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“Hi Dad, I am speaking to you from Mefalsim,” the man says gleefully, referring to the Israeli Kibbutz by the Gaza border. “Open your WhatsApp and look at all the killed. Look at how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews!”

That is the chilling phone call a Hamas terrorist made to his father on Oct. 7, 2023, in audio released by the Israeli Defense Forces.

In my eyes, and those of nearly every Israeli and Jew I know, Oct. 7 was a day of horrific terror — a day when our people were slaughtered on a scale we had not seen since the Holocaust.

But in the view of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and three other student groups, Oct. 7 was something very different: A day of heroic resistance. Their statement reads, “One year ago today, Gaza broke through Israel’s blockade, showing the world that the ongoing Nakba and apartheid cannot stand.”

On Oct. 7, a dead, naked woman was found with a knife and three nails in the crotch area. Another had her breast almost entirely sliced off, with her shirt ripped off and a knife wound in her neck.

In the eyes of my peers: “Gaza broke through Israel’s blockade.”

On Oct. 7, Abigail Edan witnessed her parents murdered in front of her eyes. She was taken by Hamas and held hostage for 51 days. Abigail was only three years old.

In the eyes of my peers: “Gaza broke through Israel’s blockade.”

Three hundred and sixty-six days after Oct. 7, 2023, when more than 30 student organizations released their initial, horrific statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the attacks, these students simply have not changed — their tolerance for Hamas’s evil never went away.

“Whoever is in solidarity with our corpses, but not our rockets, is a hypocrite and not of us,” wrote one leading pro-Palestine activist in a comment beneath the post.

I used to think that when outside actors branded Harvard demonstrators as “pro-Hamas,” they were being hyperbolic. But as time goes on, and the rhetoric only escalates, I realize I was wrong.

If Jews ever needed a reminder why we need a state to call our own, it is that there are still people — including students studying at the world’s most storied university — who can somehow convince themselves the mass murder of innocent Jews is justified.

Today, we have that state. While neither Israel nor an elite education can defeat antisemitism, the Jewish state can protect us from it.

So when I read my peers’ assertion that “resistance will ultimately break the shackles of the Zionist entity,” as I watch them rejoice because the “Zionist entity is crumbling,” more than any sense of fear, I feel pride.

I feel pride because, after thousands of years of exile, the Jewish people can now defend themselves. I feel pride because the PSC statement, despite all but endorsing a slaughter of my own people, did absolutely nothing to harm Israel. It only proved the need for a Jewish state is stronger than ever.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Lowell House.