7 attack itself. Intelligence, medicine, civilian logistics, and Israel’s defensive systems prevented the fighting from becoming the catastrophe the scale of the battlefield could have produced. Israeli intelligence subsequently hunted down October 7 participants one by one. By October 2026, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that approximately 4,000 of the roughly 6,000 people who crossed into Israel on October 7 had been killed. Four thousand. Gaza-border communities began rebuilding. Families returned. Homes were rebuilt. Communities terrorists intended to erase from the map are alive. After years of development, Rafael and the Defense Ministry delivered the first operational high-power Iron Beam laser system—Or Eitan—to the IDF on December 28, 2025, after tests successfully intercepted rockets, mortars, and UAVs. Actual lasers! Israeli medicine adapted at incredible speed. Whole blood and freeze-dried plasma were used in the field. Volunteer civilian logistics networks supplied front-line units when the normal supply system was overwhelmed. Israel fought one of the most difficult forms of warfare imaginable: dense urban warfare above an enormous tunnel system. Hamas’s military structure and tunnel network were systematically degraded. That’s Hamas. What about Hezbollah? Three years after October 7, the army that spent decades preparing to invade northern Israel is a shadow of what it was. Its communications devices became weapons against it. Its commanders were found. Its leadership was killed underground. Its weapons infrastructure was attacked on a massive scale. Thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded nearly simultaneously on September 17, 2024. The following day, radios and walkie-talkies exploded. Just stop and imagine hearing that story before it happened. You’d laugh. You’d say it sounds like something out of a spy movie. Except it happened. Then Israel’s intelligence penetration allowed it to systematically target Hezbollah’s command structure. Ibrahim Aqil and senior Radwan Force commanders were killed. Then came Hassan Nasrallah. A man who had spent decades hiding from Israel. A man protected by one of the most powerful terrorist organizations on earth. A man sitting in a fortified underground command center beneath Beirut. Israel found him. And on September 27, 2024, Israel killed him. Hezbollah’s leadership was devastated. Its invasion capabilities were severely degraded. Its rocket and missile infrastructure suffered enormous damage. The force that was supposed to invade the Galilee instead spent the following years trying to survive. Astounding. And what about Syria? When the Assad regime collapsed, one of the great fears was that Syria’s enormous military arsenal would fall intact into the hands of jihadist groups or other enemies of Israel. It didn’t. Within roughly 48 hours, Israel carried out more than 350 airstrikes against strategic Syrian military infrastructure. Aircraft. Air-defense systems. Missile sites. Drones. Naval vessels. Weapons depots. Israel also took control of strategic positions, including on Mount Hermon, rather than waiting for hostile forces to occupy them first. Again: imagine someone describing that scenario on October 8, 2023. You would have thought they were insane. And now to the big fish. Iran. Iran had spent decades building an enormous regional axis around Israel. Hamas. Hezbollah. Islamic Jihad. The Houthis. Militias in Iraq and Syria. Ballistic missiles. Drones. A nuclear program. For decades, Iran was treated as the untouchable center of the entire system. Then came June 2025. During Operation Rising Lion, Israeli aircraft flew deep into Iran and struck nuclear, missile, air-defense, military, and leadership targets. Iran responded with approximately 550 ballistic missiles and around 1,000 drones. Let those numbers sink in. Five hundred and fifty ballistic missiles. One thousand drones. And how many Israelis were killed during those 12 days? Twenty-eight. Every one of those 28 lives is an entire world. Every one is a tragedy. But think about what hundreds of ballistic missiles carrying enormous warheads are designed to do. Think about what the casualty projections could have looked like. Instead, approximately 90% of the ballistic missiles headed toward populated areas were intercepted. The overwhelming majority of drones never reached their targets. During the operation, no Israeli manned combat aircraft was reported shot down over Iran. Israeli aircraft repeatedly flew more than a thousand kilometers into one of the most heavily defended countries in the region, attacked, and returned home. Senior Iranian military commanders were eliminated in the opening strikes. Among them were armed-forces chief Mohammad Bagheri, IRGC commander Hossein Salami, Gholamali Rashid, and aerospace-force chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh. Iranian nuclear scientists were also killed. And then, in February 2026, the unthinkable happened again. During a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the man who had ruled Iran since 1989 and spent decades building the regional architecture designed to destroy Israel—was killed. Think about the world on October 7, 2023. Sinwar was alive. Haniyeh was alive. Nasrallah was alive. Khamenei was alive. Iran’s senior military command was alive. Hezbollah’s senior command was alive. Now think about October 7, 2026. Do you understand how extraordinary the transformation of this region has been? Miracles. Now, I want you to stop and ask yourself an honest question. When Israel eliminates one of these senior commanders, do you stop to think about what went into that operation? Do you thank God along with our soldiers? Because every one of these operations requires an unbelievable combination of intelligence, technology, courage, precision, timing, decision-making, and yes, luck—or, as I would call it, divine assistance. Let’s examine that. HAMAS Yahya Sinwar was located and killed in Gaza in October 2024. Mohammed Sinwar and other senior Hamas commanders were subsequently eliminated. Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in July 2024. HEZBOLLAH Hassan Nasrallah and senior aides were killed in Beirut in September 2024. Hashem Safieddine and additional Hezbollah leaders were eliminated. Ibrahim Aqil and senior Radwan Force commanders were killed. IRAN In the June 2025 opening strikes, Israel killed some of Iran’s most senior military commanders, including Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, Gholamali Rashid, and Amir Ali Hajizadeh. Then, on February 28, 2026, Ali Khamenei was killed during joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. HOUTHIS In an August 2025 strike on Sanaa, Israel killed Houthi prime minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and numerous senior officials. Each one of these operations had a thousand moving parts. Each one could have failed. Many succeeded. And now to the hostages. This might be the part that moves me most. Two hundred and fifty-one people were kidnapped into Gaza on October 7. They were scattered across buildings, tunnels, apartments, camps, and guarded facilities. Some were rescued in operations that sound impossible even after we know they happened. Ori Megidish was rescued on October 30, 2023. Fernando Marman and Louis Har were rescued from a guarded building in Rafah in February 2024. Then came Operation Arnon. Four hostages—Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv—were being held in two separate locations in the heart of Nuseirat. Armed guards. Dense urban terrain. Broad daylight. Israel went in anyway. And brought all four home alive. Commander Arnon Zamora was mortally wounded during the rescue and the operation was subsequently named in his honor. Think about what those four people experienced. Think about the probability of locating them, reaching them, surprising their captors, extracting them through heavy fighting, getting them to helicopters, and bringing them home alive. And then came something I don’t think any of us should ever take for granted. On January 26, 2026, after 843 days, the IDF announced that every hostage—living and deceased—had been returned from Gaza to Israel. Every one. For more than two years we said: Bring them home. Bring them home. Bring them home. And eventually, every last one came home. Some alive to their families. Some, tragically, only to be buried by their families. But none were left behind. I still can’t believe they’re home. And now to the terrorism front. In 2025, IDF Central Command reported a roughly 78% decline in terrorist incidents compared with 2024 and an approximately 86% decline in shooting attacks. And then there were attacks that simply didn’t happen as intended. In February 2025, explosives planted on buses in the Tel Aviv area detonated while the buses were empty instead of during crowded passenger service. Imagine what could have happened. Then, on September 30, 2026, came flydubai flight FZ1073. A flight carrying more than 170 people, many of them Israelis, was traveling from Dubai to Tel Aviv when the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to seize control of the aircraft. The aircraft plunged thousands of feet. The wounded captain managed to unlock the cockpit. Passengers and crew intervened. Other pilots aboard helped bring the aircraft down safely in Saudi Arabia. Everyone survived. Read that again. Everyone survived. Miracles all around. And now to what might be the most extraordinary miracle of these three years: Israel itself. A country fighting on multiple fronts was expected to see its economy collapse. Investors would flee. The shekel would collapse. Technology investment would disappear. Companies would leave. Instead? Israel’s economy bent. It suffered. It absorbed enormous costs. But it did not break. The shekel eventually strengthened to levels not seen in decades. Israeli markets reached record territory. High-tech remained one of the central engines of the economy. In just the first nine months of 2025, Israeli high-tech mergers and acquisitions reached roughly $71 BILLION. Google agreed to acquire Wiz for approximately $32 billion. Palo Alto Networks announced its approximately $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk. Those are not normal numbers. Those are historic numbers. Israel continued exporting technology, cybersecurity, defense systems, medicine, software, and innovation while fighting one of the most difficult wars in its history. Defense exports surged as Israeli systems demonstrated their capabilities under real combat conditions. Inflation moderated. Unemployment remained extremely low. Israel continued issuing debt. Foreign investors continued investing. