Watching Never Again Happen Again

‘A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive. I could go on, but it’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way.” This is how United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken — in Israel to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu — described some of the photographic evidence of the barbarity that Hamas recently inflicted on the Israeli people.

“They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “They beheaded soldiers, they mowed down these youngsters who came to a nature festival.”

The attack came during the Jewish feast of Simchat Torah, during Shabbat. If you’ve ever been to Israel, the weekly celebration of Shabbat marks a powerfully striking cultural difference from the West: The Jewish people take the Sabbath seriously. Good luck buying a Tylenol on Saturday before sundown. We could learn a lot from them. Hamas hates the joy and the silence and life itself. Hamas is the antithesis of the civilization that the Jewish state exists to protect. Hamas is evil. Its adherents hate Jews and even the Palestinian people that some in the West and elsewhere pretend to support. In recent days, Israel asked civilians in northern Gaza to leave before it attacked to eliminate the terrorists. Hamas urged them to stay, because they don’t care if innocents die.

As Blinken put it: “Hamas continues to use civilians as human shields. Something that’s not new, something that they’ve always done, intentionally putting civilians in harm’s way to protect themselves. . . . So that’s one of the basic facts that Israel has to deal with.”

With a clarity that transcends domestic politics, he said:

And of course, civilians should not be used in any way as the targets of military operations. They are not the target of Israel’s operations. We did discuss ways to address the humanitarian needs and people living in Gaza, to protect them from harm, while Israel conducts its legitimate security operations to defend itself from terrorism and to try to ensure that this never happens again.

These things need to be remembered as the war continues, as Israel works to make the region safe. More Jews were killed on October 7, 2023, than at any time since the Holocaust. Meditate on that. The demon of antisemitism is rearing its hellish hate today more than at any point in the lifetimes of people living today. I know more than a few Jewish mothers in tears these days.

We should all be brought to a humility and conviction about eradicating hate in our lives. Others may celebrate evil or work overtime to justify it — we’ve seen it on college campuses, in Congress, and, naturally, on social media. But we are all in control of our responses. You don’t have to pretend that the Israeli government is perfect to understand Israel’s need to protect its people – and to acknowledge that hatred of Jews is alive in our world today and as sickening as it ever has been.

Since the attacks began, I’ve been scrolling, seemingly endlessly, to see the faces of the many who lost their lives — at a music festival, in their homes, as they were working to save the lives of others as first responders. Death is such an intimate reality, and I hesitate to see the evidence of people’s brutalized bodies, though I’ve seen some of that, too. But we must look at the human face — those murdered when they were full of life, because that was what was stolen from them, and that is our common humanity.

It has been said that this attack is Israel’s 9/11. But while America is plenty hated, Israel exists under a perpetual existential threat – because of antisemitism. In the hours and days after the 9/11 attack on the U.S., some of us said, “We are all Israelis now,” acknowledging that that total uncertainty and fear we were experiencing is the very air Israelis breathe, day in and day out.

“We is overcome by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale.” Pope John Paul II said this in 2000 at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. His words feel near today: “How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a Godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people.”

As with the Nazis and, more recently, ISIS, any thought that Hamas’s cause is righteous is the perversion of any kind of truth or concept of God. Woe to those who have the luxury to pretend otherwise, especially in the West. It’s a delusion that spirals into all sorts of justifications for evil.

“Jews and Christians share an immense spiritual patrimony, flowing from God’s self-revelation,” John Paul II said.

Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good. We remember, but not with any desire for vengeance or as an incentive to hatred. For us, to remember is to pray for peace and justice, and to commit ourselves to their cause. Only a world at peace, with justice for all, can avoid repeating the mistakes and terrible crimes of the past.

Never again happens again. It’s not the Holocaust, but it has the same roots. And there is similar brutality and inhumanity, in the suddenness of the attack, but with similar calculation, and history. I’d love to see Christian pilgrimage hotels, now empty, becoming temporary homes to those displaced by the inhumanity of Hamas and the necessary work of the Israel Defense Force. Pray for peace. And pray that we confront and defeat, again, the evil of antisemitism in our communities and around the world.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.