The following is an abridged excerpt from JNS columnist Fiamma Nierenstein’s essay in “Extreme Trauma: October 7 as an Outlier in the Range of Human Potential,” a new book compiled by Moshe Kaplan and published by American Friends of Be A Mensch Foundation, Inc.
In the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and others relied on the refinement of advanced German thought without an inkling that anything was brewing in the country. They did not know—precisely because of their sophistication and hope in life joined with materialization—that a monster was lurking in the shadows, planning how to kill all the Jews, one by one, and bury them under the ruins of Europe.
[On Oct. 7, Kibbutz] Be’eri rested until 6:30 [a.m.], among the sweetest Israeli dreams. It is one of the border kibbutzim known for its pacifism, for seeking a secular tikkun olam, a mending of the world, where man helps God to complete the Creation. But then the truth had only one color, that of Jewish blood, and the pogrom arrived on pickup trucks.
Batya Holin of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who had [worked] with five Gazan photographers on a very successful joint exhibition, noted that four of them had disappeared in the days before the massacre. During the killings, the fifth phoned her from within the border where he had broken in with the monsters, asking her where she was, if there were soldiers around them, and if she was with her whole family. “He was digging for information,” Batya said. “Only then, while they were trying to break into our hiding place, did I understand that he was a terrorist.”
To believe that what happened is true. I had to watch, several times over, the footage that the Hamas operatives collected with their video cameras. I had to listen and listen again to a hundred horror stories, visit the ruins, meet the survivors … and it is still hard to believe with my own eyes and my own ears. In the shadows of the tunnels under the buildings in Gaza or up and down the no-man’s-land between Gaza and Israel, the Hamas men had been given careful training and detailed instructions for months. Their preparations, like those of the Syrians and Egyptians for the surprise attack of 1973, were not secret: Hamas leaders held meetings and distributed leaflets with instructions and maps. The orders were, “While rockets are being launched from here [Gaza] and they are all taking refuge in their homes, invade, kill, rape, tear them apart, burn them, cut off heads and limbs.” Whose? Everyone’s, babies, mothers, children, older people, young men and women. And to take into captivity in Gaza a most diverse section of Jews so that the blackmail would affect all of Israeli society.
Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar used his imagination well, ordering the tearing of children from their mothers’ arms and the killing of mothers in front of their children, inventing every possible way to make the terror more horrendous than that of ISIS, to exterminate in the cruelest manner possible. Sinwar commanded his men to kill babies; to brutally rape women of any age, whether alive or dead; to castrate men and boys; to decapitate; to burn entire families alive along with the symbols of their lives. Thus, he forever epitomized the savagery of his movement, making him the absolute leader of contemporary hatred.
Sinwar placed Hamas at the head of a worldwide movement for the deconstruction of history that legitimizes rage as the emblem of life. That believes that it must take this action against all of civilization. This movement has decided that the contemporary outcome of history and religion, including the Jewish-Christian civilization and the human rights culture, is advantageous only for those who created [it], and so it is a tool of oppression to be ripped to pieces. The diabolical choice to tear down this civilization permits any means to destroy the “colonialists,” the “imperialists,” the “racists,” the rich, the white men, and above all, of course, the Jews. This concept finds consensus far from Gaza, first in the Muslim world, which places the “Islamophobes” among the oppressors, and along with the students, the LGTBQ movements, the ecological movements that think the Earth will be destroyed by capitalist interests and the Jews.
The United Nations, the Palestinian Authority, and even the Ivy League universities have still not condemned Sinwar’s atrocities. It is a crime whose “context” is what counts, and nobody expected that after a massacre like Oct. 7, the destruction of contemporary civilization would piggyback on an antisemitic atrocity. The plan, unlike that of the Nazis in their time, was to destroy the Jews by publicizing as widely as possible the resolve to make them suffer one by one. Hamas leaders repeated the promise: “We did it, and we will do it again and again and again.”
Once the barbarians entered Israel, they roared down the roads by the hundreds in white pickup trucks and on motorbikes, shooting everyone they encountered, pedestrians and drivers, in the head and chasing those who tried to escape. They were divided into units, some assigned to close public roads, while others headed for the countryside and the kibbutzim. They were systematic, coming back to seize anyone who might have escaped them. They opened the doors of the cars abandoned at the sides of the roads to make sure everyone was dead and finish off the wounded. Then they came together to shout for joy over the bodies of the dead: Itbah el Yehud! Allah hu Akbar! They all shouted with the index finger raised, indicating their blasphemous oneness of God, the primal call of jihadism: “Allah is great.” By cutting off the head of a baby, the murderer was fulfilling the mission of reconquering the land occupied by the Jews, purifying it of the Western and democratic culture.