The Two Millennia Hate laid bare
The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, by a UK parliamentary group, makes for hideous reading. Everyone should read it.
We all agree, I’m sure, that the Israeli-Palestinian War is awful; death and destruction on an appalling scale; a conflict that we all hope might be brought to an end as quickly as possible.
The rather-more-than Sixty Four Thousand Dollar Question, however, is how best to achieve a sustainable end to the conflict? Is it even possible for the opposing parties to reach some form of peaceful co-existence? Or does it have to be a battle to the bitter end?
Reading a new UK all-party report, the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report, chaired by Lord Roberts of Belgravia, I’m bound to say that it does appear to me that the battle-to-the-bitter-end solution may be the only way. The battle to the bitter end of Hamas, that is.
The Hamas-organized attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 was the most well-documented pogrom in history. Bar none. Documented, sometimes gleefully, by the aggressors themselves on their GoPro cameras and sent out into the world together with graphic footage shot on smart phones taken from Israelis who had just been raped, tortured, murdered.
1,182 Israelis were killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that day. Babies, Children. Women. Men. Of the total, 364 were young people attending a music festival. 251 were taken hostage (41 of whom were dead). 4,000 people were wounded and an entire nation was traumatized. This was rape, mutilation, slaughter and on-going abuse on a hideous, wholesale scale.
It is hard to see how there can be any settlement with such evil.
The Report is a scrupulously researched and assembled, important historical document. It clearly communicates the fact that this event was outside the range of what we might term - if it’s even possible to label it - normal human violence. This was something else: an act of such barbarity that it raises fundamental questions about the consequences for civilization.
I have written more on this topic but, in the end, decided to keep it back (for now, anyway), save only just adding this …
Since the 1980s, we in the West have changed the way we look at the world. We have excised the concept of Good & Evil and replaced it with a therapeutic explanation of human behaviour.1 It’s a means to avoid blame. After all, how can you blame someone if they are simply unwell or ill in some way?
But Evil exists. And Hamas’s unprovoked attack is an example of it.
Jewish people are, of course, only too familiar with unprovoked hostility. Hence my headline Orwellian reference.
Do take a look at the 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report.
Thanks for reading.
Frank Furedi. Therapy Culture (2004)
Yes, Evil exists. I have come to that conclusion myself. It's not an easy insight to reach; I can readily recognize petty malice and anger in myself, but the naked evil we find documented online is truly difficult to comprehend. I cannot help but think of it as a form of possession, or perhaps that's just a mental crutch to help me process the vileness.