In 2008, after 19 years in an Israeli prison, security prisoner Yahya Sinwar entered Assaf Harofeh Hospital, where he underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his brain. Israeli doctors diagnosed him, Israeli doctors operated on him, the Israeli health system bore the expenses of surgery and hospitalization, and the prisoner whose life was given to him as a gift quickly recovered and returned to his routine: to carry out, even from prison, attacks against Israelis.
Sinwar is not the only senior Hamas official to receive medical treatment in Israel. If, according to normal moral procedures, it can be argued that every prisoner, even the most despicable one, is entitled to treatment by the state in whose custody he is subjected, sometimes we have gone out of our way to cure relatives of murderers with a special humane import: the sister of senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouq came here in 2014 from Rafah to receive cancer treatment. Ismail Haniyeh, who has been planning the destruction of Israel from Qatar for years, has won that many members of his family will benefit from the good services of the Israeli health system: his daughter, granddaughter and brother-in-law were brought here from Gaza to receive life-saving treatment.
Three days before the murder of Gil-Ad Sha'ar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrah, Amina Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas' wife, was treated in an Israeli hospital, under heavy security and a veil of secrecy. Ayelet Shaked, then a Knesset member, articulated the logic behind the decision to deal with those whose husband made sure to pay salaries to murderers of Jews: "That's the difference between us and them. There are those who hand out candy when children are kidnapped, and there are those who take care of the enemy."
"Hamas knew - it was a Jihad rocket" // Photo: IDF Spokesperson
A spokesman for Talmon, where Gil-Ad Sha'ar lived, also agreed: "Once again it is revealed that there is a people here that all it does is convey a desire for peace, love and good neighborliness. When we invest in good neighborliness and sacrifice for it, the other side seeks to hit the soft and weak spots at every opportunity. We are glad that this is happening these days, and it sharpens the opposite attitudes between the peoples."
What has further sharpened the opposite attitudes between the peoples is the fact that none of these acts of kindness and rescue have changed the plans and attitudes of the Palestinians and their leaders towards Israel and its citizens. It only raised the imagined moral standard we had set for ourselves as we tried to win a competition in which we were the only ones participating, and in which the prize was our extinction as a country and as individuals.
Martial doctrine?
On Tuesday evening, Hamas promised a particularly heavy rocket on Haifa. The launch failed and the rocket landed in a parking lot near a hospital in Gaza. The Gaza media was quick to declare hundreds dead and accuse Israel of deliberate shelling. The Israeli studios rushed to report from Hamas (a news source that makes perfect sense to quote in wartime), and then trembled with worry: Could we Israelis shell a hospital?
Forgotten is the fact that Hamas uses all civilian institutions as launching pads and weapons depots, whose consistent policy for years has been to commit every atrocity it wants, and then accuse Israel of harming innocent people when it responds. This is his martial doctrine. Why did it become part of our martial doctrine?
During a war, Israel may accidentally damage a hospital. Of course, it is inconceivable that Israel would deliberately attack hospitals in Gaza, which serve as Hamas Nazi headquarters and weapons stockpiles, even if it is known that Hamas will never voluntarily evacuate civilians because it wants to show the world Israel's evil. But after Hamas has proven with signs and wonders and 1,400 murdered and killed who it is and what it is, can we finally believe what it has said and done all these years, what it wrote in the Hamas charter, what it educated its children: They want to murder us all, down to the last of us? If we want to live, we will have to win. And in order to win, it is necessary, for starters, to destroy the enemy's arsenals.
It takes a great deal of intellectual sophistication to admire artistic gymnastics of "morality" in front of an audience that tries to murder you while performing spaghette. This is a kind of sophistication that in recent decades has bought a strike in the Western world. The best intellectuals have succeeded in hijacking morality and twisting it into theories so complex that "child murder" can be considered as abhorrent as "colonialism."
Anyone who tries to challenge the correctness of this equation will first have to explain what colonialism is, why the State of Israel does not meet this definition, and that is before we even get to the challenging discussion of "what kind of colonialism can justify the deliberate mass murder of civilians."
Evil becomes a theory
It is difficult for complacent and satiated Westerners to accept the existence of evil. After World War II, he immersed himself in narcissistic delusions about the end of history and discussed issues of gender, climate and body image. When he encounters evil, he puts it into theory. He is interested in Hannibal Lecter's relationship with his mother, attributes increased violence of certain cultures to some oppression, or finds geopolitical reasons for the massacre in the South. We also contracted the disease. We've even gotten used to missiles.
Biden. They ask us to embrace terrorists,
And if we are, all the more so the Western world. In the current moral construction, Israel has the right to defend itself – but this defense mainly includes Iron Dome. Moreover, we are required to embrace our murderers, because within the framework of Western morality they are more dangerous: they have no state (they refused every offer) and no money (there was, but Hamas used it to build a killing machine against Israel). But why resort to the reasons for the dangers? The poor guy is always right, and if he murders Jews – well, there must be an academic theory to explain that too.
The broken morality of the Western world is a luxury that Israel cannot afford. Of course she shouldn't voluntarily take on homemade hardware. In the end, we will have to deliberately shell Gaza's hospitals. Not to harm civilians, but to destroy the weapons stockpiles stored there. In the meantime, it is worth recognizing that we are not the "Western world." We are Jews. It's good that we live. It's bad for us to die.
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