Horror And Danger Are Not Independent

Israel is not safe with Hamas there.

Yes, there is pain and death in Gaza, just as Israel is still being attacked by rockets, and Israeli soldiers still fall in combat with Hamas, that didn’t put their guns down. Also, the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas have not all been returned yet. A lot of them were killed, including babies. All because of a war that Hamas started in October 7^th.

Some people talk of Israel as if it was a powerful country that just decided to create a war where there was peace. But there was no peace.

The history of Israel is the History of a country which many of its neighbor say that it shouldn’t even exist, and for some reason the mainstream intellectuals of the World agree that it shouldn’t exist. And this have caused, and still causes, so much death and blood. Even if the circumstances of its birth didn’t involve displacement of Arabs, but also Jews, even if displacements were not rare in the forming of the modern map of the World. Even if there was always Jews in the Middle East, and now they only have Israel, their Holy Land.

So why should Israel be the only country whose birth should be reverted? And why should the Palestinian people be taught that they can’t move forward and seek their own happiness, that their fate depend on destroying their neighbor?

Just because Israel is modern and prosper – modern and prosper enough to make it difficult to believe that their people really desire war, by the way – doesn’t mean they are a super powerful agent in the Middle East. Search for a map of the whole Arab World with little Israel in the middle, highlighting we all the countries that have once been in war with Israel in its less than a century of existence, and the countries that still don’t recognize Israel as a legitimate Nation.

That gives us more perspective. So many countries have fought Israel, Iran is a powerful dictatorship, and they support the terrorists. Very rich Qatar never recognized Israel either.

The growth of radicalism, extremism, in the Muslin World is not a philosophical matter. We know that, when you are a dictator, giving the people a “big villain” to hate makes them direct all their frustration, about their own lives, towards that enemy. Making people believe that their time is coming, that soon they will revert the game and conquer the big enemies, make the most violent ones euphoric.

The big villains for the Islamic extremists are Israel and America, that represent all the liberties that they hate, liberties that the Western people enjoy but so many “forget” to recognize it’s a good thing.

Anyway, I don’t know how far Iran and their friends are really disposed to go in their holy war against America in the near future, I really don’t know that, but Israel is very close to them, alone, geographically surrounded by non-friends. Having victories against Israel is the best thing that radical leaders can use to attract radical followers, give them a teste of “glory”.

If you think about the disgrace of World War II, Hitler didn’t devastate half of Europe just with money and equipment. He needed people to do that. People that were getting more and more radicalized, hating their “big villains”, and at every victory getting more pumped up, believing that they were oppressed in the past but their time had come.

The radicalization of muslin people in the Middle East means the raising of a totalitarian army. More people willing to join the Terrorist armies, and more civilians willing to help them in their attacks. It will give power to their tyrants, power over their own people and power to threaten their enemies more and more.

So, what would be more glorious for those extremist leaders then destroying Israel? If they could achieve this, it would make the hate-filled ones so confident, that those tyrants would have momentum enough to dominate, and enlist people in their anti-Western agenda, for decades.

Of course for us, in the Western World, it is almost impossible to even imagine a solid country like Israel being wiped out of the map. It seems just impossible. But think, things like that don’t happen in a day. What the enemies of Israel would really like first of all is to, God forbid, gain some terrain. Taking some small cities, to start.

They could use the people of those places as human shields. So many western intellectuals would welcome that, and a lot of people would be ready to show Israel as violent if they wanted to take it back. God forbid it ever happens, but that would probably be the path those groups would want to take to weaken Israel slowly.

And what would the World say in that case? Would the World be ready to finally say a loud “no” to an ideology based on the dream of destruction of a country? Would the governments with socialist tendences be ready to defy the mainstream intellectuals? Would the World see it as a criminal invasion that have to be responded, or just one of those things that happen in the Middle East, too complex for us to judge, when it is executed by the extremist Arabs?

The reality for the Israelis is that they don’t have few enemies, and those people would like to destroy their country. And it is not philosophical, the guns stored by their enemies, the rockets being produced – and launched – the terrorist soldiers being trained, none of that is abstract. A terrorist group like Hamas is not a gang of small bandits in rags, they have thousands of soldiers, training centers, infrastructure, a whole region like Gaza under their command.

Horror and Danger are not independent from each other. October 7^th is not only a horrible event that happened in the past and must be dealt with emotionally. Israelis have all the reason to see it as a signal of big danger, something they thought their enemies were not capable of doing but did, not only they broke in, in numbers that couldn’t be predicted, but acted in a way that shows they have no limits for cruelty. Israelis have all the reason to think about that unprecedent event as something that speaks not only of the past, but also of the future. How would they not see it as a sign of danger?

