Facing the Truth About Our Enemies

We were all sickened as we learned how an infant and a toddler met their deaths in Hamas’s dungeons, strangled by their captors and then mutilated to disguise the atrocity.  How, we ask ourselves, could our fellow humans be so cruel and depraved?  It’s the wrong question.  That Hamas, Islamic State and their ilk – let’s call them Muslim eliminationists – are savage and psychopathic is a platitude.  That they are antisemitic is a risible understatement.  That they enjoy consistently widespread support among Palestinians has long been evident from opinion polls.

The question we should be asking is how we can step outside our enlightenment mindset to comprehend a nihilism so fierce and so implacable as to defy any accommodation our civilized minds can imagine.  Nazis loathed Jews as cultural and genetic pollution; they created a vast transnational industry dedicated to the collection, conveyance and extermination of Jews.  That was hatred.  The Einsatzgruppen pursued their tasks with varying degrees of enthusiasm or sadism but rarely knew their victims personally.

In contrast, we hear reports that, as one of the female observers kidnapped on October 7, 2023 was beaten while hanging upside down somewhere in Gaza, her tormentor laughed about how his daughter’s life was saved in an Israeli hospital.  The day the observers were abducted, invading Hamas terrorists were joined by thousands of ordinary Gazan civilians of all ages to slaughter and kidnap Jews many of them knew as employers or volunteer drivers who ferried them to medical facilities in Israel.  They knew which houses to go to first to eliminate security personnel, where the hidden surveillance cameras and weapons were located, where to find the electrical panels.

This is not an ordinary or even atavistic hatred that the civilized mind comprehends.  It sees the Jew not as other or enemy but as vermin, a defilement whose filthy feet desecrate all they tread upon.  The chattel Jew lives at the sufferance of the Muslim eliminationist and is privileged to serve him until expedience or pure whimsy dictates death.

The civilized mind rejects this perversity as both inconceivable and too terrifying to contemplate.  We are certain that others think as we do and confident in our ability to solve any problem.  (“We can talk this out!” cried the film director Theo van Gogh as he died under the knife of an Islamist radical on an Amsterdam street.)  We search for political origins since those we can fix with compensation and land.  But we search in vain because Muslim eliminationism long predates the first stirrings of political Zionism, much less Jewish sovereignty.  Barbaric massacres of Jews in Palestine have been chronicled at least as far back as the 1830s.

If the dispute is not political, then political solutions are futile.  Yet civilized minds refuse to give up on the dream of two states living side-by-side in peace and security.  They remain convinced, 30 years after the Oslo Accords were signed, that just the right compromise endorsed by farsighted leaders will satisfy political aspirations and reverse, or at least contain, eliminationist hate.

But Palestinians rejected progressively more generous offers of statehood in 2000, 2001, and 2008 because the aspirations were illusory.  Israel unilaterally initiated a statehood experiment in Gaza in 2005, and despite the experimental evidence accumulated over four wars, allowed Hamas the ability to carry out its October 7 pogrom and withstand 16 months of military assault.  Yasser Arafat’s “strategy of stages,” announced half a century ago, has been the stated or unstated principle behind every Palestinian government: take whatever territory Israel will cede and use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until the Jews are expelled or murdered.

Confronted with these realities but determined to retain agency in their own fate, civilized minds pursue outreach efforts to individual Palestinians in the hope of inculcating tolerance from the bottom up.  Such minds populated the Israeli “Gaza envelope” communities devastated on October 7 and suffered the greatest slaughter.  Oded Lifshitz, murdered in Gaza shortly after the massacre and whose body was just returned to Israel, spoke Arabic and, even at 83, picked up sick Palestinians at the Gaza Strip border and drove them to Israeli hospitals.  Who mourns him in Gaza?

Political compromise, economic incentives, charitable gestures, personal outreach, self-blame – they’ve all been tried.  Of course, some will always make the unfalsifiable argument that the efforts have been insufficient.  A storm of criticism greeted Mitt Romney’s 2012 assertion that “culture makes all the difference” between Israel’s success and the Palestinians’ economic struggles, for example.  But he was right: the carrots and sticks that transformed Germany and Japan from predatory, militaristic powers into responsible civil societies have not even slightly dented the culture of eliminationism in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, or anywhere else it exists.

With all of our carrots devoured to no beneficial effect, we are left, bleakly, with sticks.  The status quo that has prevailed uneasily in Judea and Samaria since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 is the future: separation, checkpoints, incursions of varying intensities, moral condemnation from the UN, the Squad, and Banksy.  If the Gazans are to remain in Gaza, add a perimeter buffer zone, permanent military control of the Rafah crossing and the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors, and an intrusive army presence.  It may not be possible to destroy Hamas as an idea, but with tough vigilance after its unambiguous defeat, it can be prevented from re-arming into a threat.

There are some problems that resist all solution – particularly when your death is your enemy’s joy and salvation.  The civilized mind reels, but civilization must endure.