Israel

Hamas Godless Killers

In firing at Jerusalem, Islamists underscore
their willingness to murder absolutely anybody.

W

ho are these people?
game. For in their malevolence, they have
They are, as they showed last
persuaded themselves that they are fighting
Friday, people with no compunc- a holy war in whose cause the most repre-
tion about killing absolutely any-
hensible actions are rendered
body. In firing missiles toward
laudable.
Jerusalem — firing indiscrimi-
None of this should surprise
nately, pushing themselves to
anyone. Hamas' despicable con-
the very limits of their deadly
ception of religion holds that the
capabilities — they showed utter
finest act one can do to honor
indifference to the lives of their
the divine creator is to kill off
own brothers, sisters, parents.
his creations — Jews, Christians,
Those rockets could have
Muslims, themselves. In Hamas'
gone anywhere. They could
perverted doctrine, this is the
have killed anyone. They were
path to paradise. Its operatives
David
aimed at areas filled with Israelis
lust for death. They have deluded
Horovitz
and Palestinians, with Jews,
themselves that this is God's will.
Times of
Christians and Muslims.
This is difficult for most of us
Israel
So what.
to
internalize. Our instinctive
Commentary
Those rockets could have
sense is that surely, ultimately,
slammed into places holy to
everybody just wants to live and
Jews, to Christians and to Muslims.
let live. And by extension, therefore, in our
So what.
particular conflict, that surely, ultimately, we
Their own people. Their own most vener-
could work things out if only we all sat down
ated places. For Hamas, all targets are fair
together.

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24

November 22 • 2012

Actually, no. Actually, we are grappling
here with people who have lost tzelem elohim
(the image of God), who have spurned the
divine gift of life, rejected the sheer joy of
drawing breath on this planet. The terrorists
of Hamas and others like them — inspired,
armed, funded and trained by the ideologi-
cally and territorially rapacious rulers of Iran
— do not ultimately seek to live and let live.
They strain to kill and be killed.
It may be difficult to accept, but the
evidence is everywhere. It was clear when
Hamas killed its own people while seizing
power in Gaza in 2007. It is clear in a terrible
history of suicide bombings against Jewish,
Christian and, again, Muslim targets. It is
clear in Hamas' ruthless deployment in Gaza
— its savage readiness to open fire from
right next to mosques and schools, and to
take children out with its rocket crews in the
cynical appreciation that its decent, humane
enemies might then hold their fire and thus
enable it to continue to wreak destruction.
For all that Hamas' trampling on the
natural desire to live and breathe is counter-
intuitive, then, it should have long since been
recognized. Those who insistently misrep-
resent the parameters and context of Israel's
struggle against the Islamists, those who
defend them and rush to their aid, empower
and unforgivably sustain them. Those who
seek to break Israel's desperate efforts to
prevent more of the very weaponry fired at
Jews, Christians and Muslims these last few
days from reaching the arsenals of Hamas,
for instance, may wish to consider them-
selves human rights activists; actually, they
are potential accessories to murder.
For anybody who genuinely seeks to pre-
serve innocent lives — everybody's innocent
lives — should long since have faced the fact
that doing so requires marginalizing and
ultimately defeating Hamas and its ilk.
Israel has no quarrel with Gaza. It has no
military presence in Gaza. It ripped out the
settlement enterprise it had constructed in
Gaza. Had a peaceful Gaza flourished after
2005, Israel — even though our country
is tiny and embattled —would have been
tempted, in its burning quest for a quiet
place among the nations, to relinquish much
or all of biblical Judea and Samaria to the
Palestinians as well. None of this is of interest
to Hamas; it should all be remembered, how-
ever, by those who seek to avoid the unpal-
atable reality of Hamas' kill-and-be-killed
motivation and look instead for ostensible
reasons for Hamas-led "resistance
To those who wonder why Israel resorted
to force now, why in the words of some
critics it goaded Hamas into action, there
are several answers, all compelling: Hamas

seeks relentlessly to tunnel under the Israeli
border to kill and kidnap Israelis in infiltra-
tion attempts, and the IDF's discovery and
destruction of one such tunnel prompted
a pinpoint missile attack by Gaza gunmen
on a jeep inside Israel last week in which
four soldiers were injured, precipitating this
particular escalation; Hamas has been fir-
ing rockets indiscriminately into residential
Israel for years or allowing others to do so, an
outrageous and intolerable situation; Hamas
works continuously to improve its missile
capacity, with Hezbollah as its role model,
and must be thwarted, otherwise the next
generation of missiles most assuredly will hit
Jerusalem's population centers; and Hamas,
like Hezbollah, is poised to weigh in militar-
ily should Israel find itself in confrontation
with Iran, and needs to be defanged before
that danger can become a reality.
An election ploy by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu? He was safely on
course to re-election. That smooth path
could be deeply complicated if Operation
Pillar of Defense goes horribly wrong.
We can argue about Israel's role in the rise
of Hamas. Was the unilateral withdrawal
from Gaza a predictable mistake that vindi-
cated Hamas' heartless terrorism and weak-
ened purportedly more moderate Palestinian
forces? Or should we have stayed put in
Gaza, however draining and dangerous in
so many ways? Should we be doing more to
promote reconciliation and harmony, how-
ever unpromising the circumstances, and in
so doing reduce the sense of grievance on
which the Islamist recruiters thrive?
On those questions, there is no consensus
in Israel. On the imperative to defeat Hamas,
there can be no argument.
It will not be easy — as Operation
Cast Lead underlined four years ago, and
Operation Pillar of Defense is confirming
again now Military force, however wisely
applied, has its limits when confronting an
ideology, the more so in this case when that
vile ideology is furthered via an abandon-
ment of all decency and the exploitation of
Israel's insistent morality.
The task of weakening Hamas' capacity
to do harm would be helped, though, if a
watching world displayed a greater intellec-
tual honesty when looking at Hamas, and at
Israel's efforts to deny Hamas the capacity to
kill. Perhaps those rockets fired at Jerusalem
will promote a greater clarity of thought and
thence of judgment.
Who are these people? They are people
who glory in death. Since we delight in life,
we had better prevail.

❑

See related stories on pages 12 and 36.

