Opinion

Don’t blame Israel when it launches retaliatory attack on Islamist terrorists for the genocidal attack on Jews

What Hamas radicals did was pure evil, there is no justification or ‘root cause’ theory for terror

Sreemoy Talukdar Last Updated:October 09, 2023 10:40:59 IST

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from the city of Ashkelon, Israel on 8 October, 2023. Reuters

I write for a living. I’m struggling to put together coherent sentences. It has been like this since Saturday when along with billion others across the globe, I watched the terrorists from Hamas cross over into Israeli territory and open the gates of hell, unleashing creatures of darkness who went about inflicting unspeakable, unimaginable, unfathomable, unprecedented, unconceivable horror on unarmed, defenceless, vulnerable civilians.

Somehow, as an Indian, it felt personal.

People were waiting at the bus stop, some were inside their homes, their ‘safe space’, while some were still lying in bed when terror came calling.

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In one among countless videos circulating in cyberspace and social media, platforms that the Hamas terrorists have weaponised to launch an information war, shape the narrative and strike terror deep into the hearts of Jewish society by livestreaming terror tactics in sleek, macabre, propagandist videos, I stumbled upon a heartbreaking clip of a father saving his entire family through a window in the attic and failing, ultimately, to make it himself. It is quite graphic. Be warned.

For two straight days, I have been following the developments with a strange, restive, feverish obsession. On social media, cable television, through reports and other sources. It has been hard to come to terms with absolute, pure evil. When evil manifests itself in such barbaric a way, humans tend to go numb. Terror extracts not only the price of rationality but even the basic human reaction.

Perhaps that explains why the entire Israeli state and its security apparatus, ever aware of its vulnerabilities leading to a perpetually heightened state of preparedness, went into such a profound state of shock! It took the country, including its civilian and military leadership, almost 24 hours to develop some sort of a coherent response.

Much has been said about Israel’s massive intelligence failure, and there surely is. Heads will undoubtedly roll at the very top when wartime unity ends, and a bitterly divided polity resurfaces. The scale and audacity of the multi-pronged offensive launched by Hamas, the meticulous planning and professional execution that went into represents a degree of sophistication never seen before.

Evidently, this would have been impossible without a serious lapse in intelligence from a state that is known for its state-of-the-art security apparatus including battle-hardened military units, fearsome intelligence agencies, and local and national police departments. Ironically, it occurred at a time when under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing government is in charge that places a premium on national security.

It seemed almost unbelievable, and perhaps even the Hamas terrorists themselves were taken by surprise at how easily they breached the fences of an extremely sophisticated border security mechanism equipped with sensors and subterranean walls. The breaches were preceded by the firing of thousands of rockets that struck deep into Israel, a state known for its technological prowess and formidable Iron Dome missile defence system. As if the entire system became paralysed at once.

CNN quoted Jonathan Conricus, a former international spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, as saying, “the entire system failed. It’s not just one component. It’s the entire defense architecture that evidently failed to provide the necessary defense for Israeli civilians… This is a Pearl Harbor-type of moment for Israel, where there was reality up until today, and then there will be reality after today.”

Almost an hour after the missiles were launched, the breaches took place through holes punched through the ostensibly ‘impregnable’ border fencing. And all along, in these crucial early hours, the Israeli state struggled for a response.

As Israeli analyst Haviv Rettig Gur writes in The Times of Israel, “The great and vaunted Israel Defense Forces, a 64-billion-shekel per year (over $16 billion) institution, seemed to evaporate in Israel’s moment of desperate need. And not just because of the initial surprise. Five hours into the event, battalions had still failed to materialize, government ministers failed to explain the events. Everyone seemed shell-shocked. The whole state apparatus, from the politicians on down, disappeared. And a great and deadly quiet seemed to come over the Israeli body politic.”

And then they came in droves. Through the land, air and even by sea. A commander of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) put the number of infiltrators at over 1,000. They were armed to the teeth. The Saturday raid started at the crack of dawn, but their hearts were blacker than the darkest night.

Hamas assassins chose the sleepy morning of a major Jewish holiday and poured into the villages and towns of south Israel. With automatic weapons in hand, they shot at anyone who moved and left in their wake bleeding, mutilated corpses strewn on the roads. Then they circulated the videos on social media.

