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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Pamels Paresky

Published: Mar 12, 2024

When Israelis speak about Oct. 7, they frequently say “there are no words.” But one word they consistently use is “shattered.”

Israeli psychologists have been treating severe trauma, complex trauma and collective trauma. The word “trauma,” however, fails to convey the scale, the savagery or the sadism of events that day. The term does not encompass the complex mix of disorientation, anguish, emotional overload and the experience of utter brokenness after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

There is no word for the shock felt by Jews around the world when Israel was suddenly and without warning attacked by thousands of rockets targeting civilians from the north to the south and from the river to the sea. There is no word to describe what it is like to be a Jew kidnapped by terrorists indoctrinated since early childhood to believe that murdering Jews is rewarded in the afterlife. Or to know that the people you love are in the hands of terrorists who delight in rape, torture and slaughter; who enjoy forcing parents and children to watch as they inflict horrors on loved ones.

There is no word to convey the terrifying ordeal suffered by survivors of the attempted genocide that Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7. There is no word that communicates the panic, betrayal, horror and distress of those who hid for hours waiting for help to come, reading WhatsApp messages about terrorists inside their neighbors’ houses. Hearing terrorists break into their own homes. Hearing the screams of injured and dying friends and relatives. Hearing sounds of gunfire and exploding RPGs punctuated by ecstatic shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” All the while knowing they were being hunted.

Everyone in Israel is just one or two degrees of separation from someone who was murdered, injured or kidnapped on Oct. 7. And everyone knows someone who sped to the rescue that day, many of whom never returned.

There is no word to describe the grief of a country still holding its breath while more than a hundred hostages remain in Gaza, and while hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many in their teens and early 20s, go to battle. Some returning badly injured. Some returning to be buried.

Israel, which in the 20th century absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Holocaust survivors as well as nearly 900,000 Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitism and violence in neighboring Arab countries, is now temporarily housing about 200,000 displaced Israelis — refugees in their own country — some in hotels and even dormitories.

This includes not only those evacuated from areas near the Gaza border, but also from the north, as confrontations with terrorists in Lebanon escalate. Many displaced families are unsure how long it will take before they can return home. Some refugees from the south have already returned. Some don’t have homes to return to. Some don’t know if they want to return.

There is no word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on Oct. 7 or the new world in which Israelis now live. But “shattered” comes closer than “trauma.”

A Shattered Paradigm

Jews are the only indigenous people who lived in one region for thousands of years, and then, when the majority were dispersed across the globe to be a tiny minority wherever they lived, managed to retain the same religion, rituals, language and attachment to their ancient land for 2,000 years — even as they believed themselves to be full members of their new host countries.

But Jews have also been unable to spend even one century without being ethnically cleansed, violently persecuted or massacred somewhere — whether in the Diaspora or the land of Israel. And since the newest iteration of Jewish control of the land in 1948, Israelis have existed under a threat to which there has been no real solution.

During the Second Intifada, roughly 1,000 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorists. There were stabbings, shootings, suicide bombings and beginning in 2001, mortar and rocket attacks launched from Gaza. In response, Israel increased security. Terrorists from the Palestinian Territories became less able to penetrate Israel’s borders and the number of injuries and deaths decreased. And of course, from the time they are little, Israeli children are aware that they will be required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

One of the most surprising things I learned during my time in Israel is that for decades, new parents have believed — or at least hoped hard enough to almost believe — that by the time their children are old enough to serve, defending the country from terrorism will no longer be necessary.

Gaza: “Land For Peace”

Gaza was home to Jews for over 2,000 years, beginning in at least the second century BCE and ending in 1929, when Arabs in the region once known as Judea killed more than 65 Jews in Hebron and around 135 Jews in Gaza. These pogroms came after a decade of similar antisemitic violence in the British Mandate of Palestine. A British commission referred to the pogroms as “racial animosity on the part of the Arabs.”

In part to protect Jews and in part to appease the forebears of the Arabs who in the 1960s would come to be called Palestinians, British colonial forces expelled the Jews from Hebron and Gaza, and restricted Jewish immigration to the region.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Jews returned to live in Gaza. In 2005, in the hope of securing both peace and international goodwill, the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew its forces from Gaza and forcibly removed the 9,000-plus Jews who lived there, as well as disinterring those buried in Gaza.

Referencing the long history of Jewish expulsions by colonial forces and antisemitic governments, Gazan Jews’ protest slogan was “Jews don’t expel Jews.” The IDF physically carried many of them out of their homes and across the newly designated border.

Hours after the finalization of the historic 2005 withdrawal, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza fired rockets at Israeli civilians. In 2007, the year Hamas took over as Gaza’s government and murdered its political rivals, terrorists in Gaza launched more than 2,800 rockets and mortars at Israel. By then, the staunch international support for demolishing Gaza’s terrorist infrastructure, which Sharon expected would last a decade, had already evaporated.

Instead, between then and Oct. 7, with backing from Iran along with appropriated international aid controlled by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (which has been revealed to be both a terrorist-training system and an internationally funded source of income for Hamas terrorists and supporters), Hamas significantly expanded its terrorist capabilities and vastly increased its stockpile of weapons.

Without the international support necessary to destroy Gaza’s terrorist capabilities, in order to keep Israelis safe, Israel had to rely on defensive strategies. Israelis’ famous technological ingenuity resulted in an increasingly sophisticated rocket-alert system that now includes smartphone apps, and the “Iron Dome,” a highly advanced technological system that intercepts terrorists’ rockets, neutralizing the vast majority that don’t fall within Gaza.

