Gerard Baker
WSJ, Oct. 9, 2023
“The terrorists’ objective is truly indiscriminate destruction. For them a dead Jew is a bonus, but a dead Palestinian is a trophy they can parade before credulous Western media to convey some supposed moral equivalence between their depravity and the actions of a beleaguered state seeking to preserve its very existence.”
It will take time to absorb the horror and to begin to understand the wider consequences of the carnage Hamas unleashed on Israel this weekend, but five things are immediately clear.
First, while the scale of the attack has implications that will transform the strategic landscape, we must recognize the atrocity primarily for what it is—another attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.
The spectacle of paramilitaries going house to house shooting Jews, dragging their dead bodies through the streets, and brandishing them as spoils is as shocking as it is familiar. For Jews, this is their history played out one more agonizing time. Another year, another place, another pogrom. Even the state of Israel, that magnificent homeland they have built for themselves in the desert, with its world-beating technology and its fearsome security forces, can’t fully protect them from the undying, putrid hate of anti-Semitism.
Second, as moving as it has been to watch, the sympathy we have seen expressed for Israel around the world won’t last. It has been stirring to see the colors of the Israeli flag adorning public buildings across Europe and America, but I give it a week before normal service is resumed.
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