1.
"Arise and go now to the city of slaughter/ Into its courtyard wind thy way / There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head / Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay / The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead … For God called up the slaughter and the spring together / The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny weather."
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120 years have passed since Hayim Nahman Bialik published his famous poem about the massacre of the Jews of Kishinev. Forty-nine Jews were brutally murdered there. And today, what shall we say about the murder of more than a thousand of our sons and daughters on Simchat Torah, whose honor was desecrated, and they were put to death with unprecedented cruelty that outdid even the perpetrators of the Kishinev massacre? Our pain is as great as the ocean, who will heal us.
We have known many wars. We wanted quiet. We offered mutual peace agreements, and when those failed, we withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. We dug up our dead from their graves and left our farms and greenhouses to the Gazans in the hope they would set up a tourist riviera. But when that too failed, we decided we would make do with just quiet and economic interests.
We offered our neighbors the chance to enjoy all the good that we have brought to this land. We assumed that their choices would be logical, utilitarian and that if we provided jobs for their laborers; if we provided them with electricity, water, construction materials, and medicines; and if we treated their children in our hospital, they would be grateful to us and would not risk harming the fabric of life of their citizens, and their ability to make a living. We also assumed that their leaders would not give up the comforts of power and the large sums of money that flowed to them from Western countries, and so we believed that they would not dare arouse the wrath of an IDF dozens of times stronger than them.
We have erred, we have strayed, we have sinned.
2.
Perhaps the root of our errors lies in the early days of our national awakening when we dreamed of establishing a Hebrew-speaking European state on the shore of the Mediterranean and did not take into account the different language and thought, culture, and religious streams that have been prevalent here for thousands of years, and which were so different from those we were familiar with.
On Shabbat, we will start over the cycle of reading the Torah, as we have done for the past 1500 years. Adam was created from the dust of the earth (in Hebrew: Adama) and within his name is the fluid of life that flows through him: blood (in Hebrew: Dam). These are not word games but the most fundamental building blocks of existence in this ancient region. Not territory, but land (Adama), in the absence of which man (Adam) cannot exist. Cursed Cain is banished, he wanders the world, fearing his fate: "…whoever comes upon me will kill me!" That is why man (Adam) saw fit to spill blood (Dam) to hold land."
3.
In rational Europe, certainly after the secular revolution and even more so after the terrible world wars, land became a currency with which to buy quiet. We too tried that route and failed. The Middle East never absorbed and accepted that Western concept. Even the concept of time here is different to that in the West. Time doesn't equal money but is stretched as may be necessary. The concept of causality according to which every action has a reason – from Aristotle through to David Hume –states that we can solve every problem if we find its cause. But in the Middle East, not every problem has a logical solution; many times, the problem is left to be solved with time, but that too, as we have already said, can stretch over hundreds or thousands of years.
In this region, we still see ancient concepts such as blood redemption, stoning, and even the practice of the "wayward wife" (Ishah sotah) in its primeval sense (today it has evolved into the "institution" known as honor killing). Taking women as prisoners of war with all the horrors inflicted on them is a regular phenomenon among the tribes that surround us. But among the Jews, these practices ceased more than two millennia ago. Our Sages did not annul biblical passages but interpreted them in a way that after a long process, they were de facto no longer applicable. In the IDF there is no phenomenon of rape during war as we have seen in other armies, such as the mass rapes during the world wars.
4.
We in Israel tried to play by our laws with these savages. They know full well the various arts of war and the institutions of human rights, and they knew how to use them against us. Thus, as we held ourselves back from acting harshly against them, they did not shy away from any means. When they had the chance, they slaughtered raped, beheaded, and led women, infants, and the elderly through the streets of Gaza as they bled to jeers and cheers of a crowd that handed out sweets to celebrate the "victory."
In his book, "How Democracies Perish", the French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel talked of a sophisticated industry of blame that has adopted a one-sided view of Western historical guilt. Namely, that every bad thing that happens, especially in the third world, is caused because of forces emanating from the wealthy Western capitalist democracies. For this reason, any attempt to resist communist expansion and aggression caused confusion or paralysis among Western intellectuals at the time. Revel believed that the Soviet expansionist strategy would not have succeeded had the West not yielded to it. He described the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West as a football match, in which one of the teams - the West - disqualifies itself from going past the half-way line on the pitch (while the other team plays close to the opponent's goal). At the time that Revel was writing, the ayatollahs had only ruled Iran for a few years and he certainly did not imagine barbarians like ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
5.
If what happened on October 7, the day of Simchat Torah, teaches us once and for all that in order to survive in this ancient region, we must understand and internalize its language, then perhaps we will atone in some way for our naiveite. Internalizing the language means accepting what Rabbi Akiva, the "Chief of the Sages" taught us almost two thousand years ago: If your life is at stake, your life comes first before that of your friend. The answer to the question of whose life comes first, that of our enemies or that of our soldiers, is thus clear. Rabbi Akiva would not hesitate; he would rule: "The lives of our soldiers!" After the Simchat Torah massacre, we will no longer see a repetition of what happened in Jenin in the Second Intifada in which we sacrificed the lives of our soldiers because we did not want to harm the civilian population. Considering this, before any ground operation in Gaza – and a ground operation must take place –the Strip must be pulverized, minimizing as much as possible the enemy's ability to come out of their hiding places and harm our soldiers. The poet Avraham Shlonsky wrote: "Cry heaven, if in vain passed that night of rage/ Cry heaven, if by morning I resume my trot/ Not learning the lesson taught me by this age."
We will overcome and with God's help, we will defeat our enemies. During my tenure as Israel's ambassador to Italy, during every military campaign, I repeated to the local media that the situation must also be viewed from the historical perspective of thousands of years of existence of the Jewish people. In other words, the wars, the pogroms, and massacres of Jews over the past 150 years are part of the failed effort by the enemies of the West to stop the historical process of the return of the Jews to Zion as predicted by the prophecies of the Bible. The redemption of the free world depends on this, just as it does upon the understanding that Israel's campaign against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is the war of the entire free world for life and freedom.
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