Why should I love Hamas? Israel's enemies have plumbed the depths of evil

And for today at least, I have no time for those who want to “both sides” the situation. This was a massacre, hideously reminiscent of the Shoah. They beheaded children. I do not want to hear those whose first sentence expresses condolences, and whose second sentence begins with a “But”. Nor do I want to hear your little pet theories about the politics of the Middle East, not when the world outside feels such a threatening place for my family. As Amos Oz explained in his excellent book, How to Cure a Fanatic, Arabs and Jews typically understand each other far better than we Europeans understand either of them. Cost-free wisdom from Western liberals is so often pathetically ill-informed and bathing in self-righteousness. Look at those riding their cars up and down the Edgware Road, beeping their horns in delight, Palestinians flags flying from their windows. And those B-list academics who preach decolonisation and celebrate the slaughter of innocents as some sort of noble justifiable resistance. Little wonder London’s Jewish Free School has just made the wearing of their school blazer optional for students on the way to and from school. Those who have created a culture where all this is deemed acceptable have lost any sort of contact with moral reality.

I’m not sure I have even got properly angry yet, though this will inevitably follow. Not just anger, but blazing fury. Then I will have to reckon with those impossible words: “Love your enemy.” Then I will need most to remind myself of the humanity of those who want to do my children harm. Yes, that they have children too. And that their children are now under the most enormous threat.

It was 19 years ago last week, that I first visited Gaza. We went to a primary school in Khan Yunis, right at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. Before lessons, the children had to throw balls at the wall to expend all their frustration. Without that, they were unable to concentrate on their lessons. As the children were showing me where their houses used to be, houses which had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers, a machine gun from the border emptied its load in our direction. Bullets kicked up dust all around us. Children of seven and eight — the same age as my boy — ran behind a wall like they’d done it before.

I remember we played football and ate ice cream. And I tried to recall some of their faces and I will need to think of them when my own anger wells up within me. They would be in their late 20s now, of course. It was a disturbing thought, inviting a depressing conjecture: perhaps some of them were now in Hamas; perhaps some broke through the border on Saturday, going house to house, murdering Israelis. Or perhaps some of them never made it to adulthood.

The situation is, of course, now going to get so much worse. And so, not only do I find “love your enemies” hard to conjure, but I find hope even harder. I’m not much of a Christian, I know. Surely a ground war is coming, with soldiers venturing into the most dangerous of places to try and rescue terrified captives who are now tied up in cellars, subject to the Isis-like cruelty of their captors. There will be those who will inevitably cast this response as revenge. But retrieving prisoners from the depths of such a desperate evil is the only thing that the Israeli army can possibly do. Those who try to draw some sort of moral equivalence between a rescue mission and the deliberate and gleeful murder of the innocent have totally lost their moral bearings. They have become the useful idiots of rapists and murderers. So for now, the only words of hope I have to stand alongside are those from the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikvah. “Our hope is not yet lost. It is 2,000 years old. To be a people free in our land.”

I pray that captives will be found and released — prayers being the only thing available to some of us. What good will they do, asks the sceptic? Even that question misunderstands how prayer works. Prayer is my category for the most important of things that I cannot and do not know how to solve. Like tears, it is a bubbling up of something impossible to silence. It’s not a way of getting something done in the world; I’m not escalating stuff to the almighty. And anyway, He and I are going to have words when this is over. I have more than a few questions — and in the silence of my prayers, they won’t be gently put. But neither can I get through all of this without Him.

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Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

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