Information flowed indiscriminately. Event by event. Already on Saturday morning, Telegram groups began to be flooded with shocking videos. A woman with babies is kidnapped by armed men, terrorists at the entrance to homes of settlements, people are slaughtered in security rooms. We even saw a kidnapping on Facebook Live from a family's home. The mediation of the screens creates the illusion of distance, but it really happened. At that moment. In our country. For Jewish women and Jews of all ages. The fear of death on their faces, and we watched in shock and helplessness. The hours passed, and the people in the video started getting faces and names. Mother recognized her daughter. A girl recognized her father. The videos have become a horrifying reality. This gap, between reality and the screen, between reality and the bubble we created for ourselves, was closed on that terrible Shabbat, Simchat Torah 5724, which will forever be remembered in the history of the Jewish people.
Our generation, those who grew up in Israel in the 80s and 90s, find it hard to internalize that we are part of history. Also the cruel one. We grew older, we moderated, we started wanting things other than war. We mostly wanted money. In the worst case scenario, we faced missiles and terror attacks. Scary, no doubt, but distant, even quite sterile, compared to what we have experienced in recent days. Back then, the Yom Kippur War was the worst thing we could have imagined. We believed that we could deal with theoretical internal questions about democracy. But the scale of the horror that is still being exposed forces us to face a reality we have never encountered.
While the State of Israel implements a policy of quiet buying money, an organized, equipped, trained and skilled enemy has emerged in Gaza. They dreamed of a show of cruelty that would put them on par with the major Islamist terrorist organizations. For a year or more they planned this brutal attack, and we saw nothing. A great deal of detachment and arrogance, which has always characterized Israel's defense establishment, is what enabled it to regard Hamas as an esoteric organization, especially in relation to the IDF, and to believe that it is deterred. But more than that, the assumption that money buys quiet is based on the basic misunderstanding that this is a religious war.
Quite a few circles on the left believed until Saturday morning (some still believe) that Hamas is an organization that fights the occupation and is interested in civilian life in a Palestinian state. As far as they are concerned, terrorism is undesirable, but it comes from both sides and is therefore understandable on the weak Palestinian side. But in the religious war of Judaism against Islam we cannot escape from our Judaism, and Jews are a small minority. You see this clearly on social media, where a war of consciousness is taking place between the few and the many.
Palestinian society, like any other society, has undergone many processes in recent decades, both in the West Bank and in Gaza (everywhere else). Among other things, in many cases the struggle against the occupation turned into a war against Jews. This is evidenced by the lack of distinction by Hamas and the Palestinian terrorist organizations between security personnel and civilians, or between settlers and other Jews in Israel – a distinction to which the left still adheres.
A great deal of detachment and arrogance, which has always characterized Israel's defense establishment, is what enabled it to regard Hamas as an esoteric organization, especially in relation to the IDF, and to believe that it is deterred
Human rights discourse in the Palestinian context began to take on an anti-Semitic tinge, which became increasingly dominant. The climate in Israeli and international universities, in which the concepts have blurred, has undermined the values of the global and Israeli left. It also undermined our judgment, the Jews. We didn't want to be Jewish so much. We fought with all our might to be citizens of the Western world, liberals and democrats. Even when synagogues were burned, we turned a blind eye. All in order to continue to be a European bubble that does not go to war. Mostly, we refused to hear what Hamas was saying about itself and ignored its cruelty towards civilians in the Gaza Strip. Our power seemingly made this possible.
Humanism is an important value, which requires dialogue with reality. The current reality vis-à-vis the enemy requires us to reorganize our priorities, to return to listening to basic instincts, to deep intuitions, to our instincts for survival.
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