Nonetheless, bomb shelters are still necessary. They appeared across Israel’s roadways as well as in Israeli homes and businesses. The fortified room in a home is called a “mamad,” an acronym for “merkhav mugan dirati” which means “apartment protected space.” The door to a mamad doesn’t lock. If a home is damaged, first responders need to be able to open it in order to extract the people inside.

Life in Israel, and especially the otef (the Gaza envelope), can be hard for those outside of Israel to truly grasp. Imagine needing constant protection from terrorist rocket attacks, and trying to prevent your children from developing anxiety, panic disorders and PTSD. Israel’s creative solution was to turn children’s bedrooms into bomb shelters. In newer homes, when rocket attacks happen at night, instead of awakening children to take them to a shelter, Israeli parents calmly visit their children’s bedrooms until the danger has passed. Sometimes children don’t even wake up.

This all had the effect of transforming something life-threatening into something more like a nuisance. On Jan. 29, I experienced this myself when air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and my cell phone app blasted a “critical alert.” Hamas rockets aimed at the city came close enough that from the bomb shelter, I could hear them exploding when Iron Dome missiles destroyed them in the air.

In a tacit contract between Israeli citizens and their government, Israelis have come to tolerate a certain level of antisemitic terrorist violence as the price of Jewish self-determination in the historical, biblical, and continuous homeland of the Jews. In return, Israeli homes — or at least, the mamads — were thought to be as safe as if covered by an iron dome.

On Oct. 7, that contract was shattered.

The Kibbutzim

Early in the morning, Hamas began their barbaric rampage. Thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza at civilian targets across the country, and Israelis took refuge in their mamads as they always do.

They soon understood that it was not a “normal” rocket attack — the alerts didn’t stop when they usually do. But they could not have imagined that at that moment, thousands of terrorists were breaking through the border wall and invading their country, intending to murder, rape, dismember and kidnap as many Israelis as possible. Or that terrorists knew exactly where to find them. Or that their “safe rooms” would become death traps.

Entire families were gunned down in their children’s bedrooms. Or they died from smoke inhalation. Or they were burned alive when terrorists set fire to their homes. In many cases, terrorists shot their victims through mamad doors as Israelis tried desperately to hold them shut.

That is how 18-year-old Maayan Idan was murdered in front of her family as her father, Tsachi, held the door closed. Terrorists livestreamed the family’s ordeal on Facebook as Maayan’s parents and young siblings tried to process what was happening.

Tsachi was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nahal Oz and is still a hostage in Gaza. At Maayan’s funeral, her mother, Gali, described being “shattered into pieces.”

Sixty-nine-year-old Itzik Elgarat was shot in the hand through his mamad’s door. He called his brother, Danny, who thought the handle had somehow injured Itzik and told him how to create a tourniquet. Just before the call was disconnected, Itzik became hysterical. “Danny! This is the end!” he said. “This is the end!”

Not understanding what “end” it could be, Danny called a relative who lived in the same kibbutz, asking him to check on Itzik. His relative told him the kibbutz had been overtaken by terrorists. As one of the few residents with a weapon handy, he had killed two terrorists in his own home. Danny then opened his phone tracking app and watched as Itzik’s phone entered Gaza.

Danny’s sister lived in the same kibbutz. She spent seven hours holding her door handle in the closed position, saving the lives of the two grandchildren who were with her. Terrorists kidnapped her ex-husband, Alex Dancyg, a 76-year-old world-renowned scholar of the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history, and the son and brother of Holocaust survivors. He has trained Israel’s Auschwitz guides for over 30 years, and is a beloved fixture at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial museum of the Holocaust.

According to released hostage Nili Margalit, for at least the first 50 days, Hamas held her and Dancyg and others from Nir Oz, most of them elderly, deep in a tunnel.l. To keep their minds active, they took turns giving talks about their areas of expertise. When Dancyg lectured about the Holocaust, the others asked him to speak about something else.

Margalit, Dancyg and Elgarat were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where 46 residents were murdered. By the time the IDF arrived, the terrorists were gone and had kidnapped approximately 80 people — about a third of all the hostages. About one quarter of their close-knit community was either kidnapped or murdered.

Thirty people from Nir Oz are still held hostage in Gaza, including Dancyg and his brother-in-law Elgarat. Also kidnapped were Elgarat’s next-door neighbors: Four-year-old Ariel Bibas, his 9-month-old brother, Kfir (who, if alive, spent his first birthday as a hostage), their mother, Shiri, and father, Yarden, who was taken separately after trying to protect his family. Images (shot by a Palestinian “civilian” who works as a photographer for the Associated Press) show Yarden being kidnapped on a motorcycle, blood gushing from his head; a terrorist with a hammer in one hand, holding Yarden by the throat. Hamas streamed the kidnapping of Shiri and her boys, all of them wrapped in a blanket. A screenshot of the terrified mother and her red-headed babies has become an iconic image of the Oct. 7 kidnappings.

About 100 residents of the larger Kibbutz Be’eri were also murdered that day, and about 30 kidnapped — together, 10% of that community. Among the kidnapped were Emily Hand, who spent her ninth birthday as a hostage. She was at a sleepover with her friend, Hila Rotem, when terrorists invaded the kibbutz.

