As Jews, we are no strangers to being victims of despicable acts of violence. Our history is, in fact, littered with them—beyond the expulsions, Crusades, Inquisitions, blood libels, pogroms, and the Shoah, there are a litany of other examples. Israel’s founding as a safe haven for the Jewish people came a few million dead Jews too late, but it was a watershed moment.
Not that it really mattered, as the murder and hatred of the Jewish people has continued unabated. Singular events have shocked us—Munich, AMIA, Sbarro, Dolphinarium—while an ongoing slow boil of inhuman acts of murder and terrorism in Israel on a slow, regular rotation has never really ended.
Through no fault of our own, we have become conditioned to deal with those tragedies, random shootings, ramming attacks, and Jews killed in their homes a few times a year. Is it crude to say that we all understood that it was the cost of doing business? Or, more bluntly, that it was just the cost of being Jewish?
The reliable callousness of the status quo exploded on Saturday morning, with over a thousand innocents slaughtered in their homes, on the streets, and in the desert sands of Southern Israel, and an unknown number of hostages taken into Gaza.
If only that was the end of it, but no, it was worse than you think it is.
Things that used to be buried in the corners of the dark web or on ISIS promotional videos played out across the border towns near Gaza. Rape, murder, kidnapping, families burned to death in their homes, dogs being shot for sport, Hamas commandos roaming the streets of Ofakim, 260 dead at a desert rave…I don’t even know the half of it and I don’t want to know any more. This generation’s Holocaust of dead Jews now joins millions of others on a millennia-long list of martyrs who were slaughtered merely for the audacity of being Jewish.
What is the measured and proportional response to an enemy who desires nothing except for your extermination? What are we supposed to do? Pray for peace? Should we not pray first for the destruction of Hamas? After what we just witnessed, and the horrors yet to come, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assert with the utmost conviction that there can’t be peace with the ultimate, deepest, and darkest evil. Golda Meir knew as much when she spoke about our enemies:
“They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise. And that’s why we have no choice.”
What do I know? I know we aren’t going anywhere, and neither is the State of Israel. We will fight to the last Jew to keep her.
We have no choice. We have no other land.
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