Six weeks after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel, I find that I understand that horrid, shocking, unjustifiable attack much better than I did in the first couple of weeks. Not just because of the hundreds of testimonies, videos and reports that educated me about the facts of the ferocious attack. Not just because of the heartbreak, which I have felt time and again as I learned about the loss that friends and acquaintances suffered that day, and the torment of friends whose relatives – young children without their families – are held captive in Gaza by Hamas. Nor even just because of the fear and the existential dread instilled within me in response to the attack, my government’s complete failure to stop it and offer its citizens security, and the threat of regional war.
I understand it better because I see how my own society, including dear friends, is so willing to justify a different massacre, carried out by our army against the people of Gaza, excusing it by saying that “we have no other option”. If this is true of many Jewish Israelis, whose nation suffered this one utterly devastating and brutal blow, how could one fail to understand that decades of occupation, siege, oppression, death and destruction would lead some Palestinians to launch, participate or support the massacre of 7 October? How could one not see that by killing thousands of people, hundreds of entire families, forcing hundreds of thousands into homelessness through unimaginable destruction and cutting off basic supplies to more than two million people, we are recreating and deepening the legitimacy people in Gaza see in doing the same to us?
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