After her release, Emily revealed that in Gaza, she, Hila and Hila’s mother, Raya, had been held not in tunnels, but in homes. For at least part of the time, she was with Be’eri resident Yossi Sharabi whose brother, Eli, was also taken hostage. Yossi’s wife and three daughters survived the massacre, but terrorists killed Yossi in Gaza, where Eli remains a hostage. Eli’s wife and two daughters were murdered. Yossi and Eli’s brother, Sharon, says his family is “shattered.”

The Nova Festival

Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on motorized paragliders swarmed the Nova “peace rave” at a campground near Kibbutz Re’im. (Re’im means “friends.”) With assault weapons, grenades and RPGs, terrorists mowed down hundreds of partygoers who fled on foot and by car, many of which were incinerated. Of between 3,000 and 4,000 attendees, 364 were murdered and many more were injured. Forty from the festival were reportedly taken hostage.

Ayala Avraham and her husband, Ilan, although in their 50s, were regulars at trance music festivals, dancing together every weekend. Ilan frantically drove Ayala and a friend away from the Nova grounds while terrorists shot at them, hitting the car. The three made it to Moshav Yakhini, a small community near Sderot, where they hid in a standalone bomb shelter behind a security gate.

When Ilan realized terrorists were approaching, he gave Ayala the car keys, hugged and kissed her, and said “You will be okay.” Then he stood outside the shelter to distract the approaching terrorists, hoping they would not look inside. Several terrorists grabbed Ilan and absconded with him.

Other terrorists soon discovered the women, but left only one to guard them. The women broke free from their captor, who shot at them, wounding Ayala’s friend as they ran to hide behind her car. They were not well hidden. If he had come after them, they would have had no chance. But for whatever reason, he ran back toward the other terrorists. The women were soon rescued by the IDF.

For three weeks, Ilan, who wore dreadlocks, was thought to be missing. Eventually, his unusual hairstyle allowed him to be identified — terrorists had completely mutilated his face. It was later revealed that he had refused his captors’ demands to knock on doors and tell people in Hebrew that it was safe to come out of their homes.

Meanwhile, near the festival grounds, in tiny roadside bomb shelters, each built to accommodate 10, dozens of terrified festival-goers huddled together as terrorists sprayed them with gunfire and threw in grenades. In one shelter, a 22-year-old unarmed off-duty soldier, Staff Sgt. Aner Elyakim Shapira, caught seven grenades and threw them back out. The eighth grenade killed him.

Some survivors of the blast were kidnapped, including Aner’s close friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American whose left arm was blown off below the elbow. His fate is unknown. In the shelters and elsewhere, many young people survived the massacre by hiding under the bodies of their friends and others.

As of this writing, 144 of those kidnapped have been released or rescued and 134 are still held hostage in Gaza. Reports indicate that as many as 50 of those in Gaza may now be dead.

Sexual Violence

Survivors who witnessed gang-rapes describe terrorists mutilating women before murdering them. In at least one account, a terrorist shot a woman in the head, killing her while still raping her. Hamas later denied the rapes, but manuals recovered from Hamas terrorists included a list of Hebrew phrases for communicating with Israelis — including “take your pants off.” And when interrogated, terrorists admitted to the raping of even dead bodies, saying that despite religious prohibitions on mistreating or killing women and children, Hamas leaders instructed them to murder entire families and permitted them to perpetrate rape.

In testimony delivered at the United Nations headquarters in New York, first-responders and those tasked with handling women’s dead bodies reported that many of the murdered were found partially naked; some with broken pelvises, some with grotesque injuries to their genitals. The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel recently issued a report revealing that terrorists inserted nails, grenades and knives in Israeli women’s vaginas. The report detailed evidence that the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 was intentional, “systematic, targeted sexual abuse.”

Meanwhile, many women’s organizations around the world have remained silent. Those that eventually condemned Hamas did so only many weeks later. Some have even denied the sexual violence. The director of the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre signed an open letter that referred to Hamas terrorists as “Palestinian resistance,” called Israel “terrorist,” claimed that false reports about the Al-Ahli Hospital bombing were accurate, and asserted that testimony about Hamas rapes amounted to no more than “unverified accusations.”

Such appalling hypocrisy notwithstanding, a recent United Nations report noted a pattern among the murdered — mostly women — who were found naked, at least from the waist down, with their hands tied. This and other evidence, along with witness testimony, provides what the report called “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the Oct. 7 attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape.”

Regarding hostages, the report is equally unsettling. “The mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The team also has “reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.”

Antisemitism and Shattered Illusions

If Jews in the Diaspora thought the events of Oct. 7 would turn the tide against anti-Zionist antisemitism, it took only one day to disabuse them. On Oct. 8, while Israel was still collecting bodies and eliminating terrorists within its own borders, more than 30 student groups at Harvard issued a joint statement declaring that “the Israel regime” was “entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.” Across the country, identical posters advertising a “Day of Resistance” appeared, prominently displaying an image of a terrorist flying a motorized paraglider.

Despite such dispositive evidence to the contrary, on March 1, a New York Times news article (not an opinion piece) reported that this campus movement “began as general protests against continuing Israeli retaliation” (emphasis added).

Even as the depth of Hamas depravity and brutality is revealed, students, faculty and other illiberal activists continue to assert that what happened on Oct. 7 was not terrorism — it was “resistance.” And resistance, they insist, is justified “by any means necessary.” Hamas is an Arabic acronym for Islamic “Resistance” Movement.

A favorite campus chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a Hamas slogan — a call to annihilate the Jewish state, which is bordered by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Some demonstrators prefer the Arabic version, which is more explicit: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.”

By “Palestine,” they mean Israel.

