The Israeli High Court of Justice descended into bedlam on Thursday when pro-government activists attempted to force their way into a hearing on petitions demanding a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 atrocities. Court security advised the justices to evacuate the chamber, suspending proceedings as a mob outside chanted “Judge the judges” and demanded entry. The scenes, unprecedented in Israel’s judicial history, laid bare the intensity of a political crisis that pits Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition against the judiciary. The judges signalled a preference to delay their ruling until after the next election, a tactical retreat that, viewed from Jerusalem, risks further eroding public confidence in an institution already battered by months of judicial overhaul protests.

That same day, far from Israel, the legacy of October 7 was playing out in strikingly different forms across the United States. In California, the office of Secretary of State Shirley Weber mailed a 64-page voter guide to every registered household that included a candidate statement laced with antisemitic conspiracies: blaming Israel for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, attacking the Talmud, and linking to white supremacist websites. Jewish groups protested, but the mailing went ahead – a testament, analysts in Washington note, to how mainstream political machinery can inadvertently amplify fringe hatred when vetting procedures fail.

Meanwhile, from a California prison cell, far-left activist Casey Goonan wrote a chilling manifesto detailing the ideological groundwork for the October 7 attacks, framing the Hamas invasion as the launch of a worldwide struggle. Goonan, jailed for firebombings, had watched a livestream of clashes between anti-Zionist protesters and pro-Israel counter-demonstrators at UCLA and then moved into an encampment at UC Berkeley the following day. His document, recovered by investigators, offers a window into how the Gaza war has radicalised small but determined cells on both extremes of the American political spectrum, providing a shared narrative of global confrontation that transcends traditional partisan lines.

These three episodes – a besieged court in Tel Aviv, a state-sanctioned conspiracy pamphlet in Sacramento, and a manifesto from a jailed firebomber in California – are not isolated. They form a triptych of a society fraying under the weight of October 7’s aftershocks. In Israel, the coalition’s refusal to establish a state commission of inquiry has paralysed the Supreme Court and postponed accountability. In the United States, the spread of antisemitic tropes into official state communications and the explicit embrace of Hamas’s violence by far-left radicals signal a dangerous normalisation. The forward path remains uncertain: delayed rulings and unvetted candidate statements may offer short-term political relief, but they deepen the fractures that the attacks of October 7 exposed, leaving both democracies more vulnerable to the next crisis.