These are women murdered before or after being raped. Fathers killed in front of their children. Pregnant women with bullet-riddled bellies. Naked bodies of young women delivered to the furious crowd. Corpses decapitated by the shovel, their executioners going over it nine times to achieve it. Without forgetting these exclamations of joy from one of the killers calling his parents to tell them the good news: “Dad, dad, I killed ten Jews with my own hands! »
We could fill pages with these horrors as the butchery of October 7 is so far from usual. This young man full of hatred is not mistaken. It did not target Israelis, much less soldiers or even adversaries, but Jews. Nothing but Jews! No, this massacre is neither an act of war nor a simple killing, as happens regularly in all conflicts – and even less a gesture of resistance. All this is a thousand miles from what we call war, which has its rules, whatever anyone says.
All the testimonies agree. Those of the investigation of New York Times conducted for two months in Israel and published at the end of December 2023, those collected by Lee Yaron in his book sum October 7. The deadliest day in Israeli history, those of Israeli surveillance cameras, videos shot by the victims and GoPro cameras of the torturers themselves. All agree to designate a racist crime which is not the work of what we call soldiers, but of madmen of God, also called jihadists, unfortunately posing as liberators.
As the feminist Liliane Kandel asserted, these people were slaughtered or burned alive “only because they were Jews” and for nothing else. The desecration of bodies through dismemberment and cremation demonstrates a clear desire not to defeat an adversary, but to exterminate him. Hamas was not mistaken; he himself named this massacre Al-Aqsa Floodin other words a flood sent by Allah to punish the infidels. Historically, such massacres have a name: “pogroms”, a Russian word meaning “to destroy entirely” and which was attributed to murderous and racist attacks against Jews in the last century. October 7 will therefore have been the first pogrom of the 21ste century.
If we do not understand what is particular and unique about this raid, what it represents both for the Jews but also for all of us, we condemn ourselves to understanding nothing about this event and its consequences. . Because there is a before and after October 7.
It was the French historian Georges Bensoussan who explained that the real fear did not occur on October 7, but on October 8. Israel had not yet reacted to the fact that anti-Semitic acts were exploding in many cities. Faced with such a despicable attack, the Israeli people expected a minimum of compassion and solidarity; the opposite happened. The dead had not yet been buried when words were suddenly released, awakening what Romain Gary and Albert Cohen called “the oldest hatred” in the world.
While the tributes to the victims of Hamas went virtually unnoticed, that day, Israelis were overcome with immense dizziness. For if Israel were no longer a shelter for Jews, where would there be one? That day, they understood that they were alone in the world, as shown by the recent bombings intended to put an end to Hezbollah, this armed arm of Iran which has been terrorizing the entire region for 40 years. .
We can of course have good reasons to believe that the human cost paid by Gazans is disproportionate. And that Netanyahu’s reaction only sought to erase his own negligence, he who had failed to foresee this unthinkable barbarity and protect his citizens. But this does not explain to us how it is possible to avoid total war in the face of an enemy who wants neither to defeat you nor to make you retreat, but to exterminate you and make you disappear “from the river to the sea”? A desire to exterminate the Jews from which neither Hezbollah, nor Iran, nor Hamas have never hid, who even wrote it down in full in their founding texts. Hence also this slogan which we have not heard since 1945 and which we even hear in France during demonstrations: “Death to the Jews. » The latter having become in our universities and part of our youth the symbol of the genocidal “white colonialist”. As if there was a perverse pleasure in throwing these outrageous accusations back at the victims of the Shoah.
October 7 will have made us discover how the Palestinians under the control of Hamas had unfortunately moved away from their national liberation struggle to become the whippersnappers of the Muslim world. Here they are stuck in a dead end: jihad. However, jihad knows neither the nation nor the States, it only knows theumma and the will of God. What would a Palestinian state be today – which will have to be built one day – if not a rear base for jihad while awaiting the complete destruction of Israel? To finally obtain their state, the Palestinians will have no choice but to free themselves from Hamas.
This terrible observation emerged a year ago. We could dream of something else. But as the saying goes, “you don’t choose your enemies, they choose you.”