Some protesters may not understand which river or what sea. But other slogans are less ambiguous: It’s difficult to see how “Globalize the intifada” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” are calls for peace rather than for violent attacks on Jews everywhere. If all that weren’t enough, many of the increasingly disruptive and even violent demonstrations in the United States incorporate the word “flood,” reflecting the name Hamas gave their Oct. 7 sadistic orgy of atrocities: Operation Al Aqsa Flood.

In a particularly cruel example of global anti-Zionist antisemitism, when posters of kidnapped Israelis appeared, they were quickly vandalized or torn down. At Harvard, a photo of baby Kfir was defaced with the words “evidence please” and “head still on.” On a picture of 4-year-old Ariel, graffiti read “google dancing Israelis,” a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. And many of the faces of other kidnapped Israelis were obscured with red paint on a multi-part display.

After more than 150 days, anti-Israel rallies have continued on- and off-campuses across America. As hostages languish in tunnels and in the homes of terrorist-captors (some of whom, like an UNRWA employee and a physician, have been referred to in the media as “civilians”), many demonstrations include calls for a one-sided Israeli “ceasefire” with no calls for Hamas to surrender — nor even release the hostages.

The Oakland, CA City Council even voted down a condemnation of Hamas when passing a ceasefire resolution. Oakland residents argued that “the notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative,” “Israel murdered their own people on Oct. 7,” and “Hamas isn’t a terrorist organization.” One went as far as to say, “I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation including through Hamas.”

In other words: It didn’t happen. But if it happened, the Jews did it. And anyway, they deserved it.

Meanwhile, video footage taken from a camera in Rafah on Oct. 7 was released in February, showing Shiri Bibas and her two young boys with six terrorists in civilian clothing. On Feb. 12, the IDF pulled off a spectacular rescue of two hostages held in a private home in Rafah. Days later, students at Columbia University held an “all eyes on Rafah” rally. The demonstration was not to celebrate the daring commando rescue. Nor was it to demand the release of other hostages held in Rafah.

It was organized by two anti-Israel campus groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia University Apartheid Divest, to protest “Israel’s recent attacks on the city of Rafah.” The groups instructed members to obscure their faces with masks “for security.” During the rally, someone broke the glass in a door to the library.

Shattered Hopes for Peace

Though well aware of Hamas’ murderous intentions, many who lived near the border believed there was a bright line between Palestinian civilians and their violently oppressive, terrorist government. Residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz like survivor Irit Lahav, and of Kibbutz Be’eri, like Vivian Silver, who was one of the founders of the organization “Women Wage Peace,” devoted time to driving Palestinians from the Gaza border to hospitals in Israel, where they received the same, high-quality medical care available to Israelis. For over a month, Silver was thought to be among the kidnapped, since no body was found in her house. Eventually, however, her remains, found in the debris of her badly burned home, were identified using techniques borrowed from archeology.

In recent years, Hamas developed a penchant for using kites and balloons to launch Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices into Israel, often killing wildlife and damaging agriculture. Some airborne packages carried brightly colored toys in order to appeal to children, and if all went as planned, blow them up as they reached for the toys. In spite of this, every year, members of the kibbutzim near the border would fly kites bearing messages of peace, signaling their hopes for the future to their neighbors across the border.

Saturday, Oct. 7 was supposed to be that day.

For the last 15 years, the “Kites for Freedom” celebration in Kibbutz Kfar Aza was organized by Aviv Kutz. On Oct. 7, Aviv, his wife and their three children were slaughtered by terrorists.

Margalit, a pediatric nurse who worked primarily with Arab-speaking patients at Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva, had planned to fly kites for peace that day. Instead, she was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz and spent 54 days as a hostage. Her father was murdered at Nir Oz and his body taken to Gaza.

For 12 hours, in the same kibbutz, Natali Yohanan and her family hid in their mamad, listening as Palestinian “civilians,” including a woman, rummaged through their belongings, and when they tired of trying to get the family out of the mamad, heated and ate the food Natali had left on the stove, and even switched Netflix to Arabic to watch some shows before finally leaving with their booty. Once the family emerged, they found that the looters had stolen everything from electronics, to Natali’s jewelry and makeup, to the family’s clothing — even Natali’s underwear.

In the aftermath of the massacres, residents of several kibbutzim were shattered to learn that Palestinians they had employed created maps of their communities for the terrorists, detailing the locations of their armories, the names of the residents, and even which homes belonged to members of security teams — the first to be murdered.

“Are these the people I wanted to help? These are people who want peace?” Irit Lahav now asks herself. She was equally astonished that after murdering her neighbors, terrorists took their dead bodies into Gaza — and sometimes only their heads. “What kind of human being would want to take somebody’s head …?”

After the beheading of 19-year-old soldier Adir Tahar was recorded on video, a terrorist in Gaza tried to sell Adir’s head for $10,000. The boy’s father was finally able to complete his son’s burial after the IDF found the head in a duffel bag — in an ice cream store freezer in Gaza.

A poll by The Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research found that more than 50% of Palestinians in Gaza and 85% in the West Bank support the Oct. 7 attacks. Most claim to not have seen videos of the atrocities and say they do not believe they happened.

Still, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, pays a monthly stipend to terrorists who slaughter Jews, and the pay scale is based on how many Israelis they murder. According to news reports, the PA recently added 661 of the Oct. 7 terrorists to the payroll, increasing last year’s $161,000,000 payments for murdering Israelis by $16,000,000.

These “pay for slay” incentives are enshrined in Palestinian law.

