Fury

From our early childhood we learn of the atrocities committed against Jews throughout our history, starting with the enslavement and murder of our forebearers in Egypt, the invasions of Israel and the slaughter of its inhabitants during the destructions of the first and second Botei Mikdoshim, the Crusaders’ murderous campaigns, the expulsions of Jews from different countries, the Inquisition, the Cossacks, and most recently the destruction and near annihilation of European Jewry a mere eighty years ago. Most of us are too young to remember the Holocaust, although many of us (such as myself) have the honor of being named after one or more of the murdered kedoshim.

We know that monstrous evil exists, but comprehending it is impossible for most people. How can a human murder children? How can a large group, an entire country, create a death industry that constructs factories to manufacture poison gas that will be used to slaughter millions of innocents only because of who they are, construct crematoria that are needed because too many have been slaughtered to simply bury, and do so with the cooperation of millions of its citizens? Individuals who are evil have always existed, but organized population-wide evil on this scale is unprecedented and incomprehensible.

And now, just shy of eighty years from the end of the Holocaust, it’s happened again. We know well the evil and depravity of groups like the PLO, PFLP, Hezbollah, Hamas and their ilk which have murdered Jews from Shalhevet Pas H”yd, an infant held in her father’s arms, to elderly wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer H”yd. These and other murders and massacres were committed solely because the targets were Jews, and those who perpetrated them were lionized and treated as heroes by the Palestinians and much of the Arab world. The only reason they haven’t carried out an atrocity to the scale of this week’s until now is because they weren’t able to, not because they didn’t want to. Tragically, this past Shabbos, they were able to. And, incomprehensibly to us yet again, there is celebrating among the Palestinians, the middle-eastern Arab world, and many Islamic ex-pats and far-leftists right here in the United States.

Negotiations, concessions and kindness are useless – they are viewed as weakness by these murderous groups whose highest aspiration is to murder Jews, secular or religious, young or old, men or women. One may as well try to negotiate with cancer or with covid.

We may not understand what it’s like to possess the level of hate, evil and depravity that drives these murderers, but we understand that they must be fought and defeated. They know full-well that our humanity puts limits on what we’re willing to do when we fight back – that’s why they use human shields and that’s why a Hamas leader a few years back sent his daughter to Israel for medical treatment. We take no joy in photos of bloodied children from Gaza who were caught in Israeli airstrikes, but we can’t allow the planners, executers and supporters of the Shabbos atrocity to hide behind civilians. The U.S. and its WWII allies understood that full-well when Tokyo, Berlin, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and many other cities filled with civilian populations felt the fury of allied bombers in the fight against evil, and the defeat of Hamas must be just as complete as that of Germany and Japan. The time of “mowing the grass” limited strikes against Gaza is past; this is now a full-scale war and the sole Israeli objective must be winning it.

The New York Times (and many other media organizations) refuses to call those who murdered hundreds of concert-going civilians and beheaded babies in their cribs “Terrorists”, instead using their preferred term “Militants”. If the perpetrators of organized atrocities such as these can’t be called terrorists then the word might as well be removed from the dictionary, because who then does it apply to?

There will be calls for Israel to “exercise restraint”, as there always have been when Israel fights back. I hope Israel prioritizes the safety of its soldiers and citizens first and foremost, with “restraint” being the smallest part of any battlefield equation. May Hashem protect our brothers and sisters living in Eretz Yisroel and the soldiers going into danger.
.ה’ יִשְׁמָרְךָ מִכָּל רָע יִשְׁמֹר אֶת נַפְשֶׁךָ
.ה’ יִשְׁמָר צֵאתְךָ וּבוֹאֶךָ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד עוֹלָם