A week ago Saturday, Jews began a new cycle of reading the Torah, the Jewish Bible, beginning with the portion of Genesis, thus continuing the thousands-year-old public practice. Genesis recounts the dawn of creation, when God created light and darkness, calling light good and separating day from night.
The Jewish people – indeed, all of humanity– sit today at the epicenter of a war of civilizations. The fight between good and evil, light and darkness, could not be starker or more existential. The question for the world – not just for nations, but for each individual human being – is: On which side of history do you stand? Will you be a partner in breathing life and kindness into humanity, or will you be a helpmate to the forces of evil and barbarism? Will you help us fight the world’s ills, or will you work to drag all of humanity back to the Stone Age? Will you applaud, apologize for, or defend barbarity, or will you take a stand against it.
On October 7, Jews in Israel celebrated the festival of Simchat Torah, commemorating the completion of the Torah cycle and immediately beginning it anew. On October 7th, the enemies of humanity raised their ugly, vicious heads in the most heinous ways imaginable.
Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, murdered over 1,300 Jews in Israel, almost all of them civilians, in the most vile and barbaric manner. Not since the days of the Holocaust have so many Jews been murdered on a single day. They burned and executed Jewish babies. They decapitated Jewish people. They raped Jewish women and paraded their half-naked bodies around to the cheers and jeers of their fellow barbarians. They murdered young Jews attending a music festival. Parents were forced to watch the murder of their children, and children were forced to endure the torture and murder of their parents. They dragged over 200 people into captivity, reminiscent of when Jews were dragged into captivity in prior centuries, including by the Babylonians.
Hamas is a cruel, inhumane Islamic fundamentalist terror group that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2006 and, for many years, has attacked Israel and subjugated Palestinians who live in Gaza. Hamas’s founding charter rejects the existence of Israel and calls upon Muslims to engage in jihad, holy war, to eradicate the Jewish state and the Jews within it. Hamas’s partner in crime is Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Both of these miserable groups, numbering in the tens of thousands, are supported, trained, and, generally speaking, largely controlled by the Iranian regime. They are part of the family of merciless, cruel savages that includes Hezbollah, Houthis, ISIS, and others – all of whom are enemies of Israel, the United States, and many of its friends and allies, including many of Israel’s Arab neighbors.
But not even Hamas’s prior terror attacks against Israel could prepare the world for its latest actions. In a sophisticated, coordinated attack, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli communities and engaged in the worst forms of depravity. The barbarism and utter inhumanity were indescribable, shaking people of good conscience and morality to the core.
Hamas's genocidal barbarism: The side of darkness and evil
The genocidal behavior of Hamas was eerily similar to the brutality carried out over 2,000 years ago by the Romans, who sought to destroy Jewish life in the Land of Israel during the times of the Jewish Temple. Just as the Romans sought to extinguish Jewish life in the Land of Israel, Hamas’s charter, its raison d’etre, is to do the same.
The world is at an inflection point. We do not have the luxury to remain morally complacent or indifferent to this inhumanity. Hamas and its supporters, the other terror groups, and the Iranian regime stand firmly on the side of darkness and evil. Hamas must be uprooted and eradicated along with those who support and extol their barbaric aims.
In the aftermath of the carnage in Israel, the worst elements of civil society now seek to justify and rationalize the brutality. For example, students on some of America’s most prominent university campuses, including Harvard University, issued letters of support for Hamas, blaming Israel for the carnage. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, an organization whose founding charter calls for the eradication of Zionism and the Jewish State, praised Hamas. Just this past week, there were reports of an over-300% increase in antisemitic incidents towards Jews inside Great Britain. In Sydney, Australia, there was a very large crowd enthusiastically chanting “burn the Jews.”
When asked on Capitol Hill this week as to whether she had any comment regarding the beheading and burning alive of Jewish children by Hamas, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan was silent, refusing repeatedly to condemn the barbarism.
When Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC questioned former Palestinian Liberation Organization spokesperson Diana Buttu about the murder, rape, decapitation, and mutilation of Jews by Hamas, Buttu countered that Mitchell was not putting the issue “in the right political context.” Pressed further, she said, “I’m not the one doing it, so it shouldn’t be me to comment on it.” Is she in lockstep with the agenda of Hamas or grotesquely sympathetic to it?
Israel and the Jewish people are at war with the forces of barbarism, the Nazis of our time, and with those who sponsor and extol their efforts. There can be no proportionate response to such evil, no accommodation for genocidal movements. Victory must be assured for the benefit of Israel, most of its Arab neighbors, and much of the world.
The question remains: On which side of the arc of history does humanity stand?
The writer was the White House Middle East envoy in the Trump administration. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book In the Path of Abraham, and director of Arab-Israel diplomacy for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Follow him on X @GreenblattJD.