It is very difficult to find the words to respond to the scenes of mindless and deliberate slaughter that unfolded in Israel on Saturday morning and continued across the weekend – and even more difficult in a country like Ireland where misguided and nevertheless militant support for the Palestinian “cause” is so entrenched.
What can be said, though, is this: For all those who have wondered for years why the Israelis build walls to keep the Palestinians out of Israel, or who have wondered why the Gaza strip has been blockaded, or has wondered why the Israelis are so assiduous about blocking most imports to Gaza, or who have described the actions of Israel as “apartheid” – this weekend you learned why they do that.
What unfolded, as countless videos shared gleefully by the attackers themselves show, was nothing more or less than an orgy of sectarian murder, and rape. Children were shot dead. Pensioners were shot dead. Young women were killed, raped, and then had their almost-naked corpses paraded through the streets as war trophies, even in one case a German woman who was in Israel to protest in favour of the Palestinians.
None of this was hidden. All of it was eagerly shared with the world, almost as if the perpetrators were seeing just how far they could push their western – and Irish – supporters in politics and the media before shame might compel them to silence.
The answer was pretty clear and endlessly depressing: They can push them a lot further yet.
— The Ditch (@wereontheditch) October 7, 2023
But this is what “Free Palestine” means, in real terms. Not in theoretical terms. Irish people, romantics to the last, have always indulged the damn fool notion that like the northern Irish conflict, all of this can simply be solved if the Israelis are a little nicer, and the Palestinians given their own state. It is nonsense, and has always been so.
Irish people sometimes make the mistake of thinking of the conflict as allegorical to that which unfolded in Northern Ireland, which is why the phrase “two state solution” appears to be mandated by law to be mentioned in every single Irish discussion of the issue. But the truth is that while Israel has always been open to a two state solution, Hamas is not: It believes in a one-state solution, which can be achieved only by the eradication of Israel and Judaism, which it sees as inextricably linked. This is what “from the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free” means, after all: Just look at a map – a Palestine from the River to the Sea leaves no room for Israel, because it is not intended that Israel should exist.
It is oft forgotten, and oft deliberately forgotten, that the present territory of Gaza was granted self-government by a full and unconditional Israeli withdrawal in 2005, which included the forcible dismantling, by Israel, of many Israeli settlements in the area. The residents had a choice between investing in schools and industry, or investing in weapons and plotting war. Their response was to choose government by Hamas, a group which explicitly calls, in its charter, for the murder of every last Jew in Israel. The aims of Hamas are not a secret. They would perpetrate a Jewish holocaust, given the chance, on a scale larger than Adolf Hitler’s.
This weekend should make clear that they are also not a bluff. 600 people lie dead purely because they were jews, or were suspected of being jews.
Even now, though, the naivete will persist, as will the notion that the Israelis must be expected to open their borders and allow free movement throughout their country of millions of Palestinians, a goodly proportion of whom seem intent on killing Jews for the sake of killing Jews. Ironically, much such bleating will come from people on the so-called “right” of Irish politics who spend the rest of their time raving about the dangers of unfettered immigration into our own country, while most of it will come from the left who spend their time preaching liberalism and sexual freedom in the west, while never yet having found a murderous and repressive Arab regime they wouldn’t like to befriend.
In one of several similar incidents, one of the Hamas attackers who broke into the home of a grandmother in Nir Oz, near #Gaza, killed her, filmed it with her phone and uploaded the video to her Facebook – which is how her grand-daughter found out. pic.twitter.com/0Pi4QUE7xb
— Michael A. Horowitz (@michaelh992) October 8, 2023
In the coming days, innocent Palestinians will doubtless have their turn to die in a war that, like the innocent Israelis they will be joining in the afterlife, they had no part in starting. But there will be a difference that many Irish people refuse to acknowledge: While Hamas soldiers entered family homes to murder the innocent deliberately, a great many Palestinians will die because of how their leaders wage war: Placing weapons and missile systems inside schools, and hospitals, and mosques, and other residential and civilian buildings, and daring the Israelis to strike them. In some cases, if past is prologue, civilians will be compelled by Hamas to remain in buildings that the Israelis have issued warnings to before targeting. In some cases, the Israeli warnings will give Hamas time to move the weapons systems, and force the civilians to stay.
The fundamental difference between the two “sides” is the same as it ever has been, when facing down Islamic extremism: One side sees death as a tragedy, the other sees it as a joy.
Between these two combatants, there can never truly be any equivocation, or “both sides”-ing. One is a normal, democratic country like Ireland in which over two million Muslims live and have the right to vote, and in which Palestinians are the third largest group in parliament. The other is an explicitly sectarian death cult. There are no Jews in Gaza, for a reason.
And at home, here in Ireland, there can be no “both sides-ing” either. You either are the kind of person who views raping a civilian woman, murdering her, breaking her legs, and trailing her naked corpse as a trophy through the streets as an “act of resistance”, or you are not.
Palestinians hostage in criminal siege of Gaza for 17 yrs.Since 1948 Palestinians victims of ethnic cleansing, murderous occupation & apartheid. They have every right to resist. Shocking double standards of western leaders supporting Ukraine resistance but condemning Palestinian. pic.twitter.com/eo8LpzG0gI
— Richard Boyd Barrett (@RBoydBarrett) October 8, 2023
If this behaviour can be justified by Richard Boyd Barrett, and others, for people they dislike in Israel, then why would you ever be stupid enough to think they wouldn’t justify it for people they dislike here at home, in Ireland?
You are either a person of good character, or you support or excuse Hamas this weekend. There is no in between.