Published: 10 November 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
He set Jews on other Jews and unleashed settlers on Palestinians. He weakened Israeli democracy and encouraged Hamas to attack it. The buck stops with Bibi.
October 7 was “a day of infamy”. Until that day it was inconceivable that Roosevelt’s words after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could again ring true. I was transported back to that other October day, October 6, 1973, day one of the Yom Kippur War. It was the other time in living memory that an attack on Israelis shook Israel and Jews around the world to their core.
That other time when Jews around the world feared for our present and our future. Fifty years and a day later, the cruel ironies of 1973 had rung forward in time to 2023. Their echoes haunt Israelis and Jews of a certain age just as their truths ring in the minds of those living in the present.
What a horrible month. What a horrible war, not that any war is not horrible but this one is so much worse. It started in utter barbarism by Hamas, ostensibly in the name of Palestinian resistance. I am unable to accept, I cannot accept that this mass murder of innocent families and young lives should be depicted as an act of resistance, no matter how much I support a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
And while I love Israel as the Jewish homeland, l despise Israel's military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank. I condemn the brutality of the extremist Israeli settlers and the denial of Palestinian freedom.
However, I accept that Israel has the lawful right to use military force to defend its citizens against Hamas. That is not a pretty picture but reality rarely is, even more so in view of Hamas's infamous modus operandi to embed its political and military infrastructure within and underneath the residential and civilian fabric of Gaza. The other Gaza Hamas reality is that the Strip is so densely populated that it is difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to hit a military target without collateral civilian casualties.
That the people of Gaza are human shields for Hamas is fact, not cliché. Hamas governs Gaza to further its ideological and religious aims, largely focusing on conservative Sunni Islamism and confrontation with Israel. In its 17-year rule of Gaza as a one-party state, Hamas has diverted unknown millions of aid dollars into missiles, tunnels and bunkers instead of the development of Gaza and the betterment of the lives of the Palestinians living there.
