Marty Levine
November 22, 2024
I just finished reading Lee Yaron’s recently published book about the victims of Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel. “10/7 The Human Stories” is this Haaretz reporter’s searing look at the lives of men, women, and children that were destroyed on that day. To read it is to feel the terror of those hours on people just going through their lives on a Saturday (Shabbat) morning as death and destruction overwhelmed them.
On October 7, 2023—which was the Sabbath, and the holiday of Simchat Torah, itself the final day of the holiday of Sukkot—members of Hamas along with allies in Palestinian Islamic Jihad and eight other groups launched an operation for which they’d been training for at least three years. Crashing through the Gaza border, they attacked from land, sea, and air, indiscriminately massacring civilians in what became one of the worst terror attacks in modern history, and, in the words of President Biden, “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” In fewer than twenty-four hours, approximately 3,000 terrorists managed to claim the lives of over 1,200 individuals and abduct around 250—most of them Israeli citizens, but others hailing from more than thirty countries. Civilians ranging in age from infants to the elderly, who’d just woken up that morning, were gunned down, stabbed, and burned alive; they were tortured, raped, and purposefully amputated, in hellish scenes that many of the terrorists documented and posted globally. Entire communities were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis were forced to leave their homes, becoming refugees within their own country.
The stories of these lives lost are traced from start to end. We learn about older adults, people my age, who immigrated from their homes in a destroyed post WW II Europe or from troubled Arab lands seeking a haven in the Jewish State only to be brutally slaughtered by Hams soldiers. We learn about the short lives of children and young adults that ended before they had a chance to blossom. We learn about what it felt like to be attending a rave in the desert I have found so beautiful, only to find themselves being slaughtered. We learn about acts of heroism and the pain of loss on the survivors.
I struggled to get through the book.
It is impossible to defend the individual acts of violence committed on that day. They were horrific, full of fury and hatred, and without a purpose. They are what I fear most about the intolerable situation that is Israel/Palestine.
And yet I hoped that in recognizing what had occurred as Yaron does she would not minimize the context of what came before 10/7/23 and, perhaps more importantly, recognize that what has come after is without justification as well. But her desire to focus on her personal and national pain has her, in my mind, minimizing how her nation has responded.
Following the massacre, Israel went to war, striking Gaza with unprecedented fury with the aim of destroying Hamas—a terrorist organization that has vowed to annihilate Israel and ruled Gaza for almost twenty years, ingraining itself into the heart of the civilian population.
And in the book’s afterword, Joshua Cohen concludes that this day of death has led to the building of a new form of Jewish identity that transcends religion and seems to serve as a rationale for more than a year of destruction on the people and land of Gaza. He makes a statement that if made by Gazans, citing moments of death and destruction at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers to defend Hamas would be seen as just rationales for hatred.
The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” was also the day that Jewishness returned to Israel: Jewishness as an identity, regardless of belief or practice. At a time of rising nationalist religiosity and Jewish extremism, a massacre was perpetrated on the avowedly secular: Jews were killed for being Jews; not because they were wearing kippot, not because they were conspiring to raze Al-Aqsa and erect a Third Temple, but merely because they had the temerity to exist as Jews within the borders of a Jewish state; while the Arabs who were killed that day, the Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs both, were killed because they had the gall to live among Jews as fellow citizens; and the Nepalese and Thai citizens who were killed that day were killed because they dared to work for Jews, toiling in Jewish fields, picking Jewish produce. It’s tempting to take this even further and say that the dogs that were killed that day.
As I write these words the Gaza Health Ministry tells us that almost 44,000 residents of Gaza have died since 10/7. They tell us that over 100,000 have been wounded. We know as many as 50% off those killed or injured were women and children. It was also a day after The Guardian published a story under the headline “ ‘Total oppression’: West Bank children being killed at unprecedented rate. Huge rise in attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers killed 171 children in year after 7 October.”
“In the course of last year there was an extremely concerning increase in children killed in conflict-related violence in the West Bank, and we already see the trend is continuing,” said Jonathan Crickx, spokesperson for UNICEF Palestine.
“UNICEF wants to ring the alarm bell, that children are being killed and seriously injured on a regular basis, mostly by live ammunition.”
The UN only counts child victims whose name, age, and cause of death it has verified.
If there is no excuse for what Hamas did on 10/7, is there then a justification for the year-long destruction of Gaza and its people? Or for the treatment of Palestinians living in the “West Bank” lands that were to be their own homeland in a Palestinian state?
If there can be a justification for what Israel has done in Gaza and that justification is the horror of 10/7 then why is not 10/7 itself justified by the horrors of life in Gaza (and on the West Bank) under Israeli occupation?
Whatever side of this ongoing dispute you advocate for, I hope you will ponder these questions.
Violence breeds violence. If violence can justify more violence we are doomed to relive the horrors of this Israel/Palestine tragedy endlessly.