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange continued operating through missile barrages. The Abraham Accords survived enormous regional pressure. Natural-gas infrastructure continued operating and generating revenue. And despite war, reserve duty, displacement, missile attacks, political turmoil, and enormous uncertainty, Israeli entrepreneurs kept building companies. Unbelievable. In the Bible, we know that the more the Egyptians persecuted the Israelites, the more the Israelites flourished. That was true then, and it is true now. The more they terrorize us, the more we innovate. The more they destroy, the more we build. The more they try to make us disappear, the more determined we become to live. Israel could have collapsed these past few years. It didn’t. It fought. It mourned. It buried its children. It rescued its hostages. It rebuilt communities. It destroyed armies built to destroy it. It created technology. It attracted investment. It innovated. It survived. And it flourished. With all the sadness, I believe we should also feel gratitude, as difficult as that might be. We owe it to ourselves to notice the miracles. To see Hashem’s hand even when it is difficult. Because Hashem has been with us these last three years. He has been with us in mourning. But He has also been with us in victories that, just three years ago, would have sounded impossible. Listen, we’re all sad. We’re all devastated. And rightfully so. But for our own sanity, let’s zoom out. Look at these three years from a historical perspective. Imagine telling your grandchildren about them. Think about how your grandson would react when you told him about the pagers. “Wait, Grandpa. You’re telling me thousands of Hezbollah terrorists were walking around with pagers and suddenly the pagers exploded?” “Yes.” “And then the next day their radios exploded too?” “Yes.” “Come on, Grandpa.” Think about telling him about Nasrallah. About Sinwar. About Haniyeh. About Khamenei. Think about telling him that Israel repeatedly flew fighter jets more than a thousand kilometers into Iran. Think about telling him that Iran once fired more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel in one night and roughly 99% were intercepted. Think about telling him that Israel fought what looked like literal Star Wars, with Arrow interceptors capable of destroying ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere. Think about telling him that Israel deployed an actual laser weapon to shoot threats out of the sky. Please stop and imagine that conversation. “Hey, grandson, let me tell you about this country that is so small you can barely see it on a world map. In 2023, this country of roughly ten million people was attacked by Hamas. Then Hezbollah attacked. The Houthis attacked. Iran attacked. Militias attacked. Missiles came from multiple directions. Drones came from multiple directions. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were called into reserve duty. Tens of thousands were displaced from their homes. And somehow, while fighting all of that, Israel kept building. Its entrepreneurs kept coding. Its doctors kept inventing. Its scientists kept researching. Its companies kept raising money. Its technology companies were acquired for tens of billions of dollars. Its defense engineers built systems that intercepted missiles in space and lasers that shot threats out of the sky. And as rockets, missiles, and drones rained down, Israelis sat in bomb shelters with laptops and kept building technology that would eventually improve the lives of people around the world.” Folks, on this day we cry together. We remember more than 1,200 people whose worlds ended on October 7. We remember the soldiers who fell afterward. We remember the hostages who did not survive. We remember families who will never again be whole. We remember communities that were shattered. We remember unimaginable heroism. But let’s not make the mistake of closing our eyes to everything else that happened. Look around. Look at what happened to Hamas. Look at what happened to Hezbollah. Look at what happened to Iran’s military leadership. Look at Syria. Look at the hostages who came home. Look at the April 2024 Iranian attack. Look at the June 2025 Iran war. Look at our missile defenses. Look at our soldiers. Look at our doctors. Look at our reservists. Look at our volunteers. Look at our entrepreneurs. Look at our families. Look at this country. The list of miracles is nearly endless. I only wanted to give you a small taste of the incredible—and sometimes seemingly inexplicable—events we have witnessed over these past three years. Three years ago, our enemies wanted October 7 to be the beginning of the end of Israel. It wasn’t. We are still here. We are going to be okay. We are going to be better than okay. We WILL dance again. Am Yisrael Chai Vekayam. The nation of Israel lives and endures—now and forever. Thank you to our incredible heroes. And thank You, Hashem, for all the miracles we noticed—and all the ones we will never even know happened. Now, we will get up as a nation, wipe away the tears, and continue to change the world!

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Alice Nderitu. Most people don't know that name. I talk about her all the time. Why is she important? She was one of the world's preeminent experts on genocide. She's a Kenyan woman, not a Jew, not married to a Jew, obviously not Israeli. She rose in the ranks of international communities around the world because of her tremendous expertise in this field. And she she reached the pinnacle of this field. She became the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Crime of Genocide and the Prevention of Genocide. She became the world's preeminent and most prominent source on whether genocides were happening around the world and how to prevent them. And she was adamant and clear that there was no genocide in Gaza, that it was the furthest thing from a genocide, that Israel spent tremendous amounts of money and effort and had an entire organization of its government devoted to preserving and protecting the lives of uninvolved Palestinian citizens. And then what did Alice Nderitu get for telling the truth at the United Nations? She was fired. Her contract was not renewed, and someone who would toe the party line was placed there in her stead. And it's the fact that no one even knows her name that shows you what it looks like to lose an information war in the West.