We have struggled to find, especially since that 7 October, the righteous among the civilised.
Panaji, Goa: Our first sighting of a novel horror came on 19 January this year. That was the day, under the agreement between the State of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, three Israeli hostages were released from captivity. The three—Emily Damari, Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher—were the first of what was to become a series of releases.
They had been captive for 471 agonisingly long days. Nothing could have forewarned their anxious families, nor a country waiting for the hostages to be freed, for the blood-curdling spectacle to follow. The video footage of the three young women’s release showed them being herded between vehicles by squads of masked men wearing new combat fatigues, the Hamas green bandana on their foreheads, brandishing submachine guns.
Around them, in every direction, the videos showed enormous mobs, some armed, all screaming, roiling madly around the epicentre of their demonic focus, three terrified young women, the transfer vehicles all but lost in the frightful tide of bloodlust. It was the closing counterpart to the ghastly spectacle, again glimpsed through video footage in the days after 7 October 2023, of the demonic mobs in Gaza who abused the live hostages and desecrated the bodies of the murdered ones.
For the next six releases of hostages (or bodies of hostages murdered in captivity, war crime compounded by war crime) the spectacles continued. These were quasi-rallies of a kind not seen even during the most frenzied days of Nationalsozialismus Germany, so hideous were they. Scarcely commented upon by the world’s media, which blandly reported these as hostage “handovers”, the public spectacle concocted by Hamas (with the Red Cross in attendance) for each was nightmarishly ghoulish.
On 20 February, the main act of the ghastly series was staged. The bodies of the two youngest hostages, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, and that of their mother Shiri, were returned. But not without the Hamas danse macabre, and this time children of Gaza were brought to see the transport of two small coffins (their occupants having been choked to death months earlier) to Israel for burial, to cheer and wave, as if trophies were being sent off ceremoniously.
If nothing else since 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and butchered more than 1,200 Israelis (and other nationals) it is this series of horrifying spectacles that dismantles completely the fiction of neutral Gazans hijacked by tyrannical leaders. Like the patriarch Abraham, Jews and non-Jews who had alike been appalled by the Hamas savagery—played out time and again since 7 October—tried to find the righteous among the wicked, and failed.
Similarly have we struggled to find, especially since that 7 October, the righteous among the civilised. For even before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) entered the Gaza Strip to put an end to Hamas terrorism, there was a swift closing of ranks by those described as the woke Left, who painted the abominable atrocities committed by Hamas—butchered babies, people burned alive, unarmed civilians blown up by hand grenades, women raped, infants beheaded—as the somehow inevitable consequences of Israel being an “occupying” or “colonising” or “settler” power.
By the time, during the first half of December 2023, the IDF began uncovering the Gaza tunnel system, the calumny against the state of Israel, against the Jews of Israel, against Jews anywhere, had ratcheted up. Alongside the high-pitched demands for “proportionality” in Israel’s response to the 7 October invasion and atrocities emerged the repetition, in western university campuses most conspicuously, of the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That deadly slogan—menacingly chanted by youth in western universities and by “protesters” in European cities—meant exactly what the terror organisation Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, the heirs of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Islamic Jihad, the heirs of Muslim Brotherhood, want it to mean. And that is, the elimination of Israel and Jews.
Its repetition, in the media of the West (and by news agencies used by much of the world’s press), was designed both to obscure the Hamas atrocities and whitewash its clear genocidal intent. Called into question directly is Israel’s right to exist. Far too many have neither countered it nor answered conscientiously. By such action or inaction, they evoked the nihilistic Khartoum Resolutions of September 1967 by the Arab states: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
A former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, also a former Israeli president, Chaim Herzog, in November 1975 emphasised to the UN General Assembly that “hatred and ignorance are the two evils which menace society in general and a society of nations in particular.” The pall of malignity issuing from Hamas and its agencies has spread around the world because hatred and ignorance have been cynically used to fuel one another. Fifty years on, Herzog’s advice must be heeded.
* The author is a Unesco expert in Asia on living heritage, and adviser on traditional knowledge systems.