Today, Oct. 7, we mark the first anniversary of an event which horrified anyone with a conscience and altered Jewish history. We are still too close to it to appreciate fully its impact psychologically and certainly geopolitically. But the moment we learned Hamas had slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and captured 251, most American Jews acknowledged a responsibility only we could fulfill. “There are different ways to defend the Jewish people,” one Israeli soldier explained when I visited Israel a few weeks later. He and his comrades in arms would fight courageously in Gaza. Israeli citizens would care for the families of the slain and the captive and the hundreds of thousands forced to flee Hamas and Hezbollah rockets. Our role would be repudiating claims of moral equivalency comparing Hamas’ barbarism with Israel’s efforts to protect its people; and clarifying for the mindless that self-defense is not retaliation, and that Hamas’ murderous rampage could not be contextualized as acceptable resistance to occupation. And then, as the war intensified and innocent Palestinians were dying by the thousands, again it fell to us, always with compassion for the suffering in Gaza, to explain the intractable challenges Israel faced rescuing those hostages and eliminating Hamas as an ongoing threat all while protecting innocent Palestinians from further harm which of course Hamas guarantees by operating among them. And now we must remind the world that Hezbollah’s arsenal is 10 times greater, significantly more advanced, and that the Iranian-backed terror group has been firing on Israel almost daily since Hamas’ invasion. Nine thousand rockets have chased 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north. Many of those rockets Hezbollah hides in and under civilian homes (just like Hamas), where its leaders convene surrounded by human shields (just like Hamas). Beneath one Beirut apartment complex Hezbollah commanders were finalizing plans for their own Oct. 7-style invasion when the IDF found and killed them. Hassan Nasrallah was killed headquartered beneath another. And it is Hezbollah who violated the UN Resolution requiring they withdraw from Israel’s border, which is why Israeli soldiers have now gone in. And then there is Iran itself with but one goal in mind where Israel is concerned — destruction. With all these supporting arguments, and the world safer with Hamas and Hezbollah weakened and Nasrallah dead, why has defending Israel in the court of world opinion been so challenging? Primarily because that court has always been stacked against Israel. Certain legitimate criticisms of Israel’s government we should acknowledge. On Oct. 7, Israel’s government failed in its most basic duty to keep Israelis safe, preoccupied as it was with the authoritarian power grab it benignly labeled judicial reform. Then despite all best intentions to protect Gaza’s civilians, its subsequent bombing campaign left thousands of innocents dead. In the West Bank, settler hooligans attack Palestinians with impunity because the government often neglects to prosecute. And the IDF, in its efforts to root out terrorists there, however necessary, has left behind destruction and despair. Meanwhile, 100 captives languish in the tunnels beneath the wreckage of Gaza — those who have not already perished. Their fate remains Israel’s open wound. It is not easy for one who loves Israel as I do to say these things. Because I also believe our criticism should be tempered by humility appropriate to our distance from Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi and Iranian missiles. And we should always consider where Israel teeters on the seesaw of world opinion. With the rest of the world already condemning Israel as we saw at the UN recently, someone needs to defend it. We must never allow Israel to be held to double standards, demonized or delegitimized as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. We must decry anti-Israel bias in the media. We must insist our high schools do a better job teaching the complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict so their graduates won’t be hoodwinked by anti-Israel forces on the campus quad or anti-Zionist professors in the college classroom. And as we speak out for Israel and pray for its security and the safety of its brave soldiers, we must never relinquish our hope for peace. As Tal Becker, who defended Israel against genocide charges in The Hague, writes: “We must emerge from this testing moment recommitted to a future, however difficult to achieve, in which the peoples of the Middle East…do not see their own welfare and thriving as requiring the demise of the other.” May this new Jewish year bring us closer to that future. Davidson is the senior rabbi of Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.