The terrorists moved from house to house, hunting down Jewish people. They specifically targetted women, children and the elderly. Islamist fundamentalism has always seen women as threats, their bodies as the staging ground for jihad.

They raped the Jewish women, mutilated their bodies and dragged the corpses. Those that the terrorists didn’t kill, were kidnapped, dragged by hair, and transported to the Gaza Strip.

In a widely circulated clip too disturbing to be shared, the terrorists were seen parading around on a pick-up truck the corpse of a young woman they had possibly raped and then murdered and defiled. As The Telegraph reported, “jubilant crowds surrounded the armed men in combat fatigues, who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ from the open back of the vehicle. Some in the crowd appeared to spit on the woman’s body before the truck sped off into the distance.”

She was later reported to be a German-Israeli citizen, a young mother named Shani Louk, 23, who was attending a music festival near the Gaza border when apprehended by the terrorists.

Not just young women. The barbaric acts of the terrorists were designed to be a message to the people of Israel, to break their resolve and bring them down to their knees, to tell them that their reputation as a ‘strong state’ are a mirage before the terrorists’ resolve. This reputational damage to Israel is meant as a national shaming that the proud Jewish state won’t ever forget.

And the brutalities were aimed at the TikTok and Instagram Reels generation. As security analyst Michael A Horowitz posted on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter), in one among several similar incidents, one of the Hamas attackers who broke into the home of a grandmother in Nir Oz, near Gaza, killed her, filmed it with the phone of the deceased and uploaded the video to the elderly woman’s Facebook account, which is how her grand-daughter found out.

This is the manifestation of pure evil where modern civilizational rules have collapsed. Alongside this psychological warfare, there was the brutal execution of a carefully laid plan.

The terrorists snatched infants from mothers’ laps and took over a hundred people hostages — unofficial figures put the number at 130 — that include children, grandmothers, youth, partygoers, and even soldiers. Though most are Israeli citizens, a few Americans have also reportedly been kidnapped. They would later be used as leverages in negotiations. Hamas knows that Israel is amenable to lopsided hostage exchanges.

The fighting has still not ended. Israels’ armed forces — that has suffered a crippling blow by losing some of their top commanders — are still engaging the terrorists in multiple locations and securing as many as 29 breach points. The mayhem that extended over Saturday and Sunday resulted in a death toll of over 700 people, with over 2,000 wounded and dozens more in critical condition.

The BBC reports that more than 250 bodies were recovered from the site of the music festival — Shani Louk was among the attendees — that was among the first ground targets by Hamas.

So many Jewish people have never been killed in a single day since the Holocaust. This exceeds the toll from the worst day of the Yom Kippur war, when over 300 were killed on 7 October, 1973, and in a grim reminder of the tragedy, the Hamas attack took place one day after the 50th anniversary.

Some Israeli commentators are drawing a parallel with America’s 9/11 moment. Noah Pollak writes for The Free Press, “The meaningful similarity is the feeling of national humiliation, vulnerability, and fear provoked by the attack: the most powerful country in the Middle East, with an intelligence service that can assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists at will, with F-35s and spy satellites, was just bested by men who simply jogged across the border with rifles. Americans after 9/11 did not feel that their country was weak—we felt the bewilderment and rage of vulnerability despite our strength. This is what Israelis are feeling today.”

And yet this isn’t perhaps the right analogy. Americans, even during their darkest tragedy, didn’t have to face a political justification for genocide of their people, or anti-Semitic bigotry as the Israeli state is facing today.

Leaving aside the history of the conflict and the actors in West Asia such as Iran who would take reflexive anti-Israel positions, it has been shocking to witness the entire Leftist cabal in the West, in cahoots with Islamist radicals, fundamentalists, liberal media and “human rights” groups such as Amnesty, are busy providing justification for the genocidal attack on Jews.

The entire oppressed-oppressor context is being cynically applied to peddle “root cause” theory, as if that justifies the anti-Semitic violence, the mass slaughter of civilians on a near extermination scale or killing of young children before their parents. Israel’s retribution will come, and it will be severe. What will follow is the logical and just conclusion of the stomach-churning violence that befell the Israelis. There is no space for ‘both-siding’ or false equivalence. The terrorists are responsible for what lies ahead.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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