This week’s post was almost fully mapped out in my mind. I planned to tell you about the kids’ experience at the Israeli embassy in Lisbon, and about our family city break.
That I can’t devote this week’s post to that story is something that, I imagine, needs no explanation. I hope, and pray, that next week I will be able to cover those topics. However, since I cannot know what new depths of obscenity will have been plumbed by then, I cannot, sadly, be certain.
What I do know is that there is – there can be – only one topic to address this week, although how to cover it I have no idea.
As the events of last Thursday unfolded, we were given the opportunity to better understand our own, and others’, humanity. Was there a point at which you stood speechless in horror, or broke down in tears, at the barbarism that was revealed in stages?
Was it perhaps the sight of masked, armed Hamas monsters ‘ceremoniously’ carrying the coffins of the Bibas’ children? Or when forensic investigation revealed, as the Hamas barbarians knew it would, that the body in the third coffin was not that of the children’s mother, Shiri, but that of an anonymous Palestinian woman? Or when, having claimed that the chaos of the destruction left by the Israeli bombing that, they alleged, killed the Bibas family had led to the ‘confusion’ over bodies, the savages effortlessly handed over Shiri’s body? Or perhaps when the Israeli authorities announced that the autopsies had further revealed that the children, and their mother, were all killed by the animals’ bare hands, many months ago?
I find myself wondering whether there was such a moment for the Hamas apologists who have been marching in Western capitals, tearing down posters of hostages and terrorising Jewish students on campus. Or whether their antisemitism has removed them, like the Hamas beasts they extol, from the human race. Because killing a baby with your bare hands is not the act of a political activist; it is not an anti-Zionist act; it is pure antisemitism. And failing to be horrified by that act, but rather applauding it, is, equally, antisemitism. More than that: the act, and its celebration, place the perpetrator, and the celebrator, beyond the pale of humanity.
I urge you all to keep track of the reactions, and lack of reactions, of the world’s leaders. Last Thursday, Hamas removed the last traces of any fence that any thinking human being might have believed it was possible to sit on. Those who don’t come down with a statement on one side or the other must have their silence interpreted as consent for the actions of Hamas. They will, of course, not be held accountable for the consequences of their silence and inaction, but you, dear reader, we, dear reader, must make a mental note.
One more set of questions: Was your mounting horror matched by mounting disbelief or incomprehension? To put it more bluntly, did anything in this entire horrible story surprise you? If so, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention over the last 16 months, 75 years, 96 years. Our enemies have rarely felt the need to conceal their true beliefs and colours.
To believe that Hamas would negotiate any agreement honestly and honourably shows astonishing naiveté. I have maintained since the very beginning of the war that there is no sense in which Hamas’s interests are served by returning all the hostages. The hostages represent a lever with which Hamas can hope to tear Israeli society apart. This has not changed.
The Israeli Government announced two war aims: the complete destruction of Hamas as a military force and the return of all the captives. It must by now be clear to everyone that neither of those two aims is achievable. Hamas could only be destroyed as a military force if every man woman and child in the West Bank and Gaza were killed. There is no way in which all the captives can be returned, other than the cutting off of all humanitarian aid to Gaza, leading to the collapse of the lighting, heating and ventilation systems of the tunnels, followed by the reoccupation of Gaza and the retrieval of what would, by then, be the bodies of the hostages.
Hamas’s trump card is the knowledge they gained in the agricultural fields of the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope where the Hamas spies worked for decades, in the cars of Israeli Jewish volunteers who ferried Gazan cancer victims to Israeli hospitals for treatment, in the prisons of Israel where Hamas leaders served long sentences. This is the knowledge that Israel will never act with the institutional inhumanity that Hamas and the Gazans have demonstrated. This conflict is being played out on a very uneven playing field. Existentially hard as this makes it for Israel, there is surely no way in which we would have it any different. If Israel were to act with the inhumanity of Hamas, it would have no more right to continue to have a state in Eretz Yisrael than Hamas has to demand one.