Rabbi Mark Levin: Neither Hamas nor Israel cares about Gaza’s children | Opinion

Moral revulsion produces vomitous disgust, the visceral bodily convulsion at actions so inimical that our physical reaction precedes our rational evaluation.

The mass killing in Gaza, the fault of Hamas first and Israel secondarily, evokes moral revulsion, and the despair of powerlessness immediately after. Gaza is a graveyard for our souls.

The historical facts of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack overwhelm like a tsunami of grief, felt intensely to this day by Jews worldwide. Israel reacted with military attack and negotiations, both to crush Hamas militarily and retrieve the hostages. But Hamas, like Germany in the Battle of the Bulge, came prepared. Hamas took not only 251 hostages from Israel. It also took 2 million Gazans hostage, shields against Israel’s inevitable retaliation.

Elected as the government of Gaza in 2006, Hamas’ mission has never been the welfare of the Palestinian people. Its true mission is Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of Jews worldwide, culminating in reestablishing the Caliphate.

The evidence is clear in Hamas’ prepared tunnels and food, instruments of survival against Israel’s just war. But it prepared no tunnels or food for Gazans, their own people whom they claim to protect. Indeed, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander in Gaza, said that 100,000 Gazan martyrs were not too many in the fight. Israel came ready to oblige.

Both Israel and Hamas have erroneously treated the Gazans as though Hamas cares about their humanity. Thus they colluded in victimizing Gaza and Gazans, each futilely pursuing their military objective by persecuting the Strips’ people. Neither will succeed. Just as Hamas cannot be coerced through persecuting Gazans, so Israel’s claims to be waging a just war to retrieve its hostages by afflicting tens of thousands of Gazans as collateral damage is absurd.

Hamas cannot be coerced by killing people who don’t matter to them. Like the horror that followed Emmett Till’s mother’s revelation of her son’s mercilessly brutalized body in 1955, we know in our guts that the reign of terror in Gaza is quite simply wrong. One might suspect that the Jewish people collectively, invoking memories of the Holocaust, might reject the fire from the skies that wipes out entire families. Regardless of the reasoning, Jews might have said, “We just can’t countenance this cruelty, irrespective of the morality of its goal: justifiable hostage retrieval.” Add to that the realization that the slaughter availed little with regard to the hostages. Hamas has never been moved by the sight of dead children’s bodies, whom they label as martyrs.

Moral repugnance will increase violence

Israel is waging a just war: first, of self-defense against Hamas, whose goal is Israel’s destruction, and second, seeking a method to retrieve innocent hostages and the bodies of the dead.

But there is no wonder its tactics are frustratingly fruitless. Neither Hamas nor Israel’s government cares about Gaza’s children. nor their dead bodies. Killing Gazans could perhaps be justified if it achieved a just goal. But it does not and will not.

One thing is certain: Killing Gazans will result in more future dead Israeli and Arab bodies. This onslaught will not be forgotten, ever. It will be used for decades to come to motivate Arab children, not only Palestinian children, to deadly revenge attacks. “Remember Gaza!” will be as sustainable a rallying cry as “Remember the Maine!” or “Remember the Alamo!” The deaths, I fear without being a prophet, are not only futile but desperate. Already two innocent peace workers were killed two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., one a local woman.

Besides being morally repugnant, killing innocent children to get at Hamas’ soldiers will increase the violence. The deaths will motivate more soldiers, and rather than disappearing as Hamas was experiencing before Oct. 7, it will grow as an achievement Palestinian Arabs can claim in seeking their own independence.

The tragedy is beyond our moral capacity to endure. And so we are left dumbfounded, hoping someday this repugnance will depart from us, and we will comprehend and agree on a solution. But it will not and we will not, because slaughtering innocents leaves innocence dead alongside them on the battlefield, and no one is saved. Only resignation to war remains down this path.

I feel for Israel, genuinely and fully. I also feel for Gazans. But the disgust and my incomprehension at Israel’s actions have stymied my writing. Nothing will be achieved. The grief, the gulf between peoples and the impulse to revenge will lodge deep within both. Only resolute government determination and the people’s demands to stop the killing will save Israel, Israelis and Palestinians from future devastation.

May God have mercy on us all, and let us realize through our moral revulsion that another path must be found to pursue not simply a just war but a just peace.