LETTER: There is no symmetry in Hamas attack

Last Saturday morning, October 7, Hamas launched a planned attack on the Israeli population, infiltrating Israeli villages and towns and breaking into family houses.

Children were killed in front of their parents; entire families were executed. Hamas planned and executed the murder of civilians, particularly women, children and the elderly, with no military objective. The terrorists from Gaza did not try to conquer the towns — they came to slaughter their Jewish inhabitants.

Purposefully killing civilians is a war crime. Using rape as a weapon is a war crime. Mass murder of civilians at their homes is a war crime. There is no nuance to be discussed: babies should never be beheaded in their beds. Women should never be kidnapped and raped.

What we saw on October 7 was a well-planned, intentional and horrific slaughter performed by a specific organisation named Hamas. Any talk about “escalation of violence”, “atrocities on both sides” or “horrific events in the Middle East” conceals this truth, falsely presenting it as something that is happening on both sides, and implying (or explicitly claiming) that Israel had a part in this slaughter.

Naturally, it is impossible to separate what happened from its historical and political context. The call to bridge conflicting worldviews and values is also important. At the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict of values, beliefs and narratives, which must be discussed openly and attentively if we want a good common future for both peoples. In this moment when we are all bleeding and hurting it is hard to even imagine doing that.

If you wish to take the side of valuing human life the first step would be straightforwardly condemning the terror organisation that has been devaluing human life for decades and that enacted these horrific acts of terror. The murder, decapitation, rape and kidnapping of so many innocent children, women, elderly and other civilians had a clear perpetrator — Hamas, an Isis-like organisation. Bending over backwards to “see both sides” in the face of the October 7 atrocities is not an admirable neutrality — it is taking a side.

Life is complicated, but false balance is simplistic and wrong, just like taking a pure heroes/villains perspective. There is no reason to create symmetry when faced with a massacre of hundreds of youngsters dancing at a music festival. In the words of the author David Grossman: “There is also a ‘ranking’ in the hierarchy of evil. There are degrees of severity of evil that common sense and natural sense know how to recognise.”

Moral clarity is rare in life. It is especially rare in a 100-year-old conflict between two nationalities and religions fighting over the same 22,000km² of land (by comparison, SA covers more than 1.2-million square kilometres). What is clear is that here was a murderous and unforgivable terrorist attack by Hamas on the residents of Israel, in which hundreds of families and innocent people were murdered in cold blood and thousands were injured.

Any discussion of the situation should first condemn this in a loud and clear voice. Squirming discomfort in speaking explicitly about what happened, or careful ambiguity about what happened on October 7 and who did it, is morally dangerous. As the Harvard university faculty stated in an open letter, one should first reject “any support of terrorism or false equivalences between the targeted killing of civilians and collective self-defence. Only after terrorism is rejected can dialogue on the best path forward begin.” 

Prof Ayelet Baram-Tsabari
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

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