The first images I saw were those of the massacre at the Nova Music Festival. The massacres had evidently received orders to bring their bodycams and to put everything online immediately. My first thought was: “God you must have loved the Bataclan! You also managed to overcome the Islamic State. You caused many more deaths and at least there were no rapes at the Bataclan. Then your terror engineers – people who have studied how anguish and fear is distributed among civilians – also made you take back and send the barbarity into the world’s vision.”
The massacres of October 7 were motivated by the intention to kill as many defenseless civilians as possible. At the Nova Music Festival there were young people drinking and smoking, girls in skimpy clothes, people who were there hoping to find a boyfriend or girlfriend or even just to get laid. At the Nova Music Festival there were kids having fun like all kids in the West have fun: all this had to be barbarously destroyed and shown to the world. I was there at the Nova Music Festival, that is, the boy that I was. You had already killed me at the Bataclan, and now you were killing me again. But you also killed the commuter that I was; you killed me on the London Underground or on Spanish trains. You killed me while I was watching the objects shining on the Christmas market stalls, while I was walking in Nice, while I was listening to a concert in a Moscow theater, While I was at home in Israel next to my newborn son.
I would like people to focus on the intention behind the Islamic State and Hamas. “Intention” is important. The intention – which translates into a method – is decisive: if the states that emerged victorious from the Second World War had had the same “intention” that animated the Nazis, then Germany in 1946 would have been transformed into a gigantic concentration camp where a workforce as a malnourished slave, she would have worked to produce the wealth in the factories to be distributed to the victorious peoples. But, to the honor of the winners, this did not happen. If Israel were animated by the same “intention” as Hamas, today the civilians killed in the Strip would be 500,000, not the approximately twenty thousand that we unfortunately count.
Wars are part of human history and always bring with them collateral victims, and are always a gigantic collective punishment, for the vanquished but also for the winners. Another thing, however, is the rise of a force whose substantial method is to kill a lot, kill indiscriminately, kill ordinary people, kill as many as possible. When such a method comes into action, the motives, the ideals, the rights and wrongs, the historical evolution no longer matter; it doesn’t matter what flags the perpetrators of this horror wave, it doesn’t matter if they wear a tie or a turban, nor does it matter their race, religion, history and geography. On October 7th I ideally threw out the window all the books that talk about these things and around whose concepts I have been scratching my fleas for years. Those who use the massacres of civilians as an intentional and premeditated method must be put in a position not to cause harm as quickly as possible. The “intelligent analyses” should be reserved for something else, for these people there is no need to rack their brains over books, a single ancient phrase is enough: “If someone comes to kill you, get up and kill him first”. Sorry, but stark reality must be looked in the face at least every now and then. It happened to me on October 7th.
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