Enough
Sermon Shabbat Naso 5785
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
This is not an easy sermon to give, tonight. It has now been over 600 days since the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas began the Gaza War on October 7, 2023. That means that the remaining 59 Israeli hostages have been held under Gaza, in tunnels and locked in people’s closets, alive or dead, for well over a year and a half. 23 of them are believed to remain alive. That also means that the Gaza Palestinian terrorists have been ghoulishly holding the bodies—the human remains—of dead civilians they kidnapped and murdered for months and months. It is beyond anything civilized people can contemplate doing to anyone, even a sworn enemy. It is horrible and inexcusable.
It is also true that the Israel Defense Forces have been fighting an incredibly difficult war against a terrorist army embedded beneath and within a densely populated urban area. The Palestinian terrorists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have routinely used the Arab civilians of Gaza as human shields, and have located their rocket launchers, ammunition dumps and headquarters in and under hospitals, schools, mosques and apartment complexes. Hamas and its Palestinian allies, as well the Palestinian terrorists’ fellow Iranian proxy terrorists in Yemen and Lebanon and Iran itself have indiscriminately fired rockets and sent drone attacks against civilians in Israel.
The urban warfare Israel was forced to engage in was extremely difficult and costly. About 400 Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting the Palestinian terrorist army that Hamas assembled, with many more wounded and more still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Israel fought this war with all the care with which it could have been fought; far, far fewer Palestinian civilians have been killed in the fighting in Gaza per capita than Iraqi civilians were killed in the Gulf Wars, or in the long war in Afghanistan. Unlike the Syrian Civil War, which is being fought right now, there are no documented massacres of Palestinian civilians by the IDF. The number of Palestinians killed in this war is not really known. Hamas reports that over 50,000 people have died—but Hamas includes in those figures the tens of thousands of terrorist soldiers who have died trying to kill Israelis. It is likely that over 20,000 civilians have died in Gaza. That is a tragedy, as the death of any civilian in war is a tragedy. It is also a shockingly low number for 20 months of war in an intensively occupied urban area of over 2 million people. In contrast, the ongoing war in Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, with no end in sight, while wars in Sudan and the Congo and elsewhere in Africa have killed many hundreds of thousands in the same time period.
Clearly, Israel is taking great pains not to kill Palestinian civilians, even if some Gaza civilians are aiding and abetting the terrorists they support.
Those irresponsible people who call what’s happening in Gaza “genocide” are simply wrong. It is not that at all. It is war, hard and terrible to be caught in the midst of; but it is far from genocide. Genocide is what’s going on in Sudan right now, where militias and armies are murdering entire villages, where rape is a standard weapon of war—which it was for the Gaza Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023, of course, when they employed it freely, along with arson and torture and the murder of babies and families and the elderly. Genocide is not what has been going on in Gaza at all. A war forced on Israel by Palestinian terrorists has resulted in the destruction of most of those terrorists, and of course the physical destruction of many buildings, including many underground tunnels used to attack Israel and to hide underneath the civilian population.
The Gaza War has been, tactically speaking, highly successful in destroying most of Hamas’ military capacity, undermining its control of Gaza to some extent, and wiping out its leadership. It has not annihilated Hamas, or turned the Gaza Palestinians into pacifists or supporters of anyone other than Hamas. The cost to Israel has been high, both in human and material terms, and much higher to the Hamas terrorists. It has also been very high indeed in public relations for Israel, because the Qatari-funded anti-Israel propaganda machine was ready to trash Israel from October 7th on. But Israel had to fight this war, and it has done so about as well as it could have.
Having said all of that, as I have said it before, it is unclear just what the point of the new Israeli Defense Forces operations in Gaza are now. It does seem clear that the best way to free the remaining hostages, alive or dead, is to negotiate through intermediaries with the terrorists. The facts speak for themselves. More than 250 hostages were taken by the Gaza Palestinians of Hamas on October 7th. 148 have been released alive. All but 8 of those were released through negotiations, or by Hamas. 8—a total of 8—have been rescued by IDF soldiers alive. The Israeli army has acknowledged accidentally killing three hostages who were trying to escape. A careful operation last week managed to recover the bodies of two more civilians murdered October 7, 2023. It did not recover any living hostages.
If a central goal of this war has been to rescue the hostages alive, to perform pidyon shevuyim, the central mitzvah of saving imprisoned Jews, well, occupying more and more of Gaza is not likely to accomplish that, now is it? And undoubtedly more Israeli soldiers will die fighting the remaining Gaza Hamas Palestinian terrorists, as some died this week, including four today in a booby-trapped building.
If the goal of this war is not to free the remaining hostages, that is, to simply let them die, well, the Israeli public does not at all agree with that, nor do I. About 75% of Israelis see freeing the hostages as more important than trying to continue to destroy what is left of Hamas conclusively, or seizing control of Gaza. Israel controlled Gaza for nearly forty years before it withdrew completely in 2005, on the initiative of its Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, Bibi Netanyahu’s political mentor. If the goal of this renewed Gaza military initiative is to keep Prime Minister Netanyahu in power, well, that is far from a noble goal, or a desirable one.
I have firmly supported Israel’s mission in this Gaza War ever since October 7, 2023. I do not think I can support the current choices being made to continue the war to the bitterest of ends, without any stated goal of freeing the hostages or seeking a conclusion that might bring the glimmer of a hope for peace.
As a committed Zionist, this is a hard choice to make. We shall see if any intelligent effort is made to free the remaining hostages from their brutal confinement at the hands of the Palestinian terrorists. We shall see if Israel comes up with a new strategy that makes more sense than this. But right now, it looks like war for war’s sake, without any hope of achieving objectives that lead to positive results, with more casualties and further endangering the lives of the hostages.
This isn’t good. For anyone.
Our Torah portion includes the Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing, highest of all blessings in Jewish tradition. Its third part includes the greatest of these, yisa Adonai panav Eilecha v’yaseim l’cha Shalom—May God turn towards you and give you peace. May the choices that Israel’s leadership make now turn in the direction of peace, speedily and soon.