Rachel Rubin-Feuerstein

If the blinkered pro-Palestine crowd want to talk about ‘genocide’, they should start with Israel’s murdered mothers and mutilated children: "You want genocide? OK, read the pathologists’ reports. A girl, around five years old, who has been shot through her body from her skull to the soles of her feet. A 12-year-old girl shot in the head and then decapitated. Teenagers who received a video on their phones of their petrified grandmother as she was about to be executed (Hamas got a kick from sharing their work). Young women at the Nova peace festival, half-naked, strung up from trees the better to defile them. Vaginas rammed with knives and bottles. Twin baby boys, their mother slaughtered in the kitchen fetching milk for them, their father riddled with bullets as he struggled to keep the door of the safe room shut; the orphaned babies used as bait for 14 hours, little Guy and Roi, 10 months old, left to scream so they would lure neighbours to rescue them and those brave souls were then picked off by the terrorists lying in wait. I stood outside that house on Kibbutz Kfar Aza imagining all too well the panic of parents unable to protect their children; the number of bodies recovered was chalked on the wall. Yes, but… Killing parents in front of their sobbing children, then setting the house on fire so those children are burnt alive and all that remains of that beautiful family is cremated remains. Can we at least agree that goes beyond the bounds of “wrong” to a place we haven’t quite got a name for? “Evil” feels too small a word. For three years, I’ve been struggling to find the words; some way, at least, of expressing what happened. Because I believe it should matter to anyone who cares about our civilisation; make no mistake, the foul fiends responsible will come for us all if we let them. “They don’t just hate Jews, Allison, they hate freedom. They hate life.” That was Meirav Gonan, who I met in Tel Aviv after her daughter Romi was abducted at the Nova festival (Romi was held hostage for 471 days in Gaza). One thing I do know: the stories of suffering are seared on my soul. Yes, but… And it was all deliberate, that carnival of cruelty. On October 7, 2023, Hamas did not just seek a military victory over the IDF soldiers at the border posts. They wanted to provoke Israel into a retaliation that would scupper any chance of an imminent peace accord with Saudi Arabia, which would thwart Iran’s ambitions in the region. So they used civilians as playthings to torture, humiliate, defile (even carrying helpful translations to instruct women to undress). Yes, but… Who can forget one of the defining images of that day’s barbarity? Twenty-two-year-old German-Israeli Shani Louk, her body chucked on the back of a flatbed truck like a sack of potatoes, her leg obscenely twisted at a right angle, one of her murderers casually resting his boot on her naked flank. That beautiful young woman was a trophy of war, her corpse paraded through Gaza to the frenzied delight of the mob. Only a splinter of Shani’s skull was ever recovered. Yes, but… Shame on every single person who marches on October 7 – they celebrate the suffering of families cremated in their own homes, of Shani Louk paraded as a spoil of war, of a mother murdered when she went to fetch milk for her babies. Roi and Guy, the twins, now four years old, are thriving. The aunt and uncle who adopted them don’t want the boys to be tragic figures. Like their country, they have to be resilient. They love life. I am not Jewish, but I believe the Jews deserve and need a homeland. I hate their enemies because they are our enemies. So that makes me a Zionist. If you have any sense of where history teaches us, this leads you should be a Zionist too. No more “Yes, buts…” Today of all days let us stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters." -Allison Pearson, The Telegraph