Do We Really Get The Sheer Scale Of Brutality And Barbarity Unleashed By Hamas Terrorists On Israel?

It has been hard to find words for the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, especially on children. 

The usual suspects trying to equivocate and contextualize terrorism have faced more than usual condemnation, perhaps even consequences. This is partly, and rightly, due to images conveying the sheer barbarity of Hamas’s terrorism. 

What is less appreciated is the sheer enormity of Hamas’s terrorism.

At the end of Satanic Saturday, Israel said it had found bodies of 1500 Hamas terrorists on its territory, killed to bring their terror to an end. 

To put this number in perspective, India has killed an average of 150 terrorists per year in Kashmir over the past decade or so. 

Ten years of terror in the worst-affected state in India was inflicted in a single day on a country with less than half the population of a large city. The enormity of this boggles the mind. This wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was a terrorist army invasion of unimaginable proportions.

Comparisons to 9/11 or 26/11 have been made but don’t come close to conveying the scale of Satanic Saturday. 

On 26/11, Mumbai was attacked by ten terrorists and witnessed gruesome scenes at two hotels and one railway station. Israel was attacked by over 2000, perhaps 3000, terrorists.

Reimagine 26/11 with equally gruesome terror simultaneously unfolding at every railway station and every hotel in Mumbai. Casualties would have been in the tens of thousands, not hundreds.

Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism. Terrorism is perhaps their leading export industry. A country of over 200 million that pushes a few hundred terrorists each year into India has rightly earned the terror tag.

Now, how should we view a land of 2 million that pushed a few thousand terrorists into Israel on a single day? How disproportionate might its terror infrastructure be compared to Pakistan, which is already a notorious history-sheeter on this front? A hundred times worse than Pakistan? A thousand? Ten thousand?

Humans think in relative terms. We make sense of what happens by subconsciously comparing it against what we are familiar with. While this works most of the time, it fails us in outlier events for which there is no reference set. 

The above paragraphs are an imperfect attempt to frame what just happened in terms of what we were familiar with before.

We also struggle to comprehend what we have not directly truly experienced. 

Contrary to all the moral preening and virtue signalling we do to convey empathy, humans are not very good at putting ourselves in others’ shoes. We do not naturally relate to what only others have been through. We do not always grasp the significance of what our own sub-group (country, region, denomination) has not witnessed within living memory.

We are unable to place what is unprecedented into the proper perspective. We cannot even reliably describe it. We may realize it was way more than a terrorist attack without fully appreciating how much more. Our mental references and language fail us.

Even calling it a terrorist army invasion doesn’t do justice since the scale and weaponry of a modern army were unaccompanied by the qualms and morals of the same.

Everyone in Israel realizes the enormity of Satanic Saturday as they have lived through it. Gauging from some tone-deaf reactions, it is unclear if others at a distance do. Instead of contextualizing via excuses for what was done, it may be better to contextualize by framing the enormity of what was done. Without that, we cannot understand what happened, let alone what is to follow.

What if a decade of Kashmir terror was inflicted on India in a single day? What if a few hundred 26/11 attacks simultaneously unfolded in one of our cities? How would we feel? How would we react?