Someone who was born in Israel in the beginning of the 21^st century already saw the violence of the Second Intifada, and so many terror attacks, and now the Horror of October 7^th.

We have to remember what happened in October 7^th. For two days, that was the big news. And it shouldn’t have been forgotten. If we think about that horrible event, it has all the elements of something that we should speak more about, try to analyze what makes human beings act in such a cruel way, what makes them desire the blood and pain of others so fervently. Why the sociologists are not so interested in talking about the deeds of the terrorists that day?

It was not a dozen victims, it was more than a thousand. People were killed with cruelty, in cold blood, including elderly and children, entire families. How can the fact that a peace music festival was invaded by men with machine guns that shot indiscriminately while abusing young women, killing more than three hundreds, not be a mark of terror for the whole humanity?

As I said before in other texts, the reason seems to be that, by seeing the horror and the danger, people, even disliking war, would have to ask themselves, then what? What is the solution? They would see that those leaders and celebrities of the World, while asking that Israel stop fighting, do nothing serious against Terrorism.

War is bad, that’s for sure. People dying is bad. But to achieve peace, there is thinking to be done, actions to be taken. It seems that a lot of people see “peace” as just the “absence of war”. But peace is not just an absence, peace is something mankind is trying to build. 

If there is an ideology of death banging at the door of the world we are trying to build, an ideology that considers the “other” so evil that you don’t even have to think about any of that people, who they are, that says that just for being the “other” there is nothing you can do against them that will be wrong – if a movement, a force like that is banging against the door of our home, then we need to think about the resources we have, the things that we hope will guarantee that the worst side of the human being don’t take over humanity.

We have to think, what happens when the armies of democratic countries cannot strike against a source of real and intentional threat, an extremely dangerous source of threat? And what happens when a group that dominates a region is not considered the guilty one for the death of their own people, people they left without any protection in the midst of a war they created, people they use as human shields?

The Israeli forces have no option but fight, in the most ethical way they can but fight. Defend what they swore to defend. It’s their obligation, because, truly, nobody knows the future, and the climate in the Middle East is far less calm than in the Western World, and leaders of dictatorships are far less predictable than they may appear when they occupy places of honor in International Organizations.

We sometimes may not think that the option of not fighting represents something terrible for the Israeli soldier, but what falls apart if they don’t fight? What falls is the foundations of how they kept their country so far. Yesterday was Israel Memorial Day, when they remember their more than 25 thousand fallen soldiers, without whom there would be no Israel.

It is not about politics. It’s about fighting against the biggest threaten to their families. Neither is this an abstract fear, an exaggeration about some “isolated cases” of terrorism. The Israeli Defense cannot allow the terrorists to create this situation where Israel is only allowed to fight them while they are inside of Israel. Like a horrible “game” where they enter, do horrible things, and go back to Gaza to hide, untouchable, until the day when they come in and manage to stay somewhere.

The Israeli forces do a lot to avoid civilian deaths, as no other army ever did – also, they help humanitarian aid to get into Gaza as no other army does for his enemy, because the war is against Hamas, not the people, but in the end of the day, the ways of the terrorists – installing themselves in hospitals, mosques, schools, residential areas, dressing as civilians to the confronts - makes it much more difficult to Israel to avoid civilian casualties, than it would be if they fought like a normal army, like the Israeli forces, always protecting their civilians.

They are not selfish for defending their own people, because when you live an honest life and someone gives you no option to protect your family but war, you know you are not fighting for your family only, but fighting against ideologies and regimes that want to destroy everything that brings peace to the World.

There are forces of death being raised in the World, with no leaven but tyranny, cowardice and radicalism.

Where there is horror, there is danger, and can anyone give Israel an option that does not imply in they giving up the right to defend themselves? International Organization don’t exist to be a moral judge living in the top of a beautiful mountain, but to propose solutions, I guess. The Israeli forces have to do what they can’t avoid anymore, in the best and most ethical possible way. But can the World say they are doing the best they can?

We have to think, what if? What if Israel can’t fight Hamas? On the other hand, what if a group that dominates a region is considered responsible for providing the minimal safety in a war, and held accountable for the lives they used as human shields? How this would affect terrorism, how this would make less advantageous to use this kind of strategy of human shields, in the future? What if the World, that say they care, start to think about solutions, which means start to admit that there are things worth defending, and things we need to strongly oppose?

What if everybody points their finger at countries that provide for Terrorism, like Iran? What would this do for the World in the future? For the human lives that inhabit the World?

And for the thousandth time, what is so hard about demanding a Terrorist group to surrender? How can you say, let’s achieve peace, then we will see if it is necessary to demand the end of terrorism…?