ISRAEL AT WAR
Dancing on our graves: Hamas’ war on Israel and the world's moral confusion
As Israel and the Jewish community reel from Hamas’ attack last week, we must confront a world that first celebrates, then equivocates before paradoxically denying Hamas’ crimes
My brother and other family members were born on a kibbutz called Yad Mordechai, a peaceful, tranquil community famous for its honey. It was named for 23-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish resistance (a word that here refers to the murder of Nazis and not the murder of children) during the Holocaust. Yad Mordechai was founded by Jewish socialists and refugees from Poland, populated mainly by Holocaust survivors and their descendants. It is less than 13 kilometers from Gaza.
On October 7th, the day that we now use to measure time in this country, residents, including many of my relatives, spent the day hiding in their bomb shelters as Hamas terrorists tried to infiltrate their homes. By sheer luck, Yad Mordechai escaped much of the carnage that fell on their neighbors, places such as Be’eri and Kfar Aza whose names have joined the ranks of Speyer and Mainz, Kishinev and Seville, Khaybar, Baghdad, and Babyn Yar; an endless list of places in Jewish history synonymous with slaughter.
My brother and sister-in-law, my nephews, my cousins, could have easily been there last Saturday, which is horrific enough. Almost as bad is knowing that had my family or I been among those that were raped, burned alive, beheaded, or taken hostage to Gaza, there would now be thousands, if not millions, of people the world over applauding. There would be peace activists and feminists, including former peers, friends and colleagues of mine calling our murderers and rapists ‘freedom fighters.’
We have now witnessed the bloodiest event in Israeli history and the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a massacre in which some of the victims were themselves Holocaust survivors. As we've learned more about what transpired on October 7th, the term ‘massacre’ has become an insufficient description. These were crimes against humanity and a clear example of genocide, a word first coined by Holocaust survivor and lawyer Raphael Lemkin who campaigned for its eventual legal enshrinement under the United Nations Genocide Convention.
The immeasurable trauma of witnessing a genocide has been compounded by the subsequent traumas of the world's reaction including: (a) global celebrations from Montreal to London to Sydney, (b) widespread rationalization and justification of these murders, (c) the castigation of any retaliation or attempts to hold the perpetrators of these attacks accountable, and (d) the subsequent skepticism and outright denial of the attacks in the first place.
Perhaps the most insidious and paradoxical response is denial. Social media, where so much of this discourse has moved, and international media are at times parroting Hamas propaganda, suggesting that Israel is exaggerating or flatly lying about the extent of the carnage perpetrated by Hamas. This is despite the fact that Hamas meticulously documented their crimes and proudly disseminated images and video footage across social media, making their subsequent denial all the more absurd.
Due to the rampant skepticism of a public who uncritically consumes Hamas propaganda but interrogates every sentence written by Israelis, we are not permitted to concentrate on mourning our dead or rebuilding our shattered lives, but must simultaneously act as investigators and prosecutors to collect survivor testimony and proof. For example, reports that beheaded babies were found at Kibbutz Kfar Aza almost immediately elicited widespread skepticism and demand for evidence, even though it was confirmed by journalists at the scene, the IDF, which invited foreign and domestic press to witness the atrocities, the Israeli government, and President Biden.
The goal of this propaganda, aside from eroding sympathy for Israelis, is to convince the masses that Israel has no right to attack Hamas in Gaza, because nothing terrible happened in the first place (but if it did, rest assured that it was deserved). If you follow that logic, then Israel’s attack on Gaza is not a retaliation but an unprovoked aggression.
This propaganda is so effective that many individuals, journalists, and political leaders, including some Jews, have been duped into believing that a humanistic and sober reading of these events requires condemning Hamas and Israel in equal measure. To be sure, any human being should feel only compassion and sympathy for both Israelis and innocent Palestinian civilians - though many have proved incapable of meeting this lowest of bars. However, this does not translate to a moral equivalence or symmetry between Israel and Hamas. You can try to find it, but only if you abandon all laws of causation, logic, and morality.