“This is outrageous,” Adele Raemer, who survived the massacre at Kibbutz Nirim, told the Jewish News Syndicate. “We teach our children coexistence while our neighbors make a living off our deaths.”

There are many stories of heroic Arab Israelis who saved lives that day—including four who spent hours rescuing dozens of people on their way to save a cousin, and Youssef Ziadna, a bus driver who drove straight into the massacre to help, rescuing 30 Jews, many of them wounded, even as he was constantly under fire. After news of his courage and selflessness went viral on social media, he received a death threat from someone who claimed to be from Gaza. “You saved 30 Jews’ lives,” the man said, adding, “Don’t worry, we’ll get to you.” Ziadna’s cousin was murdered, and four other family members were kidnapped. Only the two teenage family members were released.

I’ve heard stories of Palestinians with work permits who immediately went to authorities on October 7 when they realized what was happening. But it is currently unknown how many of the roughly 150,000 Palestinians who legally worked in Israel (including 18,000 from Gaza) participated in the attacks or aided terrorists. It is also unclear how many would participate in or aid future attacks if given the opportunity.

Those permits have been suspended indefinitely.

Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The New York Times, “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders.”

Hamas abhors the democratic and Jewish values that allow equal rights for all regardless of sex, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation … etc. Their intention, which is shared by other Islamist terrorist groups like Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, is to conquer the West and establish a global caliphate. Israel is just the beginning.

Israeli Anti-fragility

The red anemones, which have come to symbolize Israel’s south, are now in bloom. Seeing them after everything that happened is hard, Vered Libstein of Kibbutz Kfar Aza told The Times of Israel. Almost 20 years ago, she and her husband, Ofir, founded the annual festival known as Darom Adom (Red South). Annually, more than 400,000 visitors would come to see the red blossoms, celebrate nature and enjoy the many family-friendly events.

On Oct. 7, Ofir was among the 62 residents murdered at Kfar Aza. Their 19-year-old son was also murdered, as were Vered’s mother and nephew — who jumped on a grenade, saving his fiancée’s life. Nineteen from their kibbutz were taken hostage. “Life is stronger than everything,” Vered insists, with typical Israeli resilience, adding, “We’ll need to find the strength to renew ourselves as well.”

Whether observant or secular, conservative or progressive, soldier or survivor, one thing I hear is a fierce determination not to let terrorists rob Israelis of more than what’s already been taken. “It’s the first and last time I’m ever leaving,” the owner of a shawarma spot near the Gaza border told American journalist Nancy Rommelmann. He and his wife have returned and reopened their store. “I won’t let Hamas win” he says.

Still, the country’s economy has been significantly disrupted. Not only are more than 150,000 Palestinian employees no longer working in Israel, until recently, more than 350,000 reservists across all business sectors were serving in the IDF instead of going to work as usual. (Now the number is roughly 130,000.) At the same time, tourism, which had only been back in business for less than two years since COVID, has nearly ground to a halt.

To make matters worse, many of Israel’s farms are in areas that have been evacuated. The kibbutzim that terrorists attacked provided close to 60% of Israel’s produce, and operated dairy farms, hen houses, and cattle ranches.

Many of the kibbutzim employed people from Thailand. At Kibbutz Nir Oz alone, 11 Thai employees were murdered, five were kidnapped, and only two have been released. But farm workers from Thailand are beginning to return. And there is a fairly steady stream of mostly (but not entirely) Jewish volunteers from other countries coming to Israel to pick avocados and citrus fruits, package food and undertake various other tasks disrupted by the war. Some visitors are here to console grieving friends and family. Others are here to participate in solidarity missions.

Still others, such as investors in OurCrowd, an Israeli startup investing platform, come looking for opportunities to donate or invest. The shekel has already rebounded to pre-war levels, and if history is any guide, now is the time to invest in Israel. Between 2008 and 2021, in the aftermath of each Hamas attack and IDF response, the Israeli stock market quickly not only rebounded, but surpassed pre-conflict levels. That may be why OurCrowd was able to raise and commit the financing for its Israel Resilience Fund in record time. It may also be why international investors have been investing in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange — including billionaire Bill Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman. But perhaps most emblematic of Israel’s anti-fragility: When everything was shattering and reservists were called to serve, 150% of the number summoned reported for duty. And despite the political fractures of 2023, this war’s young soldiers are proving to be Israel’s new “Greatest Generation.”

Meanwhile, the ethically illiterate and morally corrupt have joined forces to accuse Israel of genocide, an obscene blood libel designed to delegitimize Israel’s war to defeat an internationally designated terrorist organization — one that attempted an actual genocide of Jews on Oct. 7.

This type of Holocaust inversion, a central feature of contemporary antisemitism, codes empowered and self-determined Jews as “Zionists,” and casts Zionists as Nazis. This is how, on the day after Hamas circulated a video claiming to have murdered seven of the hostages, film director Jonathan Glazer, who says he is a Jew, can use an Oscars acceptance speech for “The Zone of Interest,” a movie about the Holocaust, to claim that the “occupation” has “hijacked the Holocaust” and that this “occupation” — rather than sadistic, genocidal terrorism — is to blame for “conflict” and by extension, for “the ongoing attack in Gaza” and even for the suffering of “the victims of October 7 in Israel.”

In other words: Whatever happened to Jews is their own damn fault.

