Justice, then Peace in Israel

Sermon on Solidarity Shabbat with Israel, Shabbat Breisheet 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

This is a tough time for Jews everywhere, as it is a brutal time for Israel and Israelis, and for all who care about Israel and Jews, and, frankly, for all civilization. The horrific war crimes perpetrated last week by Hamas, the evil terrorist group that brings shame to the world, shocked and horrified everyone on this earth who has a conscience and the ability to tell right from wrong.  You have likely seen images, stories and videos documenting the brutality and evil of the civilian slaughter perpetrated by Hamas, and the Palestinian terrorist-posted social media showing their terrorists murdering children and the elderly, killing children in front of their parents and then murdering the parents, then using the parents’ cellphones to send videos of the atrocity to their family.  I’m sorry to speak about this at shul, but it happened less than a week ago to Jews: beheadings, children slaughtered, people burned alive.  This is pure evil.

There is no conceivable moral justification for these actions.  This is not warfare: it is war crimes, literally crimes against humanity, an attack on all civilization.  The people—and I use that word with regret—who did this are beyond redemption.  They must be brought to justice. 

The deliberate targeting of civilians to abduct—kidnap—them and take them into a chaotic captivity in the hellholes of Gaza, to rape and torture and commit murder are beyond anything related to any conceivable effort to quote-unquote-liberate anything.  These Palestinian terrorists took 3- and 5-year-old children, Holocaust survivors, and of course young women deliberately in order to threaten to do unspeakable things to them, to use them as human shields—isn’t that a horrible phrase—and of course to try to protect themselves from justice for their war crimes.  And some they murdered, and then dragged their naked bodies through the streets of Gaza as crowds shouted “Allahu Akhbar, God is great” and recorded and posted the atrocities on social media.

This was the worst pogrom since the Nazis, and as details of the heartrending slaughter continue to emerge, it is inevitable that Hamas will reap the whirlwind that it so thoroughly deserves.  Our prayers and thoughts are with the families of the murdered Israelis, Americans and other nation’s children who were brutally massacred, with the more than three thousand wounded in hospitals now in Israel, with the desperate families and friends of the 150 or more people stolen from their lives by these evil terrorists.

Let’s talk politics for a moment: My friends, Gaza has not been “occupied territory” for 18 years.  Israel pulled out under then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005—2005!—and has provided electricity and water and sewage control and what little productive economic activity exists in that strip of land with 2 million people for nearly two decades.  In exchange, the evil—and that word has never been more applicable than it is today—dictators of Hamas, who mostly live in rich settings in Arab capitals far from Gaza, have focused all that Iranian money and Qatarian money on murdering Jews.  And those innocent people of Gaza?  Hamas was elected to lead them by the people of Gaza in 2006, before making itself the religious Islamist dictators of the place and never again holding elections.  Perhaps these are the same innocent people that show up on the Hamas videos cheering while bloody, naked corpses of women are dragged through their streets? 

Remember, too, that Hamas would be elected to power in the West Bank if the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction had not suspended all elections since 2005. The Hamas charter calls for the total destruction of the State of Israel, and for killing Jews everywhere in the world; that is, this is not only a terrorist organization, but a profoundly anti-Semitic one dedicated to perpetrating genocide.

There is no proper response to this but unqualified condemnation of Hamas, and of any leaders in the world, including our own leaders, who do not join in that condemnation.  While much of the shocked world mourned with Israel, it’s notable who did not: the monster, Vladimir Putin; the mullahs of Iran, who paid for this brutality, provided the weapons that perpetrated it, and likely trained and organized the mass murderers; some Arab dictators—their leaders are pretty much all dictators, aren’t they?—including those working to improve relations with Israel; and of course, here at home, the morally empty Rashida Tlaib, until threatened with censure, and Harvard University’s president, who apparently can’t tell right from wrong; neither can the college student organizations around the US who “justify” Hamas atrocities.  There is never a justification for murdering babies and burning their bodies.  Never.  Never.  How dare they pretend that there can be?

My friends, we pray for peace in every Jewish religious service, multiple times.  But in order for there to be peace, there must first be justice.  Hamas and its terrorist sponsors and organizers must be brought to justice for their horrific, abominable crimes.  Only then can there be peace. 

This will be a very difficult war, and there is no other way it can be.  Israeli troops will have a hard fight, and there will be more casualties as they seek to remove Hamas from its nests and burrows and booby-trapped hideaways.  There will be no way to shield the civilians of Gaza from it.  Indeed, Hamas is using them to hide behind, as they will use the captive hostages to hide behind. 

Our role will be to continue to support Israel and to be vocal about it, as the enemies of civilization will be vocal in attacking Israel for the humanitarian destruction that Hamas has brought on.  It is important that we remember this and maintain our focus on restoring justice, and ending the possibility that such evil can again run free in a civilized nation.

I have long noted that the people who end up suffering the worst from the Palestinian people’s obsession with terrorism are the Palestinians themselves.  This week that wasn’t true; but I’m quite sure that it will soon again be.  Israel has been left with no choice but to destroy this evil that pretends to represent religion.  It is a great tragedy; a great tragedy.  And it must be done.

There are some stories that are hopeful, and it is these that we must remember.  Israelis have come together as one with astonishing speed.  And they are a unique people.

I read a report from a journalist who was trapped by Hamas in a safe room on a kibbutz near Gaza with his wife and two young daughters, 1 and 2 years old they had no water or food or electricity, but before the battery on his cellphone ran out he managed to call his father, a 62 year old retired general of the IDF.  His father and mother drove down in their ordinary car.  At one point his father, with nothing but a pistol, joined a fire fight assisting soldiers fighting terrorists who had ambushed them.  After killing the terrorists, his father and mother separated, and his mother drove two Israeli soldiers wounded in that fight to hospital, while his father found a 73 year- old retired officer who had a car, and the two of them drove to the kibbutz, now armed with the weapons given them by the wounded soldiers.  There they joined a special forces unit clearing terrorists out of the Kibbutz and saving those residents who were still alive and trapped.

At the end of the day they reached the journalist and his wife and children, and liberated them.

That’s a 62 year-old retired officer and a 73 year-old retired officer fighting gunbattles and saving Israelis from terrorists.

Hamas will never defeat or destroy this Jewish State.  It is unified by these horrors as it has not been unified in quite a while.  There will be a time, after the war, to assess what went so terribly wrong and why.  But now is the time to unite, to support Israel, to help others understand its centrality in our world, and to pray for its success.  For it must triumph now, for the good of the entire world.

It was in this week’s Torah portion of Breisheet, Genesis, that we human beings first learned to differentiate good from evil.  It is a shame that the world needs to relearn this so often, in every generation.