October 7, 2023 will be remembered as one of the darkest days of the century. Unbeknownst to the Israeli intelligence services, the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas in Israel carried out a massive and brutal attack.
Although we have long known and explained the very real and shocking suffering of the Palestinian people, nothing can justify the cruel and unnecessary violence of this operation carried out by Hamas and its armed-to-the-teeth militants.
Nothing. Not even the disastrous regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not even the radical right, which he ruthlessly feeds on to stay in power.
Nothing can justify or explain the execution of hundreds of innocent people. Shot at close range on a Saturday morning. In their streets. In their homes. Massacred on their kibbutz or at dawn at the Nova music festival.
Nothing can legitimize these incredibly violent hostage takings. Hamas militants have kidnapped Israelis, foreigners, children, women and grandmothers. Even Holocaust survivors were forcibly taken to Gaza.
A planned barbarism
Nothing. Not even the extreme complexity of the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict can exonerate the perpetrators of this barbarity. A barbarism planned at the last minute.
Because, alongside the thousands of rockets that rained down on Israel, it was these hostages who suffered the worst blow.
Those who survive their abduction will certainly serve as a bargaining chip for Hamas to negotiate with Israel over the possible release of Palestinian prisoners.
They are also used to convince the Israeli army to be careful enough in their counterattack in Gaza to try to save the lives of the hostages.
These kidnappings were expertly filmed by armed militants and broadcast on social media in near real time. They also capture the imagination of Westerners while spreading Hamas propaganda to their sympathizers wherever they are.
Above all, these hostage-takings are terrorizing the Israelis and will continue to terrorize them for a long time. No one will forget that armed Hamas fighters could so easily break into peaceful homes and kill or kidnap entire families. Nobody could forget it.
acts of terrorism
All possible rationalizations fail here. This heinous strategy of hostage-taking and random murder has only one name: terror.
At first glance, these acts are primarily aimed at sowing terror in Israel. These are terrorist attacks. Point.
The Palestinian cause is one thing, but these acts of terror are driven by a completely assumed hatred, not only towards Israelis, but towards Jews as a whole.
Much more than the legitimate desire for the Palestinians to have their own state, behind these fundamentally dehumanizing acts lies the primary desire that the state of the Jewish people one day disappear from the world map.
But if Hamas penetrates Israelis’ homes so harshly and brutally, it will achieve neither.
By calling, as he knew, for a counterattack by the Israeli army, the terrorist violence he is using is already directed against the Palestinian people, whose great defender he nevertheless claims.
Nor will it overthrow the State of Israel by killing hundreds of innocent people – Israelis, Americans or Canadians, including Alexandre Look, a young Montrealer who was murdered in cold blood by Hamas at the Nova music festival while trying to protect the people who accompanied him.
Obviously, all this hate that kills can only end badly.
