Thucydides, the Athenian historian and general, famously warned that there is a thin veneer of civilization, which can be easily stripped away to reveal humanity’s innate savagery. A full display of that savagery was perpetrated by a massive number of Hamas terrorists who penetrated into Israel with the sole purpose of slaughtering as many Jews as possible and kidnapping as many as possible. Well over 1,000 men, women, and children of all ages, the numbers continuously rising, were massacred in the most depraved and barbaric manner.
Americans need to appreciate the scale of this number. In a population of eight million Israeli Jews, this is the equivalent of 40,000 Americans being murdered within 12 hours. Hamas gleefully videoed and disseminated with pride their execution of children in front of their parents, rapes and then beating and/ or murdering those women, torturing then burning alive young women, setting fire to a home of an old lady who was locked in her “safe room,” and hundreds of similar atrocities including mowing down 260 young people attending a peace festival then kidnapping dozens of the survivors. This is not hyperbole – the videos are there to be seen by your own eyes. It is difficult to process this level of barbarism.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization. Its sole mission as clearly stated in its charter is the destruction of the only Jewish state. It is not interested in a two-state solution, or co-existence, or the improvement of the lives of its own people. It is to kill Jews and eliminate Israel. Hamas is supported by Iran with training, material, and money in an effort to achieve its own identical objective. Iran states unabashedly as a matter of foreign policy – the only nation-state that publicly espouses a policy of genocide.
In this context, what is now in full view is a microcosm of the fight between a democratic way of life or subjugation to a tyrannical, amoral power. The only question is how the US and the free world will react. The choice is as stark as the necessity to defeat Nazi Germany, i.e. not contain or degrade, but totally annihilate to unconditional surrender; the same necessity to defeat the Japanese Imperial Army requiring the use of the first atomic weapons to force unconditional surrender. There was no body count on The New York Times’ front page evoking sympathy for German and Japanese civilians who died in the effort to defeat the enemy, even after the Dresden firebombing.
THEY STARTED the war, they sought to subjugate the free world. The only difference now is one of scale and it’s the Jews being targeted. How shocking that there are forces out there that want only to kill Jews. Let’s be clear, the slaughter on October 7 and 8 was not about anything other than slaughtering Jews in the most barbaric manner possible. The fact that these savages recorded their depravity as a matter of pride and glee is about as clarifying as one can get.
The Germans and Japanese tried to hide their war crimes – not Hamas. They exposed for all to see their immorality in the clearest possible manner. There can be no discussion of moral equivalence, proportional response, or body count comparisons. There can be no pressure for a ceasefire prematurely due to images of collateral damage, especially when Hamas cynically hides its assets and personnel in hospitals, schools, ambulances, and even UN facilities.
So, will the US and the other democracies throw their full support behind Israel’s forced hand to eliminate, not contain, this evil? In retrospect, this moment will be deemed an inflection point in the fight between democratic and tyrannical forces, put in biblical terms – between good and evil. Israel will now respond on an order of magnitude very differently from the five previous Hamas mini-wars from 2012 to 2021. The gloves will come off. Collateral damage will be just that – a collateral consideration. The body count scorecard on the front page of The New York Times will be ignored. Hamas changed the rules of this fight with its Nazi level of barbarism.
Israel will prevail in spite of its incomprehensible failures in intelligence and initial military response. The broader questions are twofold: Will the democracies of what we call the free world, primarily of course the US, with its veto power in the UN Security Council, finally wake up to the imminent threat of tyrannical forces threatening their way of life? And is the threat on the near horizon – as in the building capability of Communist China to expand its notion of authoritarian rule, or the naked aggression of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in which Putin is committing war crimes every day – indistinguishable from the Nazi invasion of Europe in 1939.
The jury is out on the China challenge whereas the reaction to support Ukraine has been surprisingly strong but it needs to stay the course, which is always a challenge in the fluidity of democratic realities, with ominous signs from a neo-isolationist wing of the Republican party.
Why this is Israel's Pearl Harbor
IN THE face of this brutality, is there something to discuss, argue about, and apportion blame? This is the equivalent for Israel of not the 1973 war, but of Pearl Harbor. The only response has to be to seek and destroy the organization that planned and carried out this atrocity. Full stop. Previously, when Israel retaliated to such attacks and mini-wars on its civilian population, the world community would give it a few days to inflict damage to reset deterrence for some period of time.
The international media would publish videos and photos of dead Palestinians killed by retaliatory strikes against Hamas infrastructure which utilized the cover of their own schools, hospitals, and ambulances, knowing their own people would pay the price. Body counts would set the headlines, with The New York Times serving as Hamas’s best collaborator. Pressure would mount for Israel to agree to a cease-fire prematurely due to the PR. This just kicked the can down the road until the next time of Hamas’s choosing for a repeat.
No longer will Israel engage in this short-sighted strategy. It has proved disastrous. Just as Roosevelt and Churchill were too determined to totally defeat Hitler ending only in unconditional surrender; similarly in the Pacific theater ending in Hiroshima.
It is obvious that no country can live with an ongoing threat that seeks its destruction and strikes at its civilian population at will. Israel was created precisely to protect Jews from this part of their history. In historical terms, Auschwitz, which both my parents survived, was yesterday. Hamas is an extension of Iran whose oft-stated policy is the elimination of the so-called “Zionist entity” (they can’t bring themselves to utter the name Israel, God forbid). Iran is the only country in the world that unabashedly states its goal of genocide as a foreign policy objective and is allowed to sit in the UN.
If the US and the free world do anything other than fully and unequivocally support the only democracy in the Middle East in eliminating such an existential threat, it will signal to their enemies their weakness and lack of resolve to defend themselves from a similar threat. World history, especially in the 20th century, clearly demonstrates the folly of appeasement, weakness, and delusional thoughts of negotiating with tyrannical powers. That folly cost tens of millions of lives. Consider the tragic and avoidable lesson of the appeasement of the Munich Pact of 1938.
To accept the palpable mendacity of moral equivalence between the atrocities of Hamas and the defensive efforts to eliminate the perpetrators of such acts of barbarism is a prescription for surrender to the forces of tyranny and evil. It renders nugatory the whole notion of a moral code, of basic concepts of right and wrong, and of self-defense. The inevitable body-count headlines must be ignored and rejected.
The support for Israel must not waver until the objective of eliminating Hamas’s capability to carry out its terrorist mission is complete. If the US and the free world fail in this resolve, it is only a matter of time before they will become victims of the same assault on their liberties and threat to their way of life.
The writer, who received Israeli citizenship earlier this year, held several Jewish communal leadership positions in the US, and was the founder and the president of Frankel Jewish Academy High School in West Bloomfield, and a member of the AIPAC National Council.