In just a few months, two years will have passed since that cursed, unfathomable day – October 7, 2023 – the day humanity’s moral boundaries were shattered, once again. Soulless militants bred by Hamas stormed into Israeli territory and carried out a massacre that will forever be remembered. Babies were burned alive. Women were raped in front of their families. Parents were murdered before their children’s eyes. Children were herded like livestock to their deaths. If hell exists, it was there, in the Gaza border communities, in the formerly peaceful and tranquil fields and towns.
A nation devoted to justice and peace has been pitted against an ideological death cult whose objective is the annihilation of the State of Israel.
Hamas is an organization that glorifies death, weaponizes the slaughter of its own children, and sanctifies martyrdom, despising life. Hamas operatives are not “fighters,” “militants,” or “activists.” They are barbarians who misuse the Internet to spread hate and terror (even uploading videos of their atrocities for propaganda purposes), as they continue to keep the hostages they brutally kidnapped from Israel in inhumane conditions inside Gaza.
Do not believe those who tell you this is a conflict over land.
It is a war between good and evil.
Israel is not fighting the Palestinian people. It is fighting Hamas – an Islamist, radical, unyielding satanic faction that sabotages every opportunity for peace; has branded the Oslo Accords “a betrayal”; slaughters children; murders partygoers, and torments the elderly with unspeakable cruelty.
Revenge is the only justice
Revenge is the answer for those who believe they can rape, torture, butcher, and then sleep peacefully at night. Revenge is not just primal. It is moral. It is a necessary response to the absence of morality.
In such cases, enacting revenge goes further than punishment. It is blood vengeance on behalf of the murdered – a historic responsibility. Not just for the fallen, but for the people of Israel, to ensure that such horror is never repeated.
Just as the State of Israel relentlessly pursued Nazi war criminals, so too must it hunt down every single Hamas terrorist. Every man who took part in the massacre, who breached the fence, kidnapped children, trampled women, executed the elderly, raped young girls, his blood is on his own head. There is no room for reconciliation here; no understanding to be reached with evil; no dialogue with monsters who slaughter infants.
Attempts to portray Israel’s fight as “disproportionate” come from the global Left, from media outlets such as CNN and the BBC, from performative journalists and hypocritical pundits. But what is “proportional” when the other side is made up of monsters who dismember bodies with pleasure?
Can you remain indifferent after hearing the testimonies of the women subjected to gang rape?
Can you speak of “two sides to every story” after seeing the sheets stained with the blood of murdered infants ?
The world demands “restraint” from Israel, but restraint in the face of evil is a betrayal of justice.
Not indiscriminate slaughter
Such revenge is not indiscriminate slaughter. It is not terrorism. It is the targeted uprooting of Hamas. It is the elimination of its leadership, rockets, weapons, command centers, logistics, and propaganda apparatus. It is the destruction of every last perpetrator. Revenge is the closing of schools that teach hate. It is the dismantling of the incitement industry. It is the drying up of Qatari funding. Revenge is rebuilding a world where Israeli children (and Jewish children around the world) can live in peace.
In this war, there is no room for compromise because Israel is fighting evil in its purest form.
Some might say: “Revenge won’t bring back those who were murdered.” That is true. But if we do not take revenge, we betray their memory. How can we return to “normal life” while their murderers live?
October 7 was not just a national trauma. It was a moment of reckoning. It exposed the lie of “quiet,” the illusion of “arrangement.” It proved that Hamas is no partner for dialogue. Like ISIS and al-Qaeda, Hamas is an evil to be eradicated.
The only moral response to such an enemy is the total dismantling of Hamas, with its leadership exiled, its battalions destroyed, its finances frozen, and its communications cut. This is not revenge out of hate. It is revenge born of a love for life. A commitment to truth, morality, and justice.
There will be no peace until evil is wiped out.
In his poem “On the Slaughter,” written after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Russia, our national poet Haim Nahman Bialik says, with blood-chilling clarity:
“Vengeance like this, for the blood of a child,
Satan has yet to devise.
Let the blood fill the abyss!
Let it pierce the blackest depths and devour the darkness and eat away and reach the rotting foundations of the earth.”
Never again
A people that can forgive the rape of its daughters is not worthy of being called a nation.
But a people that avenges the blood of its children, such a nation is alive – and lights up the world with justice and compassion.
The author is CEO of Radios 100FM, an honorary consul, deputy dean of the Consular Diplomatic Corps in Israel, president of the Israeli Radio Communications Association, and a former NBC News correspondent.