While Emory University students were traveling home Friday night, sirens were blaring in Israel. At 6:30 a.m. Israel time, Hamas terrorists invaded the country in an unprecedented attack, kidnapping and murdering civilians in the streets. Many of the victims were young women, children and the elderly.
These are just a few of the unthinkable images haunting all who have followed the attacks since Saturday: babies found beheaded in their cribs in Southern Israel. Young women raped and paraded around the streets of Gaza naked and bleeding. An elderly woman murdered by Hamas terrorists who proceeded to post graphic images of her body on her own Facebook. This provocation was not an act of war but a brutalization — a pogrom. While many observers expressed moderation in past conflicts, equally condemning violence on both sides, these events are different. The sheer depravity of Hamas’ indiscriminate killing of Jews is the closest we have gotten to a Holocaust since 1945.
Those following the Israel-Palestinian conflict over past decades may be tempted to write this moment off as just another skirmish in a long history of violence. However, this war is different; it’s a horrific, unprovoked onslaught more comparable to the 9/11 attacks than Middle Eastern conflicts of recent memory. More than the familiar rocket fire, hundreds of Hamas terrorists have infiltrated Israeli security with the goal of killing Israeli civilians. At the time of writing this article, more than 1,200 Israelis have been killed. As New York Congressman Ritchie Torres noted of the population comparison between Israel and the United States, “Losing 600 Israelis is the equivalent of losing about 20,000 Americans.” These days will be forever stained in the history of the young Jewish country. Those targeted are largely peaceful civilian populations.
A Sunday Washington Post article reported on an attack from the following day that had yet to be thoroughly explained. A large music festival celebrating the normally joyous Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah was interrupted by rocket and machine gun fire. Two hundred sixty bodies have been found in the deserted venue, more than four times the number of casualties of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The 2017 shooting forced all young Americans to say, “That could have been me.” In the case of the Simchat Torah massacre, many of those who were not gunned down were abducted and taken back to Gaza as hostages. For the young people reading: The victims could have been any of us.
This is not a moment of division or even atypical complexity. Unimaginable videos of young concertgoers being dragged from their lives to realities of torture and murder make one wish for the days when the conflict could be discussed reasonably. Now, impartiality sides with Hamas. One cannot be moderate when the goal of Israel’s opposition is to murder as many Jews as possible.
A peaceful near future is all but impossible as Israel looks to retaliate with enough force to dissuade future attacks. Anyone who has spent significant time following the conflict will know that a lack of retaliation would be a death sentence for the Jewish state.
Furthermore, those defending Hamas’ terrorism with political justifications are misguided and compassionless. In the past, I have tried to be patient with those guilty of virtue signaling and remaining almost tribally loyal to their political teams, but when one’s response to a video of an Israeli girl hearing of her sister’s execution by Hamas is “Free Palestine,” there is no good-faith discourse.
Hamas and its Iranian backers know that an Israeli response is coming and will surely play victim when Palestinian casualties occur. This victimhood is part of a long history of provocation followed by signaling of powerlessness at the cost of both Israeli and Palestinian lives. Let there be no mistake: Those governing the Palestinian territories were aware of the results of their actions but chose to terrorize anyway. Those in power do not appear to have peace as the ultimate goal.
If Hamas leaders of the Palestinian people truly wanted to improve the Palestinian quality of life, they could spend some of the half a billion dollars the United States has contributed since 2020 for education, healthcare and community building. Apparently, the money has been spent on rockets, ammunition and tunnels. With these circumstances, one should be sympathetic to the idea that Hamas has no respect for Palestinian lives, much less Israeli ones.
Additionally, I find it difficult to separate anti-Israel from pro-Hamas sentiment at this moment. The Democratic Socialists of America marched in Times Square on Sunday, chanting “Resistance is justified when people are colonized.” I didn’t know that the kidnapping of children counted as resistance. Several Students for Justice in Palestine chapters expressed support for the terrorist attacks, posting “Glory to the resistance,” and “The resistance lives!” Blood is on their hands too.
Even if you believe in the independence of the Palestinian people or oppose the actions of the Israeli government, you can still condemn this indiscriminate violence. The events of the past days are not a path to peace, and opposing the murder of Jewish people is certainly not mutually exclusive from wanting the best for innocent Palestinians. Distant onlookers of violence in the Middle East have a tendency to cast it off as typical, but this weekend was anything but.
Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, famously said that there are two words for “strength” in Hebrew: “koach and gevurah. Koach is the strength you need to win a war. Gevurah is the courage you need to make peace.”
I pray for the people of Israel to have both in the months to come.
Click here to donate to Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross organization.
Ben Brodsky (25B) is from Scottsdale, Arizona.
