On the morning of October 7, 2023, I found myself reading the Economist when suddenly a message appeared on my phone. The Hamas terror attack in Israel was all over the news and I could hardly believe how such massive and despicable crime could have happened in our times, especially given Israel’s superior army, intelligence and hardware capabilities.
As a student of history, I couldn’t help myself searching for answers, but only after a few months. Before I embarked on that journey, I needed time to fully understand what happened, based on the facts, but also to understand why the people who committed those crimes were so proud of their deeds.
Slaughtering women, children, executing families and raping girls and women requires a mental state that defies not only logic or common sense, but fundamental elements of humanity.
Many of us have seen a child falling on the ground while playing and rushed to its rescue. Such behaviour is instinctive. It has nothing to do with common sense or some learned behaviour to act in a socially acceptable way.
We are made to protect the young. It is a necessary instinct found in most species to ensure good parenting.
Yet, thousands of Palestinians from Gaza participated or cheered at the sight of dead and mutilated bodies of children and others that belonged to citizens of Israel.
Proud Palestinian executioners forwarded such pictures to friends and family before they were later captured by Israeli security forces. Many people in the outside world were quick to adopt Hamas’ narrative that this was an act of resistance against Israeli occupation with no questions asked.
Hamas spent literally billions of dollars it received in aid from many Muslim countries in the years it ruled Gaza, not to bring progress that will benefit the Palestinian people, but rather to build underground tunnels and live like rats. They have indoctrinated their young to hate the Jews and believe that their elimination is a service to “God”.
It is no wonder why such service was provided with such enthusiasm by many young Palestinians.
Hannah Arendt wrote in her famous treatise on the Origins of Totalitarianism that, “terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.”
Arendt draws her conclusions mostly from her experience and meticulous study of Nazism and its state of terror. Those who can read and understand her conclusion don’t need to be students of history or historians for that matter, to understand that a regime that fits this definition is evil and capable of committing any atrocity or crime, even against its own people.
With the defeat of France in May 1940, few believed that Hitler and his evil ideology that engulfed the powerful German nation could be defeated or eradicated. Even less believed that Jews were hunted with the aim of extermination fuelled by Nazi sick ideology. The exact same ideology that Hamas has proliferated in Gaza.
Yet, many in the outside world chose to support tyranny over democracy, they chose to support evil over good.
Many ask, what about the children in Gaza that are dying from bombs and suffer malnutrition? Isn’t it a shame that the civilised world doesn’t stop Israel?
Children deserve peace
Indeed, children all over the world deserve to live in peace and love with their parents, their relatives and friends. It is a moral obligation for society to ensure those rights.
Unfortunately, these rights are neither inherent nor permanent. They must be defended.
Only a state of democracy can defend those rights. Those who look down on democracy care neither about children nor their rights.
Palestinian and Israeli children have the same rights to grow in peace, love and prosperity. But such norms do not exist in a tyranny where children are becoming agents of hate and their dead bodies objects of propaganda. The more dead children the better for Hamas.
According to a CNN report, the military leader of Hamas has said he believes he has gained the upper hand over Israel and that the spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza would work in the militant group’s favour, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing leaked messages the newspaper said it had seen.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Yahya Sinwar told other Hamas leaders recently, according to one of the messages revealed by the WSJ.
In another, Sinwar is said to have described civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices”, while citing past independence-related conflicts in countries like Algeria.
Such brutal calculations are common in any tyranny. It is a shame that the world allowed, supported and in some cases even cheered the tyrannical regime of Hamas that caused this misery in the first place.
Israel, on the other hand, is a beacon of democracy, religious and ethnic tolerance, rule of law and respect for human rights in a region where there are no democracies, but rather rule of Islam, ethnic intolerance, no respect for women and little or no respect for human rights with some relatively good exceptions found the south of the Gulf.
Some critics of Israel often resort to history and particularly at the beginning of the 20th century when Jews began immigrating to Palestine en masse, particularly after WWII, but they forget that Jews have lived in those lands thousands of years before the Muslim populations.
As Morgan Housel put it, “those who read history tend to look for what proves them right and confirms their personal opinions. They defend loyalties. They read with a purpose to affirm or to attack. They resist inconvenient truth since everyone wants to be on the side of the angels.”
Many people in the West believe that the values we enjoy in our countries are cherished and respected everywhere. Isn’t it ironic that those people who demonstrate now against brutality and human rights in the west couldn’t do it in Gaza before the war?
Support for Israel means genuine support for democracy, rule of law, human rights and freedom. Anything else is nothing short of hypocrisy.
Michael Olympios is Editorial Consultant for the Financial Mirror
