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Reuven Spero's avatar

I study and teach history, and specifically Jewish history. I have read accounts of slaughters, from Crusade to Chmielnicki to Hevron. A good Enlightenment Jew, I believe in progress, both technological and human, yet I know that a mere dozen years before my birth, Jews were still be slaughtered in a way that reflected technological perfection, of a type. My shocking revelation on October 7 is how ideologically unprepared I was for the brutality, joyous brutality of the slaughter. And the joyous brutality of those of the enlightened West who supported the slaughter.

To put it in your paradigm: we are confronted with people who simply have no abyss. There is nothing inside of them that is reflected by a mirror of humanity. I’m not saying they are not human. What I am saying is that I am shocked at myself for thinking, for believing with no supporting evidence, that humans like this could not actually exist in our day. Can one say another human being is soulless without losing one’s own soul? I think the answer to that is yes - and I believe that is a foundational idea of the Jewish people.

The issue then becomes how one does battle against the soulless. The American government seems to believe that they should be rewarded with a state. Kick the problem down the hill for a few years until the next slaughter and reprisal, some more dead Jews at the hands of the soulless ones, and some of them and their children will die too.

The strategy of Hamas is called Mukamawa. It means long-term low scale asymmetric warfare aimed at the moral attrition of one’s enemy. It is the “M” of the acronym of the organization called Hamas. Every time an episode like this erupts, we deal with it, but the cost over time will eventually undermine our country. I don’t know if that could happen, nor do I know if our country could survive the kind of steps that would need to be taken to distance this threat from our borders, even that led to a better life for both sides.

But we have to look and we have to see. We have to see, as you said, the cost of taking up arms to fight against this expression of inhumanity, a fight we neither asked for nor desire, but one from which we are adjured to press. We have to see that suffering Palestinian child and know she is suffering because her leaders see her more precious as dead rather than alive. And we can’t let that image stop us, weaken us, from fighting this war relentlessly, without quarter, because that is the only response I can reasonably take when I see the images of the butchered, maimed, slaughtered, and burnt of October 7. When I think of the hostages still held by the soulless.

It has nothing to do with the numbers. I don’t know why you left the path of talking about morality in our day and turned to numbers. We need clear moral sight much more than we need a scorecard. Proportionality says nothing about the rights and wrongs of a conflict, and we have to be clear-minded and (yes) responsible enough to be able to talk about rights and wrongs. Clear-minded and (yes) responsible enough to confront the relativism of the post-modernists and the false god of the victim narrative and the purportedly oppressed. If we can’t do that or are afraid to do that, we are lost.

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Reuven Spero's avatar

And also keep in one's mind the images of beheaded Israeli babies, bodies burnt beyond recognition, women gang-raped, murdered and mutilated - and realize that Israel is fighting for them as well as for - not against - that suffering child in Gaza. It is easy to be seduced by power, by ideology, by the evil of one's enemies. Not all Israeli or Israeli soldiers are immune to such seduction, but over time we do see that the Israeli army as an institution adopts policies to restrain the beast within, and the soldiers who lose themselves inside the abyss are rare. One policy aimed at restraining the beast is to make sure that Israeli soldiers get home to the civilizing influence of their families and communities, sometimes just for a day or a shabbat. While I always thought that the wrenching shift from war to warmth to war again might result in numerous AWOL soldiers, in fact it motivates while also renewing belief in things that are good and warm. I am wary of the trust in power that our army seems to embrace, I think the army and government has shown that we remain faithful to the values that make Israel a Jewish state, while our enemies have shown that our acquisition and use of power is unfortunate, but justified.

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