There are two justifications for a severe response by Israel to the recent invasion and massacres of Hamas, each itself sufficient, morally and strategically.
The first is the double legitimacy of Israel: It is the senior continuously resident people of the Levant and of what is generally known in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds as “the Holy Land.” There is certainly room for legitimate discussion of what the final borders of the Jewish state should be, but there has been a Jewish population there for 57 centuries, and in this time of 200 recognized sovereign states in the world, it is preposterous that a Jewish state would not exist in the place where the Jews have always lived, a region in which their seniority is rivalled only by that of Egypt (the nature of whose population has radically changed since the days of the pharaohs).
The second part of this double legitimacy of a constant Jewish presence was a response to the British promise in 1917 on behalf of the Allied powers and the future League of Nations of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, albeit one that would respect the rights of the local Arabs. In 1948, the nations of the world created Israel as a Jewish state. This was the decision of the United Nations, successor to the League of Nations as holder of the mandate for the area, and of all five of the permanent security council members and principal victorious powers in the Second World War: the United States, United Kingdom, USSR, China, and France.
The legal and moral foundations of Israel are further strengthened by the fact that all those in the international community who participated in the founding and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state explicitly recognized that the absence of a Jewish homeland had contributed to the unspeakable and genocidal murder of more than half the Jewish population of the world by the government of Germany and its satraps in the previous decade (Germany an apparently civilized country that had long been relatively accommodating of Jews).
The second justification for a severe act of vengeance is the premeditated barbarism of the Hamas invasion of Israel and torture and massacre of Israelis, including without any distinction in the treatment of Israeli soldiers and civilians, children and babies, women, and the elderly. The conduct of Hamas is in no sense morally superior or significantly different to that of Nazi Germany, either in its persecution of the Jews and other perceived enemies or its treatment of Russian prisoners of war and civilians in the Russo-German war of 1941–1945. It appears also to have been even more barbarous, though again, obviously on a much smaller numerical scale, than the most heinous crimes of the Japanese in China between 1933 and 1945.
Hamas has thus aligned itself with the perpetrators of the greatest war crimes in the entire history of the world. It is possible to find comparable outrages in the medieval and the ancient world but those were unenlightened civilizations, and unlike Hamas, it could not be said of them, as Mr. Churchill said of the Nazis: “The long night of Nazi barbarism is made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science.” Whatever anyone may think of where the borders of Israel should be, and even a civilized person deluded with the untenable notion that there should not be a Jewish state of Israel, the utilization by Hamas of sophisticated weaponry and techniques to detain, torture, and murder is a crime of unmitigated evil.
As everyone has agreed, the Hamas assault was an extremely well-planned and executed military operation. They managed to paraglide behind and then subdue the Israeli guard-posts near points on the border through which they then swarmed, led by bulldozers.
Film and well-corroborated accounts confirm the hideous barbarity of the Hamas incursions. But there is also evidence, some of it provided by an Israeli diplomat formally accredited to and well-respected in Canada, that the Israeli government is withholding some of the more gruesome details of Hamas monstrosities in deference to the families of some victims, especially young women in the Israeli Defense Forces who were killed in the Hamas attacks.
This type of information must be received with caution because it has not been substantiated or advanced by people who are prepared to make their names public, but I can say that the sources are of impeccable credibility on their past record and what is recounted is entirely believable on the basis of the indisputable playbook of Hamas generally, and certainly last week. With these caveats, an IDF doctor recounts that he was asked to provide an autopsy for 24 young women in the IDF who were the garrison in an observation base near the Gaza border and were overwhelmed by infiltrating forces and subdued. The doctor reported that many, if not all 24, had been raped, and had their hips and legs broken, and their eyes gouged out, and then were killed by gunfire discharged into their vaginas.
It is as distasteful to me as to the reader to record and contemplate such horrors, but this account is firmly attested to, albeit by someone who wishes not to be identified because he is violating his orders as a military doctor. These allegations demonstrate that the purpose of Hamas was not just to startle Israel and disconcert it with evidence of the vulnerability of its borders, or even to take some hostages and kill over 1,000 Israelis, but to engage in the ultimate excesses of personalized terror.
There is no question that outrages similar to this occurred and there is no good reason to doubt that the revolting description just recounted is true, and all such acts have only one possible purpose: to terrorize and disgust the population of Israel. It is to avoid furthering those ends that the Israeli government and high command are apparently withholding some of the more gruesome accounts of the horrible crimes of Hamas.
As a founding member of the United Nations, Canada was a co-founder of the State of Israel, following logically upon its status as one of the liberating Allied powers of Western Europe. Under governments of both principal Canadian political parties, Canada has been a reliable ally of Israel throughout its history both officially, and because of the great contributions to Israel of the Canadian private sector, particularly the large and distinguished Canadian Jewish community, in the private sector as well.
One of the most outstanding addresses ever given by a Canadian prime minister was Stephen Harper’s to the Israeli Knesset on Jan. 20, 2014, which he concluded by saying that Canada would stand with Israel “through fire and water.” This is a time when that promise should be reaffirmed tangibly and with no equivocation.
