Last Year in Jerusalem: Next Year in Jerusalem

Dr. Munr Kazmir
4 min readOct 6, 2024

No one could have predicted the savagery of the terrorist attack perpetuated against Israel on October 7, 2023. What will next year hold?

(Photo by Ethan Mittan on Unsplash.)

The October 7 terrorist attack against Israel was a chilling reminder of the volatile reality that defines life for a nation beset on all sides by Iran’s ruthless terror proxies. The surprise nature of this assault, which claimed innocent lives and rattled the region, underscored the unpredictability of security dynamics, even for a nation as militarily sophisticated as Israel.

October 6, 2023, was a kinder and gentler time. It was a different world in which normalizing diplomatic ties with Israel was becoming the new normal. Israel’s destruction and the subjugation of its population was little more than a fever dream of Hamas terrorists.

“On October 6, 2023, Brett McGurk believed that a Middle East peace deal was within reach — that the Biden administration just might succeed where every administration before it had failed,” as Franklin Foer sighed wistfully for The Atlantic on September 30, 2024.

“McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was meeting in his office with a group of Saudi diplomats, drawing up a blueprint for a Palestinian state,” Foer recalled fondly. “It was the centerpiece of a grand bargain: In…

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