As we now know, what took place this past Shabbat and Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah holiday in Israel was not the standard cross-border skirmish we have grown all too accustomed to, where Hamas militants fire rockets from the Gaza strip, Israel retaliates in order to deter future aggression, and a detente resumes, with most observers shrugging it off and going about their daily lives.
What took place this past Shabbat, and what is still taking place as I write this, will be seared into the collective Israeli, and Jewish, memory for decades—perhaps centuries—to be rattled rattled off like those other dates that have become standalone expressions in the Israeli psyche: 1948, 1967, 1973, 2023.
What is striking about those dates—1948 representing the first Arab-Israeli War in response to Israel’s Declaration of Independence; 1967 representing the Six-Day War, referring to a stunningly fast Israeli victory in response to a mobilization of Egyptian and other forces along the border, a war which expanded Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza; and 1973 representing the Yom Kippur War, in which took Israel completely by surprise before it was able to re-establish the upper hand—is that they all too place within 25 years of one another. Israel was still becoming a state; its existence was still precarious.
Since then, while Israel continued to experience more than its share of bloodshed, no singular event had a comparable effect on the Israeli psyche as did those prior events.
Until October 7, 2023; Simchat Torah 5784.
More Jewish civilians were murdered on Saturday than any day since the Holocaust. More than 900 Israelis and counting. That is the level of magnitude we are talking about.
It is fundamentally changing the experience of millions of Israelis, who now, and probably for the rest of their lives, will have a different experience to the only home they have ever known. In terms of a percentage of the population, it would be the equivalent of if over 27,000 Americans died on 9/11. Anecdotally, everyone in Israel seems to know someone who has been directly impacted by a killing, a wounding, or an abduction. It is shaking Israeli society to the core.
JOINT STATEMENT FROM MULTIPLE LEADERS: NO JUSTIFICATION
I found the following joint statement by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States of America helpful, because it brings together a diverse range of political perspectives, and yet which were able to forge a clear voice on what took place:
Today, we — President Macron of France, Chancellor Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Meloni of Italy, Prime Minister Sunak of the United Kingdom, and President Biden of the United States — express our steadfast and united support to the State of Israel, and our unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism.
We make clear that the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned. There is never any justification for terrorism. In recent days, the world has watched in horror as Hamas terrorists massacred families in their homes, slaughtered over 200 young people enjoying a music festival, and kidnapped elderly women, children, and entire families, who are now being held as hostages.
Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities. We further emphasize that this is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage.
All of us recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But make no mistake: Hamas does not represent those aspirations, and it offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed.
Over the coming days, we will remain united and coordinated, together as allies, and as common friends of Israel, to ensure Israel is able to defend itself, and to ultimately set the conditions for a peaceful and integrated Middle East region.
I support this statement in its entirety.
Among many circles today we will encounter voices that seek to justify Hamas’s actions, calling them “freedom fighting,” lashing out at Jewish spaces for propping up what they call a “colonialist enterprise.”
As this statement makes clear, the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned.
Targeting innocent civilians who are living in the only homes they have ever known, within the internationally recognized boundaries of a sovereign state, is not freedom fighting. It is terrorism.
A colonialist enterprise suggests there is a home-base from which colonizers embark in an attempt to establish a colony elsewhere——the British in India, the French in Algeria, the Japanese in the Philippines, for example. What is the home base from which Jews embarked, to which they could return? Russia, during the first aliyah when they were escaping pogroms in the 1880s? The Pale of Settlement, when they were fleeing antisemitism during the second aliyah in the 1910s? Germany, Poland, and Austria during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s during the fifth aliyah? All of these waves of immigrants were refugees, seeking to find a safe haven for themselves, in the land from which their ancestors had been exiled millenia before and whose magnetic pull had remained a central part of their spiritual and cultural yearnings for those same millenia.
None of this is to negate ties to the land by the Palestinian people, nor the desire to find a just, and lasting solution to the conflict, including the possibility of a two-state solution, two states for two peoples, that ensures equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
But neither can we countenance the negation of Jewish ties to the land or the fabrication that Jewish presence in the land of Israel is merely “colonial.”
We can lift up the notion that everyone is created in the image of the Divine; that Palestinian civilians, like Israeli civilians, are deserving of living lives of justice and peace; that, just as tradition teaches that God stopped the angels from celebrating the drowning of the Egyptians in the Sea of Reeds, so, too, can our hearts break at the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.
But in doing so, we reject, and ask others to reject, the justification of the slaughter of innocent civilians by Hamas, actions which, as the leaders of the six countries who issued the statement stated, “offer nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed.”
LINGERING QUESTIONS
There will be many more developments for our eyes and our hearts to follow: what will come of those kidnapped and abducted, held hostage? Will we see their safe return to their families in Israel? What does the future hold for Gaza and for Gazans, the territory’s relationship to Israel forever changed by these murderous attacks? What does the future hold for Israel’s domestic political situation? Will they be able to form a unity government, to include opposition leaders like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, uniting moderate factions with the Netanyahu government, and will far-right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir still hold sway? Will a political price be paid by the leadership under whose watch these attacks took place? What does the future hold for Israel’s relationship to other Arab countries in the region, including diplomatic momentum that had developed with Saudi Arabia? And finally, is there anywhere, even years down the line, the makings for a peaceful future between Israelis and Palestinians or do the compromises involved in such a resolution entail relinquishing truths that are too deeply held by each population?
As a Jew, Israel’s story is my story, and has always been, standing as I did at Sinai, as were we all, as tradition teaches. My heart follows this story with hope—at times with resignation, but ultimately with a belief that a just and lasting peace can be found if everyone involved recognizes the humanity and the deep-rootedness of the other.
In the meantime, I pray for the souls of those lost and the families of those who lost loved ones. My heart is in Israel.
