Loved ones of Hamas attack victims diverge over Israel’s war on Gaza: The small village of Be’eri in southern Israel
BE’ERI – To walk the streets of the small village of Be’eri in southern Israel nowadays is to relive the horrors from the single deadliest attack on civilians in Israel’s 75-year history.
This once close-knit community has become lined with partially destroyed homes. Some were open and others burned. There are bloody walls in that one. There are two childrens’ rooms filled with books, binders and stuffed animals. The bed frames are stained with blood.
On the road leading into this kibbutz, a backhoe scoops up the bodies of Hamas militants who stormed this community of just over 1000 people about three miles from the border with Gaza.
The Israeli military has been leading journalists through this village in recent days to give the world a glimpse of what happened once Hamas militants crossed the border from Gaza into Israel undetected, storming several communities where they killed at least 1400 people and took some 200 hostages.
Many residents of the towns hid inside safe rooms waiting for Israeli forces to rescue them. No one came for hours. The scene that they emerged in was unlike anything they’d seen before.
More than a week since the Hamas attack, which set off a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza where the group is based, survivors are still waiting to identify bodies and plan funerals
We haven’t figured out how we are going to deal with so many funerals,” Alom said. “We do not know where to bury them because they are not safe.”
He said that they were slaughtered for over four or five hours, and no one came to help them. I don’t know who is to blame. We’ve been slaughtered, so I just know.
The Palestinian Enclave: What Israelis Really Need to Do about the Middle East Problem, and Why Israel Doesn’t Care About It
They are not angry at the government for the intelligence failure or the Israeli forces for their delay in rescues, but at the Palestinian enclave.
It’s being crushed by a relentless wave of Israeli airstrikes, choked by a complete siege that’s barred food, fuel, electricity and water from entering, and is bracing for Israel’s ground invasion, all aimed at ridding the territory of Hamas.
The war has been going on for nearly a year, but Noy Katsman is sitting in a Jerusalem cafe and he wants it to stop. They know what Alom is going through but don’t use it the same way.
The village of Holit lies a mile from the Gaza Strip. Hayim was one of thirty Americans killed in the attack and was hiding in the closet when he was shot.
Hayim was a peace activist in the past. He was critical of the government for its promotion of illegal settlements and for uplifting extreme anti-Arab voices, despite authoring a doctorate about the dangers of the right wing in Israel.
“He would encourage Israelis to think about the long-term repercussions of retaliation after he was killed,” said Katsman.
“My government, instead of saying, ‘Okay, we failed, maybe we need to do something else,’ they’re saying, ‘Oh, we need to kill more Palestinians. We need to destroy Hamas. “It’s right-wing politicians who gain power from violence and hate, these are the people who gain from it. But we lose from it.”
“You need to understand how people feel,” they said. We are going to kill a thousand people if they kill us, and these people will grow up and hate us even more.
“That’s the problem – Israelis only care if something is pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel,” they said. “This question is a distraction. People die. People die from both sides.
The Middle East crisis is asking how to deal with a provocation that has no good solution. We in the West are not doing well in this test.
I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. The children in Gaza are among more than 2 million people trapped in a siege.
I think that the US speaks a good deal about principles, but they have an embedded hierarchy of human life in American policy. He expressed outrage at the massacres of Jews by Hamas, as he should have, but he has struggled to be equally clear about valuing Gazan lives. It is not always clear if he is standing for peace with Israel or with Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been a constant roadblock to peace.
What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?
What are we to tell Dr. Iyad Abu Karsh, a Gaza physician who lost his wife and son in a bombing and then had to treat his injured 2-year-old daughter? He had to deal with the corpses of his loved ones, so he didn’t have time to care for his niece or sister.
In his speech on Thursday, Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. It’s fair. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.
Americans would most likely shrug and say that Putin started it. Too bad the Russian children did not go somewhere else to be born.
Does Hamas End? Why Israel’s enemies should not be tolerated in the presence of a ground invasion — a moral imperative to defend Israel
I think the view reflects a mistake. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.
Try to hold onto our values even in the face of provocation. We try to uphold lives as having equal value despite our biases. If your ethics see some children as invaluable and others as disposable, that’s not moral clarity but moral myopia. We must not kill Gazan children in order to protect Israeli children.