The deaths of civilians in Gaza — random but numerous victims of war — are sad and terrible.
Two unfortunate peoples who found themselves on the same territory and unable to reconcile are an open wound. Eighteen centuries after the expulsion, the Jews wandered, were despised, and again expelled from everywhere. The Holocaust, when some killed them, sparing no one, and others tried to get rid of the refugees — the Americans, the French, the Swiss and so on, extradited them, interned them, persecuted them again, like the Poles after the war — left no choice. The Jewish people returned their homeland with arms in hand, having every right to do so. He doesn’t have another one.
The Palestinians had the same right to their houses and fields. It is equally hopeless to completely side with one or the other in order to create a picture that does not suffer from fatal contradictions. We grew up on books and films where some are always right and others are wrong, but in reality this happens quite rarely. Only a rare piece of land on the planet can be claimed by one people, and almost everyone can write a sad story.
But one way or another, Israel exists, being a homeland for millions of Jews, and this is the only possible starting point. Today he is driven into a corner, and will not be able to leave him until the Palestinians decide what to do with the provocateurs and murderers who quite deliberately set them up.
As long as Gaza votes for the murderers, supports them, approves of them, Israel will respond the way it responds. It is completely pointless to advise a people who were shelled for many years, and then began to be killed just like that, not for military purposes, but to shock and intimidate, to pretend that nothing happened, that it is possible to come to an agreement with the killers. It is impossible to come to an agreement with them, just as Syria could not come to an agreement with ISIS, being forced to destroy not strangers, but its own cities, as happened with Aleppo. How Russia could not come to an agreement with Basayev, those who were responsible for the mass deaths in Nord-Ost and Beslan.
There is no justice. It does not exist for God, who spares us not out of justice, but out of love. It does not exist for peoples who can live in peace only by sacrificing something, by loving the world more than their real and imagined rights, ambitions, and grievances. The mass murder of Israelis has opened the door to hell, and suggestions to Israel — close the door — are completely meaningless while Hamas represents the Palestinians in Gaza. All attempts to negotiate with him ended on the day when one thousand four hundred Israeli citizens were brutally killed, three thousand were wounded, and two hundred and thirty-nine were captured.
What I have no doubt about is that Hamas must be destroyed, and anyone who wants to take part in bringing peace back to the Holy Land must understand that this condition is not negotiable.
To stop this war, not the one that lasts for decades, and not the one that began on the day when Cain killed Abel, but the one that broke out on October 7, 2023, you need to decide on at least one condition.
Those who deliberately kill civilians — not as a result of military operations, when shells and bombs are not sorted out, where the soldier or militant is and where the woman or child is, but with a good understanding of what they are doing, when they cut the throat or shoot an unarmed person in the head, are subject to extermination like rabid animals. There can be no reference to justice, justification or explanation.
This is an unpleasant condition for many Palestinians, but it is also an unpleasant condition for Israelis. I still remember a story not so long ago when an Israeli officer gave the order to open fire on thirteen-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl Iman al-Hamas. As they later explained, she crossed some line; she could have been carrying explosives in her backpack or been sent by terrorists to lure the soldiers out of hiding (version of the Chief of the General Staff). Therefore, they first fired at her from the checkpoint, and then the officer came close and emptied the magazine of his machine gun into the girl, and then they counted twenty bullets in her body.
The officer was punished extremely cruelly — he was promoted to rank. A completely different person was subjected to obstruction — an Israeli soldier who reported what happened and what his conscience could not reconcile with.
Of course, this is not the only case, and the story is not specifically Israeli. I remember how a Polish prosecutor was persecuted for accusing several compatriots of killing civilians in Afghanistan. In the end, they got away with it. We live in a world of our own making, and we resent the fact that it is terrible. Palestinian terrorists have certainly surpassed everyone today, but those who demand that Israel stop the military operation, as they demanded it from Syria.
They almost forgot about the murderers — it’s an everyday matter.
In the seventies, Pranas Brazinskas, who hijacked a plane with his son and killed nineteen-year-old flight attendant Nadya Kurchenko, successfully settled in the United States, explaining that he killed “that bitch” because she got in his way. The Americans first explained that “US concerns about international terrorism do not apply to the case of the Brazinskas,” then they lied and said they expelled them from the country. In the end, the son beat Pranas Brazinskas to death with dumbbells, hitting him eight times, but this can hardly be called a triumph of justice.
The deliberate killing of civilians cannot be covered up.
Humanity has never grown up to this maxim, I don’t know a single country where they were able to decide on it, and the so-called civilized countries have not moved one iota away from those that are considered not fully developed in this matter. This is a question where there is complete consensus, without which the murder of Iman al-Hamas and fourteen hundred Israelis would have been impossible.
On October 7th, the murderers knew for sure that they would get away with anything, they would not be declared outlaws throughout the world, they would not be destroyed on the spot, ready to pay with thousands of lives of other innocents for the impunity of the executioners. The idea of an international court in The Hague is completely spoiled by its disregard for justice, which does not even reach “For our own — everything, for strangers — the law.” There is no law for strangers there at all.
We differ from the wild tribes in only two things. First, the presence of numerous laws and moral imperatives. Secondly, the fact that they are not observed — the wild ones, who had very few rules, strictly adhered to them.