A Week of Clarity

Nor was this the first time our Palestinian neighbors revealed their savage hatred. Recall the iconic photo of the Palestinian lynching of two hapless reservists who mistakenly entered Ramallah in 2001. A smiling figure holds up his bloodied hands from an upstairs window to the cheering crowd below, after having ripped his victims limb from limb. And it cries out from the videos proudly taken by perpetrators on October 7 of their butchery and torture of their Jewish victims.

Liel Liebowitz wrote in Tablet (“Their Time Is Up”), after the autopsies on the Bibas children and the purported body of their mother, Shiri, “Such gleeful cruelty has no parallel in the civilized world.”

He noted that a survey of Gazan opinion by Oxford University researchers found that 98 percent of Gaza’s population view the conflict with Israel as a religious war: The Jews have usurped Muslim land. Accordingly, close to half want to see Israel destroyed and a sharia state established in its place; another 20 percent would settle for the forced removal of all the Jews of Israel; and 17 percent would be satisfied with the grant of a “right of return,” a slower and gentler end to Israel.

Many of the Israeli hostages, if not most, have been held by local families, not by Hamas fighters. And yet not one story has yet emerged from any of the returned hostages of any human kindness shown to them by their captors — apart from one Hamas fighter who provided Agam Berger with a siddur, albeit as a prelude to presenting her with a Koran. Released hostages have told of being “abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.” Israel offered very large rewards for anyone providing information leading to the return of hostages. There were no takers.