How to respond proportionately to those who burned a father and young son in a small community in the western Negev? They wrapped an iron wire around them, shot them, and then set them on fire to life. The father hugs his young child, and together they become a charred lump whose components are barely recognizable. How to provide an appropriate answer to the screams, the terror, the scorching flames, the pain, the suffocation, the terrible ending.
The world demands a proportionate response to Hamas' attack on us. From the BBC to the Scottish Government, from the UN Secretary General to the Queen of Jordan. They claim that we react disproportionately to what they have done to us. Indeed, the question arises as to what constitutes a proportionate response, how to respond with the same currency to what was done in Bari and the village of Gaza, in Netivot and Sderot.
How to treat proportionately those who slaughtered mothers and babies in their cribs. For someone who fired 15 bullets at a 10-year-old girl, for someone who killed a young man with a pickaxe and then cut off his head. What is the answer to those who cut short with automatic weapons, who spend time at a party, those who hunt girls who tried to hide in the nooks?
The IDF attacked more than 250 Hamas targets in a day // Photo: IDF Spokesperson
How do we respond to those who murdered the elderly, who raped girls, to those who kidnapped civilians and more than 30 children? For those who threw sick elderly women on a motorcycle to serve as a bargaining chip. And by the way, how do you respond to someone who launches tens of thousands of missiles and bombs over many years into every town and city in Israel?
How do you treat someone who robbed a phone from the woman he had just murdered, and cried out excitedly to his father: "I'm talking to you from a Jewish woman's phone, I killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed ten." His hands are drenched in the blood of his victims and he boasts until his mother responds: "I wish I was with you."
How do you react to a nation that is its sons and mothers, who has produced so many monsters? How can countless people, in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, within the Green Line, express their exhilaration at the images of our massacre, rape, blood and terror? Who rejoice and celebrate, who recite slogans of encouragement and praise.
The truth is that there is no appropriate response on earth to each and every one of the creatures themselves and to a society that has produced such mutations and norms. There is no appropriate response for those who identify, encourage, and bask in this horror. There is no means on earth that can reward them.
Different nations have faced similar manifestations of human evil. The British responded to the bombing of their cities by the Nazis by turning German cities into mounds of fire and ruins. Not cities that served as underground outposts, but purely civic centers like Hamburg and Dresden, not to mention Berlin. They and their inhabitants were crushed in order to take revenge, in order to destroy the lives and property of the murderous enemy nation, as much as possible. In the same spirit, 12 million Germans were expelled from present-day Czechoslovakia and Poland, even though they had lived there for hundreds of years, and all their property was expropriated forever. Not to mention the Russian revenge - in which most German women, aged 7 to 70, were raped by Soviet soldiers in the occupied zones. And how did the Americans retaliate for the attack on the Pearl Harbor military base? They dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Jordan's Queen Rania, Photo: AFP
None of this is proportional enough to what Hamas, Fatah, the residents of Gaza and the Palestinian national movement have done and are doing to us. Nothing will match what they desire and strive to do with us. Only one biblical commandment can help, and that is: "Wipe out the memory of Amalek." This is the imperative of the time that does not pay them as a reward for the past, but will be used against all those who seek our lives in the future.
Late waking
Could it be that the trauma of Sukkot has finally made Israeli society connect to reality? If one evening Yosef Haddad and Eliyahu Yossian come up at Channel 12's campfire and tell us the truth to our faces, maybe something begins to change. Yusef Haddad urges us to "start speaking Arabic," that is, to start thinking and acting according to the only codes our neighbors understand. To respond with force, to destroy and to take revenge on a massive scale, because otherwise we will not be able to live here. And Elijah Yossian implores us to "be cruel," otherwise we will be swallowed alive. They and others like them repeatedly beg us to listen to the internal Arab discourse, which values only strength and power, not songs of peace and brotherhood.
The truth is finally dawning that the so-called mainstream broadcasters and newspapers have not wanted to hear and refused to broadcast for decades. A few like me, like Zvika Yehezkeli, managed to score with their voices, but didn't really make an impact. Israeli society has sealed all its senses from recognizing where it lives. Although she lives in the Middle East, she imagines she is in London, Paris and New York.
This is an old process, stemming entirely from Jewish goodness and optimism. During the War of Independence the leaders of the Yishuv had very few illusions, so Ben-Gurion did everything in his power to smuggle out and expel those who tried to crush and destroy us.
But since the establishment of the State of Israel, we have begun to weave illusions, in a process that has become destructive since the Six-Day War. Slowly, the voices of those who tried to convince them that the Arabs, and especially the Palestinians, had changed their skin. They no longer want to throw us into the sea, they don't want to return to Tel Aviv, Safed, Jerusalem and the surrounding communities. They recognized the existence of the State of Israel within the borders that we conquered by force until 1949, and if we only give them what we seized in 1967, we can finally live in peace and tranquility until the end of time. This mindset initially nested among an extreme left-wing minority, but later took over the elites – in academia, in the media and later in the army.
Destruction in Gaza City after IDF strikes, photo: AP
Hence the Oslo Accords, which were accompanied by an imagined picture of a new Middle East. One that no longer has meaning to the territory, to strength, to a strong army. That development and progress lead Arab society as a whole, which has converted its values from nationality, religion, revenge and dignity to economic prosperity and welfare.
Connect to reality
A similar premise led the planners of the "disengagement", who argued that the unilateral withdrawal to the line we occupied in 1949 would erase Gazans' desire to "return" to Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ramle and the western Negev. That they convert their nationalist ambitions to Singapore-building the Middle East.
We had endless opportunities to wake up from this imaginary world – from Arafat and Abu Mazen's Palestinian terror campaigns following Oslo to the missiles of the Gaza terror state. But we didn't really wake up. Beyond the intelligence and military failure, the addiction to Hamas deception, we did not bother to read and internalize what the other side writes and says openly. These include Palestinian Authority publications, Mahmoud Abbas' speeches, and the content of textbooks that teach to uproot Beeri, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We couldn't believe what all parts of the Palestinian national movement, from Fatah to Hamas, were planning for us.
Have we now really connected to reality? Will we really start speaking Arabic? It is very desirable that yes, if we desire life.
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