Only in an upside-down world can a man who made a movie about the dehumanization and genocide of Jews make a speech dehumanizing both the victims of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and Jews now risking their lives to ensure that the latest attempted genocide fails. In this inversion, the lesson of the Holocaust is not the imperative to clearly identify and marginalize those who disseminate and act on hate. And it is not the moral obligation to stand against evil. It is a moral indictment of Jews, whose stubborn refusal to be annihilated and creative ability to overcome even genocide only serve to increase the believability of conspiracy theories that paint the Jew — and the Jew among the nations — as the powerful villain.

The truth is much simpler. Throughout history, as a small minority group, when Jews in the Diaspora were violently attacked, they fled. With an army of Israelis, however, Jews have been able to fight back. Israel’s Special Envoy on Combating Antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, told an assembly at the United Nations that people outside of Israel still make the mistake of thinking Israel exists because the Holocaust happened. The truth, she says, is precisely the reverse: The Holocaust happened because Israel did not exist. With global antisemitism at record levels, Jews around the world are awakening to this reality.

Naomi Petel survived the massacre at Kibbutz Nahal Oz with her husband and their three young children because a terrorist’s bullet jammed the lock on her front door, making it inoperable, and looters in the other half of her duplex caused a flood, preventing the house from burning when terrorists tried to set it on fire. Even after their ordeal, she told me, there’s nowhere else she wants to live. Israel’s south is her home. Her family, along with most of their displaced kibbutz, are temporarily living in the north. They don’t know how long it will take before they can go back home. She and her husband now have red anemone tattoos.

On the “Walk-Ins Welcome” podcast, she told writer Bridget Phetasy, “What Jews have done throughout history is be kicked out, try to make it again in a different place … contribute as much as you can to society, and [hope that] maybe they’ll like us enough that they don’t try to kill us.” Over and over. Again and again.

“This time,” she said, “we’re not going anywhere.”

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Sam Harris

Published: April/May 2024

This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense.

We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. Most people in the West still don’t understand the problem of jihadism. We often speak about “terrorism” and “violent extremism” generically. And we are told that any link between these evils and the doctrine of Islam is spurious and nothing more than an expression of “Islamophobia.” Incidentally, the term Islamophobia was invented in the 1970s by Iranian theocrats to do just this: prevent any criticism of Islam and to cast secularism itself as a form of bigotry. Islam is a system of ideas, subscribed to by people of every race and ethnicity. It’s just like Christianity in that regard. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam are both aggressively missionary faiths, and they win converts from everywhere. People criticize the doctrines of Christianity all the time and worry about their political and social influences—but no one confuses this for bigotry against Christians as people, much less racism. There’s no such thing as “Christophobia.” As someone once said (it was not Christopher Hitchens, but it sure sounds like him): “Islamophobia is a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.

Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, particularly its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians on purpose, not as collateral damage, and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to Hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.

If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.

It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel but to open societies everywhere. My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.

There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the past forty years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that an undercount.1 Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews. There have been eighty-two attacks in France and over 2,000 in Pakistan during this period. Want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, which is a transformation that can happen very quickly—just as quickly as new beliefs can take root in a person’s mind. You just need a wider Muslim community that doesn’t condemn jihadism but tacitly admits the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.

In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these facts. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, Paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society, if only they were given the chance. Secular liberals imagine that jihadists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if a white supremacist goes on a killing spree in a Black church and says he did this because he hates Black people and thinks the White race is under attack, this motive is accepted at face value without the slightest hesitation. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate Islam every time. The game is rigged.

Do not mistake what I’m saying now for anti-Muslim bigotry. I’m talking about the consequences of ideas, not the ethnic origins of people. Not a word I’ve said, or will ever say on this topic, has anything to do with race. And the truth is, I’m not remotely xenophobic. I’m a xenophile. The Middle East has produced some of my favorite parts of culture—some of my favorite foods, music, and architecture. Despite my better judgment, I absolutely love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism—the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.

Of course, many religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written and spoken about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured there would be many out-of-wedlock births among its faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages, where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned; it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very bad ideas. And yet the truth is that there is no direct link between Christian scripture and child rape. However, imagine if there were. Just imagine if the New Testament contained multiple passages promising Heaven to any priest who raped a child. And then imagine that in the aftermath of an endless series of child rapes within the Church, more or less every journalist, politician, and academic denied that they had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Catholicism. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

The problem that we must grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Qur’an, in the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.

There are many, many verses in the Qur’an that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Qur’an; there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident; it’s in the Qur’an and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.

Worse, in my view, is the moral logic one gets from the doctrine of martyrdom and Paradise. If you take martyrdom and Paradise seriously, it becomes impossible to make moral errors. If you blow yourself up in a crowd, your fellow Muslims will go straight to Paradise. You’ve actually done them a favor. Unbelievers will go to Hell, where they belong. However many lives you destroy, it’s all good.

Again, most of this horror has nothing to do with Israel or the West. In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan; there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students and then killed all the children they could get their hands on. They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.

But that’s the horror of it—you don’t have to be mad to be a jihadist. You don’t even have to be a bad person. You just have to be a true believer. You just have to know, for sure, that you and all the good people will get everything you want after you die and that the Creator of the Universe wants nothing more than for you to kill unbelievers. Here is what a supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said when interviewed about the school massacre:

Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.” Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”]. Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169–170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.

My point is that we have to take declarations of this kind at face value, because they are honest confessions of a worldview—and it is a worldview that is totally antithetical to everything that civilized people value in the twenty-first century. This problem is much bigger than the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Taking Anti-Semitism Seriously

I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over twenty countries in which Islam is the official state religion and over fifty in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.

In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust, was denied entry into Cuba, the United States, and Canada and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.

