The line between good and evil is not a blurry one

The recent murder of six hostages puts us in the same place we were in on October 8

On Monday, I was among the thousands who gathered, in person and online, to watch Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American-Israeli who was kidnapped by Hamas from the Nova Music Festival 11 months ago, laid to rest. For 330 days, Hersh’s parents, Jon and Rachel, called for the return of their son. Their faces were everywhere - at rallies, online, on television, even at the DNC. Mere days before it was announced that the bodies of six hostages had been recovered by the IDF in Rafah, Hersh’s parents, along with other hostage families were filmed at the Gaza border shouting out to their son through a megaphone in the hope that he might hear them. On day 332, they said goodbye to him.

Over the last 11 months, hope has been a waxing and waning concept for me. There were days and weeks when my fastidious belief that more hostages would come home was lost. When Noa Argamani was rescued by the IDF on June 8, I relished in the shocked relief she had been found alive. 

Despite this struggle to remain hopeful, part of me really believed Hersh would be returned to his family, less a limb, but very much alive. Perhaps, it was the infectious nature of his parents’ hope. Perhaps, it was a sickening belief that Hamas would keep him alive because he was useful for propaganda. Even as the funerals for the six murdered hostages were taking place, Hamas published a propaganda video teasing a later release of their final words. 

For the last 11 months, the public moral equivocation between good and evil has been overwhelming. There has been a profound effort by factions of the media - traditional and social - to dull the bright line between good and evil; to create the appearance of balance between the amount of wrong committed by both sides of this conflict. Sure, Hamas was wrong to invade Israel on October 7, but hasn’t Israel responded too harshly? Yes, Hamas should give back the hostages, but shouldn’t Israel agree to a ceasefire first? 

Hersh, and the five hostages executed by close-range gunshots to the head alongside him, should not be of blessed memory, because they should still be with us. The fact they are not is, at least in part, the failure of the world to call out true evil - the decision to instead engage in an inversion exercise where the lives of innocent hostages are worth less than those of the terrorists holding them captive. This is what is being said every time they chant “from the river to the sea” and “intifada, revolution”.

In the days following the release of the names of the six recovered bodies on Sunday, I have felt a renewed sense of the anger and isolation that accompanied those days and weeks immediately after October 7. For a fleeting moment, I allowed the possibility that this would finally be enough to wake everyone up to the reality of what has been happening for the past 11 months to cross my mind, and then I watched a Hillel booth at Toronto Metropolitan University’s orientation be protested by anti-Israel activists on the same day as we learned the six names. 

This game of moral quibbling has to stop. 

Hamas is a terrorist organization and Iranian government proxy whose foundational beliefs are for the destruction of the Jewish state and the globalization of the genocide they attempted to perpetrate against the Jewish people on October 7. Read their charter, listen to what their leadership says - they have never tried to hide these linchpins of their collective identity. Hamas has spent decades brainwashing the citizens of Gaza. It has restricted access to food, clean water, and health care in favour of stockpiling weapons and constructing terror tunnels, like the one where these six hostages were held and murdered. 

Innocent civilians have been casualties of urban warfare since time immemorial. It is a tragic fact that seems to have been forgotten in much of the now peaceful world. When two armies are fighting in an urban centre, no matter how careful they are - how many opportunities and warnings are provided for civilians to escape, non-combatants will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. Civilian casualties of war are categorically different from a group of people crossing a border with the express intention of raping and murdering the civilians on the other side. The difference between those two things - difference in moral culpability - should be apparent. There is no moral equivalency here. Defending the actions of Palestinian leadership over the last 11 months is defending the truest form of evil many of us have seen in our lifetimes.

If Hamas cared about its people and wanted the war to end, they would have accepted any of the deals that have been brokered in the last 11 months. It is Hamas who continues to reject offers of peace. Hamas started this war, and it is them who have decided to prevent it from ending and thereby increase the number of Palestinian civilian casualties as a result. If Hamas cared about civilian causalities in Gaza, they stop using hospitals and schools to conduct their terrorist operation, giving the IDF no option but to go after these locations. If the Palestinian leadership wanted to peacefully coexist with Israel in a two-state solution, they would have seized on one of the many times when this arrangement was on the table. 

Those marching against Israel for the last 11 months are not protesting a war. They are protesting collective Jewish existence, not only in Israel, but as is increasingly being demonstrated, everywhere. If this isn’t clear, pay more attention to what the slogans chanted really mean. What do you think it means to protest Zionism? 

I am 28 years old. I was the same age as Hersh when I started law school. I am older than he will ever be. I have been thinking about this a lot - how young 23 is, and how many places he’ll never see, books he’ll never read, and people he’ll never meet, because I know how much living I have done in the last 5 years. I am older than Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino will be as well. Their memories, and those of Carmel Gat and Alexander Lobanov, are a blessing. Their memories are a revolution. Their memories are a painful reminder of the failure to identify evil when it stands before us. 

Note to the reader: I don’t want to be doing this right now, and I’m putting it at the end because I don’t like that I know I have to do it. I am stating for the record that I believe the loss of any civilian life is terrible. My heart breaks for the innocent people in Gaza, particularly children, who are suffering both at the hands of the Hamas government that is failing to prioritize them and as a result of the war. I absolutely support the IDF’s continued effort to eradicate Hamas and bring home the remaining hostages. This week has been a horrible reminder of just how important and urgent that mission is. I am not justifying the death or suffering of Palestinian people in service of this, but I understand it as a reality that cannot always be avoided and accept it as such. I hope and pray the war ends soon and that there will be a better future in store for the Palestinian people when that time comes.