Hamas opened the gates of hell and there’s no way back
TO MAKE war you must be able to pull the trigger and plunge the knife; to make peace you must be willing to shake hands and sit down with your enemy. Clearly, in both Israel and Palestine there are plenty of people willing and able to do the former and not near enough people to do the latter. So the suffering will continue in an area of the world where savagery, heartache and agony have been commonplace for decades.
The attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers last Saturday morning by Hamas murderers and cutthroats plunged the depths of human depravity. Those atrocities left at least 1,300 Israelis dead, innocent men, women and children, even little babies. Irish-Israeli Kim Damti, 22, below, is included in that long list of victims of such unspeakable barbarity.
A further 3,200 were injured and traumatised, the pain and loss spreading through thousands of families and the entire Jewish community in Israel and throughout the world.
This litany of carnage, this parade of mass murder was as premeditated as it was completely evil. Without qualification. There was nothing holy about what Hamas assassins did in the Holy Land last weekend. It was the very opposite of holy; it was Satan’s hell on earth.
NOW Israel seeks to defeat this Hamas wickedness and restore control and security. They cannot, and must not, be criticised for attempting to do that. Because they have no choice. The last time Israel was caught off-guard by the same kind of surprise attack as last weekend, was the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago when a coalition of Arab States launched an unexpected fullscale military attack. Israel survived that assault and they’ll survive this latest one as well, even if the Hamas onslaught is more personal, more vicious, more whiteof-the-eyes – and therefore more unforgiveable.
After Yom Kippur, Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir famously stated that her people’s great strength was that they had nowhere else to go. That strength persists to this day. Israel is where over seven million Jewish people must, if necessary, make their last stand.
Trouble is, the same can be said for the Palestinians, over two million of them in the Gaza Strip and a further three million in the West Bank where, according to the US Government almost 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers also live.
The Oslo Accords of the early and mid-90s brought great hope that the conflict could be resolved. Unfortunately that process has completely failed, a false dawn, a stillbirth for the two-state solution it promised. And over the past 25 years public sentiment on both sides has become more hardline. In June 2007, Hamas seized power in Gaza in a violent overthrow of the then Palestinian leadership Fatah in a revolt that led to the deaths of well over 600 Palestinians. More were killed or executed later as Hamas bedded in.
Over the years Hamas appeared to soften the terms of their original charter which called for the complete destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state covering Israel and Palestine. The cruel events of last weekend prove without any doubt that the genocidal intentions of that founding charter still persist.
This week in Ireland, and throughout the free world, left-leaning, anti-establishment, ‘against everything’ activists majored again in their usual ‘whataboutery’, in their qualified, coded criticism of this latest Hamas horror show as Israel prepared to defend itself. It would be laughable if not so entirely tragic, in circumstances where the kinds of freedoms and human rights such activists enjoy here are deliberately and routinely denied by Hamas tyrants to their own oppressed people in Gaza.
Fundamentalism and a complete failure to accept Israel’s right to exist has destroyed the present and the future for Palestinians. As one commentator repeated this week: Gaza had the choice of becoming a Singapore or a Beirut. Hamas decided for them at the point of a gun, and they chose Beirut. John Hume was our prophet in the Irish peace process, which is only in its infancy even after more than 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement. If there are prophets in Israel or Palestine they are still to be heard.
FURTHER, where John Hume convinced David Trimble and others to be his partner in peacebuilding, there is no such partnership currently or likely in the short term in the Israel-Palestine conflict. So Israel’s fighter jets will continue to drop their loads of death and misery on Gaza, killing hundreds and probably thousands of innocent Palestinians as their great Hamas protectors use their own people as human shields.
The weeks and months ahead will produce more slaughter and humanitarian disasters in the Gaza killing fields as the Israeli army moves in and attempts to destroy Hamas. Already 1,600 Palestinians have paid the ultimate price. Despicable war crimes perpetrated on one side will be followed by war crimes from the other, in a shocking cycle of revenge of biblical proportions.
Hamas butchers, murderers, torturers and hostage-takers opened the gates of hell last weekend and stepped right through. And now, there’s no way back.