After 7 October, Confronted With Hamas's 'Pure Evil', Israelis Rethink Premises

When the brutality unleashed by Hamas terrorists reached Israeli eyes and ears on social media, one initial response was collective shock, which has yet to dissipate.

Some of the most graphic material recorded on the body cameras of dead terrorists was privately aired by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 24 October.

It was aired before an audience of foreign journalists in a 43-minute raw video segment which was so shocking that many could not sit through it till the end.

The acknowledgement that Hamas is capable of “unleashing pure, unadulterated evil”, as US President Joe Biden stated in his 18 October speech, has sent many Israeli intellectuals and strategic thinkers back to reformulating their stances.

The men quoted below are not merely widely read columnists or TV celebrities. They are influential not only among the rank-and-file constituents of their sociological base, but have been advising prime ministers and generals, high bureaucracy, and policy makers, on multiple sides of Israel political divides, and internationally. Some have connections in India.

A Discussion About Palestinian Culture

The most common theme reflected upon is the moral depravity of Hamas.

A discussion is underway on whether this is the culture of Palestinian society, or as President Biden insists, “Hamas does not represent Palestinian people.”

Dr Ran Baratz, a former Netanyahu advisor, commented on the glorification of Hamas atrocities on Gaza streets and on Palestinian social media, and said: “We have no language to explain what happened on October 7....In the West, anyone voicing his will to do these things would be immediately sent to a psychiatrist, who would be dumbfounded. If a soldier in the IDF would attempt these atrocities, his comrades would shoot him… But what is beyond the fringes of our society is a central tenet of theirs… a badge of honour. They are not only beyond our conceptual border, but right beyond our geographical border, a monstrous entity we and the West can’t understand.”

Dr Micha Goodman is a liberal philosopher and best-selling author of Catch-’67: The Left, The Right and the Legacy of the Six-Day War. His book concluded that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intractable, but manageable, so that mutual damage can be minimised.

He founded the Ein Prat Academy for Leadership and is a close advisor to former prime ministers, Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, and top military brass.

In a talk given on 18 October, he lamented: “I misunderstood reality. I had read the Hamas Charter many times, and I saw it was a Nazi ideology, but I convinced myself that they were not Nazis, but people like us. This is an incoherent stance, but I was convinced that compassion is a human universal, and that they would choose their life over our death. This was the mother of all misconceptions, and it collapsed on October 7… We are no longer the same people, nor the same society, after October 7. I will not defend any of my prior opinions. We are in unchartered territory, and I’m re-examining everything.”

Professor Dan Shueftan is the director of The National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. He is noted even among friends for being outspoken, but nonetheless has been serving for decades as a senior security policy advisor to a wide variety of policymakers in Israel and in Europe.

In an interview on a popular Hebrew podcast, he laid bare threads currently under collective rethinking, and suggested his conclusions:

“It was not only operative intelligence that failed, but the entire paradigm of most of the military, intelligence community, and political leadership. They believed that Hamas were enemies, but people like us, who prioritise a high living standard. We gave them electricity, water, Qatari money. (Some) 20,000 Gazans entered daily to work in Israel, and if they didn’t attack us, that was proof that it worked. When I tried to counter these assumptions, I was called a racist not only in academia, but in the intelligence community. They refused to admit who our enemies are.”

Shueftan continued: “…They are still fantasising about bringing the Palestinian Authority (PA) to rule Gaza. The PA exists only with IDF backing and has no popular support in the West Bank. Hamas has the popular support. These are not two camps of good and bad Palestinians… It’s the same barbaric culture that glorifies murderers and teaches about them in summer camps for 13-year-olds in the West Bank… and throughout the PA education system.”

“This has nothing to do with Arab genetics. I just returned from UAE, and I was profoundly impressed with their vision of tolerance… As to the Palestinians, I want nothing to do with them. October 7 has sealed the tombstone over the grave of the two-state solution… Our great-grandchildren will fight in Gaza”.

Dr Itamar Marcus leads the Palestian Media Watch Center. After he displayed his research on the murderous content in the PA education system and mass media in Western parliaments over the years, multiple Western governments terminated their funding.

He points out that most Hamas terrorists grow up learning the PA curriculum and transition to Hamas to fulfill these values.

He highlights that PA will pay at least $2.8 million monthly to families of the 1,500 dead Hamas terrorists from the 7 October attacks. Its reward scheme for Palestinian “martyrs”, which he dubbed “Pay-for-Slay”, does not distinguish between the political denominations of the attackers of Israelis.

Theology Of Evil

Thinkers of every persuasion talked about confronting “pure, unadulterated evil” after the Holocaust. The new-founded shock is that this evil did not die with Hitler.

Rabbi Dr Benny Kalmanzon, a historian of the Holocaust who lost his son, Elchanan, in the battle at Be’eri, insists that Hamas atrocities were crueler than Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads.

But the theme of pure evil resonates back to Talmudic and Biblical texts discussing the mortal enemy of Israel, the tribe of Amalek. By biblical dictate (1 Samuel, 15,3), Israel is to annihilate Amalek to the last man, a theme excoriated as genocide by modern-day liberals in Israel.

While rabbis stress that killing the Palestinians to the last man is not condoned by Jewish law, the discussion of Amalek now resonates widely. Leading intellectual Rabbi Ouri Cherki stressed that a relentless battle against absolute evil highlights Israel’s morality, as the nation that ideologically refuses to allow such evil to exist.

But others, such as global intellectual Dr Yuval Noah Harari, a leading voice on the young Israeli radical Left, will have none of it.

In his interviews to Western media, he insists on universal, secular humanist terminology. He too views Hamas as “absolute” — demanding “absolute justice at all costs” — and therefore abhorring peace and compromise.

But in the same category he places deeply religious Israelis and his erstwhile contemporaries in radical Left academic circles who came out supporting Hamas.

To Harari, all religions are equally false and destructive, threatening to “destroy our faith in humanity”. But his religious critics point out that Jihadists are uniquely obsessed with Jews.

If Harari dismisses faith, he will never comprehend the enemy, nor envision the spiritual counterattack.