I’ve never taken modern anti-Semitism very seriously. I think I’ve done exactly one episode of my podcast on the topic. I’ve studied it. I understand its roots in Christian theology—despite the fact that Jesus, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. I’m a student of the Holocaust. And I’m well aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe and the United States at the time. Read David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews to understand how widespread anti-Semitism was in America, even as Jews were being killed by the millions in Europe. And, of course, I’m all too aware of the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam—and of the way it has been compressed into a diamond of intolerance and hatred throughout the Muslim world by the modern influence of Nazism. There’s some very depressing history there for anyone who wants to read it.

And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing recently—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.

While this status quo has been despicable, I have always believed that it was tolerable. And I say this as someone who has received death threats for two decades, and many of these threats are often explicitly anti-Semitic. Even given all this, I have felt that anti-Semitism, as a real threat to Jews, certainly in the West, was behind us. I can’t say that now. In the past few weeks, with Jews being openly reviled and threatened all over the world, in the immediate aftermath of the most shocking atrocities committed against them since the Holocaust, I’ve begun to think that anything is possible.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered how you might have behaved had you been a German on the morning after Kristallnacht—if you’ve ever wondered whether you would have just gone about your business or done something to resist the slide of your society into absolute depravity—more or less everyone on Earth is now getting the chance to see just that. There was a mob chanting “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House. We have Jewish students in Ivy League universities cowering behind locked doors in fear for their physical safety. All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause—without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7, or understanding it and not caring—you are all now part of history.

The outpouring of anti-Semitism that we have witnessed since October 7 really seems to mark a new moment, both in the United States and globally. And for the first time, I now worry that my daughters will live in a world where their Jewishness will matter to people who do not wish them well, and they will be forced to make certain life choices on that basis, choices that I never had to make. Apart from being a public figure and having to deal with disordered people of every description, I have never been concerned about anti-Semitism for even five minutes in my life. I now feel that I have been quite naive. That’s putting it charitably. I’ve been utterly ignorant of what has been going on beneath the surface.

Of course, the boundary between anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and, yes … babies; and who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields; who are killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents; who burned people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace,” decapitated others, and dragged their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is great.”

If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics who, again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as a religious sacrament; if you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.

What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas, and jihadists generally, are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see—not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world. Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful—or at least not awful—out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism. The suffering of Gaza is due to the fact that it has been run by a death cult, against which Israel has had to defend itself continuously. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel—that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide”—happens to be true.

But now we have college students at our best universities tearing down posters of hostages held by Hamas—some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are children—imagining that they are supporting the Palestinian cause. It boggles the mind. We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas—when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.

We’ve got feminist organizations such as CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident? Under Islam, the central message about women is that they are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want as long as these theocrats are Muslim.

If anything good comes from this outpouring of hate and moral confusion, it will be the end of identitarian politics of the Left. A friend of mine was just at an art opening, where they were passing hors d’oeuvres, and someone she knew came up to her and asked if she had any food in her teeth. And my friend said, “No, your teeth are perfectly white and beautiful.” Unfortunately, the woman herself was Black and considered the association of the terms white and beautiful a microaggression. She got greatly offended and stormed off. What, did she want brown teeth? I know nothing about this person apart from this anecdote, but I guarantee you that this prodigy of social justice is completely confused about Israel and Hamas and jihadism. This is the sort of person for whom words are violence but massacring women and children with knives, or burning them alive, is a completely defensible response to “oppression.” Most elite circles in the West—academia, Hollywood, the media, nonprofits—have been poisoned, to one degree or another, by this social justice psychosis where imaginary harms are seized upon as though they were existential concerns, and pure evil is easily shrugged off or even celebrated as a moral victory.

What Jihadists Want

The bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas who should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1,400 innocent people.

Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.

Look at these protests we’re seeing all over the world, which began before Israel had dropped a single bomb. Now that there have been several thousand Palestinian casualties, cities across the globe are seething with rage. But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria. The Saudis have killed well over 100,000 Muslims in Yemen. Where are the protests? No one cares, least of all Muslims. They only care when non-Muslims produce these casualties—and they especially care when Jews do it. Israel is routinely condemned by the United Nations, and the U.N. could not pass a condemnation of Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

As I said, I don’t know whether a ground invasion is the right approach. But there is no question that Israel had to act; they have to destroy Hamas, and, whatever they do, noncombatants will get killed in the process. Again, this is Hamas’s fault.

But the problem is much bigger than Hamas. Civilized people everywhere—both non-Muslim and Muslim—have no choice but to combat jihadism. This has been glaringly obvious since September 11, 2001, but it should be much more obvious now. For Israel, October 7 was much worse than 9/11 was for America. There’s almost no comparison. The revealed threat to Israel really is existential. However, in the long term, I think the threat of jihadism is existential for the West too.

This demands a much longer conversation about what to do about jihadism. I happen to think that most of our response to it should be covert. I don’t know why the Israelis, the Americans, the British, or anyone else has to take credit for anything. However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shebab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand, every day of their lives, that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them. Jihadism must be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed—logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists. We can argue with their sympathizers. And we can hope to de-radicalize them. But we also have to kill committed jihadists. These are not normal antagonists with rational demands. These are not people who want what we want. This is not politics, and it will never be politics. It is a very long war.

Back in 2016, I released an episode of my podcast titled “What Do Jihadists Really Want?,” based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State. You can listen to that for more detail.2 You can also read the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, to understand more of my thinking on this topic. Jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Israel, American foreign policy, colonialism, or any other rational grievance, and there is no concession that any civilized society can make to appease it.

