On Reckoning

“The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the term used by Hamas to describe its October 7 attacks] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” – Ghzai Hamad, senior Hamas official

“Our hearts are bruised and seeping with misery. But the real souls suffering are those of the hostages. And they want to ask everyone in the world, all the screamers, the indifferent, the experts, the academics, the knowledgeable, the passives, the perfectly outraged, the righteous, the indignant, the haters, the leaders, the lovers, the every single one of us: Why, why is the world accepting that 240 human beings from almost 30 countries have been stolen and buried alive?” – Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin

“The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 – two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization – was the reaction to the horror. The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, with a different type of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display through the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified. People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter. In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering ‘gas the Jews.’”– Bari Weiss, The Free Press

Two months after October 7 – two long months in which the world has turned upside down – my head is still in triage mode, grappling with the dual challenges of processing what occurred during the October 7 massacre and what has happened since. On the one hand, the savage barbarism of the initial event - mass rape, mutilation, dismemberment, torture, burning people alive at such high temperatures that forensic pathologists are struggling to extract DNA samples from charred and shattered fragments of human bone. And then the grotesque displays at college campuses where anti-Semitic rhetoric (of a nature that would not be tolerated if aimed at other groups) is on full and proud display.

There is much to be said, perhaps too much to be said, than can fit on these pages. But memory is short and newer images move into our consciousness and it is therefore worthwhile to review the facts so that the enormity, the stakes, and imperatives of the situation can be understood.

Because really, the battle that Israel is fighting in Gaza is simply a single theater of a broader Western war.

In the first instance, masked protestors in many cities decry a supposed Israeli occupation of Gaza. But on October 7, Israel was not in Gaza. In fact, Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and handed the keys over to the Palestinians. And one year later, Gazans elected Hamas. Hamas has ruled Gaza for more than 16 years. And Israel has been entirely out of Gaza for 18 years.

Trope 2: Gaza is an open-air prison. But visit Trip Advisor and search for “Gaza Beach hotels.” Read the reviews and look at photos of Al Deira, Al Mashtal, Al Mahathaf, or the Phoenix Hotel. Or review the 19,000 square foot Gaza Mall. These hardly meet the standard image of a Victor Hugo prison. And “prison” implies a place where people are held involuntarily. But until October 7, Gazans regularly passed into Israel daily for work or even healthcare at Israeli hospitals, the latter often transported by volunteers from the very communities Hamas massacred on October 7.

Now let’s turn to the hostages.

Hamas kidnapped children. Toddlers. Infants. Grandparents. Women. Old men. And Hamas uses them as bargaining chips when their chips are down. It does not take rarified psychological insight to discern the cruelty of Hamas who kidnap and then “negotiate” the release of hostages when their abductors feel the heat of war at the back of their neck. ?And forgotten in too many conversations is the fact that Hamas refuses to permit the Red Cross access to the hostages.

And they are the living. Let’s speak of the dead.

Let’s speak to the work of forensic pathologists and morgue workers who describe “[p]eople whose heads have been cut off. Women standing in their night dresses, woken up and shot. Faces blasted off. Heads smashed and their brains spilling out.”aHa

And, of course, the silence of women’s advocates who rightly affirm the dignity of women and protest violence, rape, and other forms of abuse. And who have been chillingly silent about Israeli victims whose bodies reveal what has been described as “systemic genital mutilation.” All spawning a new hashtag: #metoounlessyou’reajew.

And then let’s revisit what Hamas leadership said: That they intended October 7 to be only the first. And that they intend to continue because, as the Hamas covenant declares, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Hence the need to eradicate Hamas, completely. No nation would leave a threat like Hamas intact. If not for the greater good of civilization, then for the simple duty to protect one’s citizens from harm.

Of course, the images out of Gaza. The claims that Israel is responsible for civilian casualties. So let us examine some more facts.

1.??????????? The law of war prohibits targeting civilians. However, military targets may be attacked even if civilian casualties are anticipated to occur.

2.??????????? Hamas promotes this outcome by embedding itself among civilians. That is a violation of International Law. And International Law does not prevent pursuing the enemy in that case: “The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favor, or impede military operations” (Article 51.8).

The outcome is a win-win for Hamas: If civilians are killed in military strikes, Hamas peddles these images and promotes outcries against Israel. And if Israel stands down from attack, then Hamas scampers away from the war it brought upon itself, shielded by the civilians it cruelly and cunningly deploys toward its malevolent ends.

This is only the Middle Eastern theater of this war. Recall the Hamas covenant: “But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion.”

Now let’s discuss another concerning aspect: The generational divide.

Two-thirds of Americans under the age of 35 disapprove of Israel’s response to terror, while older voters are more likely to support Israel. In isolation, these are mere numbers, and college campuses have always been a hotbed of so-called “anti-establishment fervor.” Except that now there is an utter, if not morally culpable, ignorance of history, including the 1936 Peel Commission, the U.N. Partition Plan of 1948, the 2000 Camp David Summit, and the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza – all times in which Israel (including “pre-state Israel”) accepted, and Palestinians and/or other Arab nations rejected, a “two-state” solution (President Clinton called Yasser Arafat’s rejection of a 2000 proposal that included Gaza, up to 92% of the West Bank, and tens of billions of dollars in incentives a “colossal mistake” and an “error of historic proportions).

And so there are those who buy blindly into the na?ve narrative that Gazans, whose population has more than doubled since 2000, are victims of a genocide (which means, literally, the extermination of a nation). ?And then add the sensation of Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” when it circulated on TikTok. And the protests on college campuses, including the barricading of Jewish students in New York City college library while pro-Hamas protesters pounded the windows. And the dumpster fire of a Congressional hearing last week when presidents of prestigious universities (University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT) could not find it within themselves to condemn calls to kill Jews, though they acknowledged that actually killing Jews could be construed as harassment on their college campuses.

The absurdity is apparent in statement issued by a student group at Brown University that held “the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all suffering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.” The statement was issued by Students for Justice in Palestine and joined by the Teaching Assistant Labor Association, Burlesque at Brown, and Poler Bears, a student club for pole dancers.

But absurdity breeds danger. And here again, I yield the floor to a more articulate spokesperson:

“At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and postnationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games – little puzzles to see how you could ‘deconstruct’ just about anything. What I came to see over time that it wasn’t going to remain academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within.

“It seems to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.

“It replaces the basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). . . ."

And hence a junior at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who blithely describes the murder and mayhem of October 7, the atrocities of that day, the continuing fate of the hostages, as “the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressor.”

And that is where I find myself two months into this Hell. Still absorbing, perhaps never to fully process, October 7. Compounded by the wanton disregard of humanity and Western principles by those who chant support for Hamas. And intensified by educational leadership who cannot articulate a delineation between right and wrong.

Several days after October 7, a friend of mind worried that we were about to experience a great unraveling. He is dear to me. But I hope he is wrong. I hope the reckoning stands with Israel and the will of those who will stand against terror.