But this disinformation has been so readily consumed, that an alternative reality has been accepted in which Israel is the aggressor and initiator of this conflict. Every action committed by Hamas is deemed legitimate, even by those who claim to distinguish between Palestinians and Hamas, and every Israeli reaction is an unprovoked aggression. Accordingly, when Hamas murders, rapes and tortures Israeli civilians, it is deserved. Yet, when we inform the world of these crimes we are liars. When Israel bombs Hamas targets in response, it is indiscriminately attacking civilians. When Israel warns civilians to evacuate prior to attacking a Hamas target, thus betraying a tactical advantage in an effort to avoid civilian casualties, it is accused of ethnic cleansing.
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There is a vast moral difference between the targeted and intended torture, rape, murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, and the deaths of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s retaliatory campaign to eradicate Hamas from Gaza. Mass casualties alone do not a genocide make. If that were true than an earthquake that leaves thousands dead would be morally comparable to a mass shooting. One can and should mourn the loss of innocent people no matter who they are, but to conflate the actions of those who purposely murder and target civilians with those who retaliate to it, is to dismiss, minimize and condone their murders in the first place.
Confused Western commentators obsess over absurd concepts like proportionality and parity in this conflict, and this conflict alone, at the expense of essential nuances like causation and intent. If cause and motive don't matter, then there is no moral difference between the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, and the Allied bombing of Dresden in Germany in 1945, resulting in the deaths of nearly 25,000 German civilians. There is also no moral difference between the deaths of approximately 1,600 civilians in the Syrian city of Raqqa alone during international U.S.-led airstrikes to eradicate ISIS, and the crimes of ISIS itself, which, in addition to the thousands of people it has murdered across the globe, perpetrated a genocide of over 5,000 Yazidis.
Enthralled by death
Among the victims of Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel were about 60 Israeli Arabs, many of whom may have identified as Palestinian and had close ties to Gaza. One survivor, a Bedouin man, interviewed by Israeli news about his experience, spoke about how Hamas shot and murdered Bedouin farmers in their fields. He emphasized that the victims were very identifiably Bedouin due in part to their head coverings, meaning that they could not have possibly been mistaken for Jews.
This tells us something about Hamas, ISIS, and other Islamist groups that is obvious to Israelis and their other victims, but is forever difficult for the West to grasp: these are fanatics so in the thrall of death that they don't care how many of their own people they slaughter, so long as it eventually leads to the murder of Jews.
This is also why Hamas terrorists embed themselves in civilian areas, launch rockets from schools and hospitals, start a war knowing that it will lead to a retaliation that their people will pay for (while they hide in Qatar or in underground tunnels built to kidnap Israelis), and why they forcibly prevent their people from evacuating northern Gaza despite Israeli warnings to do so. These are not freedom fighters who care about Palestinian welfare and security, which are rational and noble goals, but a genocidal organization who’s single and stated aim is the destruction of this state, the violent death of every soul who lives here and Jews the world over.
This is a difficult concept for the West in particular to grasp, perhaps because we are confused by such cold and nihilistic fanaticism, or because we reflexively equate weakness with virtue and strength with aggression. We are conditioned to automatically view power imbalances in favor of the weaker party. The Palestinians are inarguably weaker than Israel, but their vulnerability does not render Hamas’ goals or actions morally legitimate.
The unique barbarity of these crimes, as well as the multiple ISIS documents and paraphernalia left at the scene by Hamas terrorists, have justifiably evoked comparisons with ISIS. If the Iranian regime provided the funding and support for this attack, then ISIS provided the blueprint. One can easily see how ISIS’ genocide against the Yazidis in particular might have been used as a playbook for Hamas' attack on Israelis; the deliberate murder and kidnapping of women and children, the brutal sexual violence, the savagely cruel murders which included the decapitation of children and burning families alive, and a variety of other tortures too terrible to name.
The only salient difference between Jews and the Yazidis is that we have the protection of a state, although it failed us, and a military. One must question whether the world’s sympathies would have remained with the Yazidis had they the strength and power of their own state and military. Had they the ability and audacity to defend themselves and retaliate, perhaps the Yazidis would have been called aggressors and genocidaires and ISIS the ‘freedom fighters.’
The writer is a reporter at CTech.
