Ted S

Three years ago today, there was no war raging in Gaza. There was a ceasefire. Then, in the early hours of 7 Oct, Hamas launched a coordinated invasion of Israel. Thousands of armed men crossed the border & they deliberately went looking for civilians. They went into homes & murdered families. They killed children & elderly. They abducted men, women & children & dragged them back into Gaza as hostages where civilians cheered. And they attacked the Nova music festival. Hundreds of young people were dancing in the desert when terrorists descended on them. It is grimly familiar to see Islamist terrorists choosing a place of music, dancing, & freedom as a killing ground. Manchester. The Bataclan. Nova. There are photographs & videos of what happened that day because, extraordinarily, many of the perpetrators filmed it themselves. There is a plethora of evidence of sexual violence. There is the intercepted call in which a Hamas attacker excitedly told his parents that he had killed 10 Jews “with my own hands”. They raped & burned bodies, hunted people through fields & into bomb shelters, & paraded terrified hostages through Gaza. It was an atrocity. And something happened in the West almost immediately afterwards that I still struggle to comprehend. Before Israel had even buried its dead, people thousands of kilometres away began finding reasons why the victims had it coming. Within days, the murderer and the murdered had begun swapping places in the popular imagination. Three years later, antisemitism has returned with a fervour to Western society with a speed and confidence that should terrify us. Ancient conspiracies about Jewish power & blood libels have been repackaged in the vocabulary of “decolonisation”. Jewish people around the world have been expected to account for the actions of a foreign government. People have celebrated or rationalised terrorism as “resistance”. Influencers who could not have found Gaza on a map 4 years ago have turned Palestine into an entire political identity. And an extraordinary amount of propaganda has been swallowed without the slightest curiosity about the people producing it. So, since the word itself is now treated as an obscenity I will admit that I am a Zionist. Zionism, at its most basic, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their historic homeland & that Israel has a right to continue to exist as a Jewish state. That does not mean believing the Israeli government is always right. It does not mean supporting every military action, every politician, or every policy. It does not mean believing Palestinian civilians have no rights or that their suffering does not matter. It means I believe Israel should exist. Shouldnt be eradicated. If Israel’s objective were simply to obliterate Gaza without regard for civilian life, it possesses the firepower to inflict destruction on a vastly greater scale. But they don’t. Hamas, meanwhile, has repeatedly made clear that it regards the destruction of Israel (not peaceful coexistence with it). They have turned down peace deals & 2 state solutions. You can grieve for innocent Palestinians. I do. And you can criticise Israel. I do. You can also believe that every innocent life lost in this war is a tragedy. But I will not pretend that Hamas is a liberation movement. I will not romanticise men who deliberately massacred & raped civilians. I will not accept that murdering Jews is morally complicated because the murderers have run a highly successful propaganda campaign. And I will not participate in the extraordinary collective amnesia about how this war began. On 7 Oct 2023, people were dancing. Then Hamas came across the border to kill them. I remember them today.