We’ve forgotten about jihadism in recent years. But it hasn’t gone away. Whatever one thinks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was surely perceived as a victory by jihadists everywhere—and the implications of that have yet to be felt. In the West, we tend to remain blissfully unaware of Islamic terrorism (which is just another name for jihadism) unless it happens in the United States or Europe. We don’t tend to notice jihadist atrocities committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India, much less in the dozen or so countries in Africa that suffer them more or less continuously. And we are totally unaware of foiled plots, of which there have been many.

As I said, we also tend to think in terms of “terrorism” or “violent extremism,” and while I use those words myself, we have to focus on jihadism, because that is the underlying ideological commitment.

Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia—despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime. And there are internecine divisions even among jihadists of the same faith. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban don’t even get along at this point. And that’s a very good thing. Hopefully, we have an army of smart people with the necessary language skills, sowing hatred and confusion among jihadist groups twenty-four hours a day. But jihadists are all united in their hatred of liberal Western values, in their certainty of Paradise, and in their willingness to turn this world into an abattoir for the glory of God.

We cannot tolerate jihadists. We cannot let them immigrate into our open societies. And by we, I mean not just non-Muslims; I mean all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the twenty-first century. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Palestinians have to rid themselves of their jihadists. And if that’s not possible, a stable peace with the Palestinians is not possible.

But this problem is so much bigger than Israel, or even global anti-Semitism. Spend some time reading about how the Islamic State treats Shiites. Look at the history of terrorism in Pakistan or India. If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai—it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel, and the film shows this with brutal realism. And while they killed some Jews too, at a Jewish center, this attack had nothing to do with Israel, America, race, so-called “settler colonialism,” or any of the other factors that Leftist fellow travelers have been fixated on since October 7. Really, this is the least boring piece of homework you will ever be given. Go watch Hotel Mumbai, and once the killing starts, ask yourself how anyone, East or West, Muslim or non-Muslim, can live with these people.

There is an intuition out there that to solve the problems in the Middle East, we must understand them in all their depth and complexity. And for this, the most important thing to grapple with is the so-called “historical context.” But for the purpose of really understanding this conflict and why it is so intractable, historical context is a distraction—every moment spent talking about something other than jihadism is a moment when the oxygen of moral sanity is leaving the room.

There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries—were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.

Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? Do you realize how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the Chinese? Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? (I think there has been one.) The truth is ideas matter. It absolutely matters what people believe. Certainty about Paradise, and about martyrdom as a way of getting there, is one of the most potent memetic poisons the human mind has ever produced. Whatever historical, political, or economic context you want to apply to Israel and Palestine, jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal; and this is a global problem, because jihadism enjoys an appalling level of support throughout the Muslim world despite the fact that it is responsible for far more death and destruction among Muslims than Israel’s acts of self-defense have ever been.

Now, obviously, there are whole populations throughout the Muslim world that are effectively hostages to the religious fanatics who control them—and certainly a large percentage of the Palestinians fit that description, as does much of Iran. But it is very easy to underestimate how much sympathy there is for the jihadist project among Muslims who are not themselves actively waging jihad. And this is a terrible thing to contemplate. When 100,000 people show up in the center of London in support of Hamas, we have a problem. Of course, it’s an open question how many of those people really support jihad. But imagining that very few of them do is pure delusion. We have to win a war of ideas with these people. Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that an open-ended future of pluralistic tolerance might be possible.

Yes, there are many other problems in the world at the moment. There’s the war in Ukraine and the looming possibility of conflict between the United States and China. Some of these problems appear much bigger than jihadism, but they all admit of some rational basis for negotiation and compromise. However bad things get with the Russians or the Chinese, they are not chanting “We love death more than the Americans and the Europeans love life.” Only jihadism has the power to turn our future into a zombie movie. Jihadists are the enemy with whom there is no rational or pragmatic compromise to make—ever.

As I’ve said many times before, the Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior. And if the Muslim world and the political Left can’t stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness fully empowers rightwing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders, Christian fascists will.

There may be two sides to the past, but there really aren’t two sides to the present. There are two sides to the story of how the Palestinians and Jews came to fight over land in the Middle East. Understanding all that is important—and I think it is important to understand the cynical game the Arab world has played with the plight of the Palestinians for the past fifty years. If there is a stable political settlement to ever be reached between Israel and the Palestinians, it will entail a full untangling of the facts from all the propaganda that obscures them, while keeping the problem of jihadism in view. It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation. But even on the point of religious fanaticism, there really aren’t two sides worth talking about now. Whatever terrible things Israeli settlers occasionally do—and these are crimes for which they should be prosecuted—generally speaking, the world does not have a problem with Jewish religious fanatics targeting Muslims in their mosques and schools. You literally can’t open a Jewish school in Paris because no one will insure it. Yes, there are lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the past twenty years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.

There is a bright line between good and a very specific form of evil that we must keep in view. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with.

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” And his dad says, “May God protect you.” “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.” And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” “I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” “Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” And the brother says, “You killed ten?” “Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, Father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp … “Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window into a culture. This is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. As terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska: “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis?

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but also ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the United Nations.

Of course, all this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance-dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight.

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades … and from the jihadist side this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to Hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) all day long as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London, Sydney, and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them.

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine are important here is present. There are no settlers, blockades, daily humiliations at check points, or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have the same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers.

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, China, climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that in my work, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous episode of my podcast on this topic: We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

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