-John F. Kennedy
The attack on Israel was sad and disgusting. The indiscriminate rape, torture, and murder of Israeli civilians. But it’s not shocking; it’s not out of character— it’s what Hamas wants to do, what Hamas has said over and over again it would do. Hamas could not have been more clear with their intentions.
What frustrates me about Jewish culture is how self-defeating it can be. These attacks were only possible because Israel gave land back after winning a war where they weren’t the aggressors (1967 Six-Day War). This is unheard of throughout history. Only Jews would return territory to those who attacked them unprovoked. Israel assumes positive intentions too much; Israel needs the courage to act in their best interest, or it’ll suffer the same fate as their Semitic Carthagian ancestors.
For those in need of a framework for how to think of Israel and its enemies, below I paraphrase a piece Sam Harris wrote in 2014: little has changed—
Everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields?
Hamas does. They shoot rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, hospitals, and mosques. Jihadists in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies.
Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred by jihadist use of human shields, as we should be. It’s morally abhorrent to shoot through children’s bodies to get at your adversary.
Take a moment to reflect on how vile and cynical this behavior is. The jihadists are acting on the assumption—the knowledge—that the infidels with whom they fight and vilify will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider Jews the spawn of apes and pigs, yet they rely on the fact that Jews don’t want to kill Muslim non-combatants.
Imagine if Jews used their children as human shields against Hamas… this is the moral difference.
Hamas is practically a moderate organization compared to other jihadist groups. Some terrorists have blown themselves up in crowds of children—Muslim children—just to get at the American soldiers who were handing out candy to them. They have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the casualties—where they then blow up all the injured along with the doctors and nurses.
Every day that you could read about an Israeli rocket gone astray or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq crucifying Christians and Muslims on the side of the road.
Israel seeks to live peacefully with its neighbors. Hamas aims to implement a seventh-century theocracy in the Holy Land. There’s no peace to be found between those incompatible ideas.
That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn specific actions by the Israelis. And acknowledging the moral disparity between Israel and her enemies doesn’t give us solutions to the problems in the Middle East.
For the rest of our lives and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world because they are desperate to get to Paradise. We’re all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.