Civilization’s Discontents
Reflections on the barbarism of the Hamas attacks and their genocidal intentions
“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will still become worse unless each of us does his best.”
This is from Viktor Frankl, who was a psychotherapist, Auschwitz survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, a remarkable book detailing how he survived in multiple extermination camps by holding onto a sense of purpose amid horrific barbarism and unfathomable human suffering. Written in nine days, eventually selling over 16 million copies, the book was originally published in 1946 in German as A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp and later titled Say Yes to Life in Spite of Everything.
The book concludes with a chapter called “The Case for Tragic Optimism” and these words:
So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”
I have been reflecting on such matters in the last days since learning of the butchery of Hamas terrorists in Israel, watching the rising death counts of Jews and Palestinians, and absorbing a variety of responses to this horror. While my post on Monday (“The Need for Humanity”) confronted the Republicans’ exploitation of the violence to condemn President Joe Biden rather than provide support and seek unity, I’ve been both grateful for the president’s clarity and moral outrage on Tuesday and disturbed by the people and groups quick to gloss over Hamas’ deadly barbarism in order to support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. As if the committing of barbaric acts of cold-blooded murder are tolerable, indeed acceptable, responses to the suffering in Gaza.
“This was an act of sheer evil…The brutality of Hamas’s blood-thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS,” Biden said, referencing murdered babies, young people “massacred” while at a music festival, parents “butchered” while protecting their children, women “raped, assaulted and paraded as trophies."
“This is terrorism,” the president continued. “But, sadly, for the Jewish people, it’s not new. This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”
By chance, I have been working on a project for several months with a talented student about displaced people at the end of WWII. It has led me to read accounts from concentration camp survivors attempting to put their lives back together and move on after the Holocaust’s ultimate horror.
One of those survivors of the Dachau death camp was Zalman Grinberg, a medical doctor who founded St. Ottilien Hospital for Jewish survivors and other displaced people in a former Benedictine monastery near Munich. In June of 1945, several months after exiting Dachau, Grinberg spoke at a musical concert to “celebrate” liberation. His words reflect what it meant for him to survive after nearly his entire people were annihilated. They illuminate the scale of trauma that such barbarism causes.
What is the logic of destiny to let [us] live? We belong in the mass graves of those shot in Kharkov, Lublin and Kovno! We belong to the millions gassed and burnt in Auschwitz and Birkenau! We belong to those tens of thousands who died under the strains of hardest labour, tormented by milliards of lice and in mud and starvation and coldness in Lodz, Kielce, Buchenwald, Dachau, Landshut, Utting, Kaufering, Landsberg and Leonsberg. We belong to those who were gassed, hung, tormented and tortured to death in the concentration camps! We belong to the army of nine million fallen in battle from these organized and cunningly prepared methods of murder! We are not alive...we are dead!
The doctor talked about Hitler and the help he received from the German nation. “However, we do not want revenge,” he told the former prisoners of Dachau. “If we took revenge, it would mean that we would fall to those moral and spiritual depths in which the German people have been lost for the last ten years.”
Through everything, he was still defined by the promise of civilization to rise above the worst among us who have lost (or never possessed) their basic humanity.
He concluded his remarks with this:
We are free now, but we do not know how to begin our free but unfortunate lives. It seems to us that for the time mankind does not comprehend what we have gone through and what we have experienced during this period of time. And it seems to us, that we shall not be understood in future. We have forgotten how to laugh, we cannot cry any more, we do not comprehend our freedom yet, and this because we are still among our dead comrades.
Yet, like Viktor Frankl, he had a purpose that sustained him. For awhile in the 1940’s, Grinberg served as a director of a hospital in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv, then immigrated to the U.S. in 1955. At the time of his death in 1983, at the age of 70, he was an attending physician in the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Nassau County Medical Center in New York. He was survived by his wife, three sons and a granddaughter.
Terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman summarized this week in The Atlantic the “genocidal intentions” of Hamas articulated in their original covenant in 1988. What happened in Israel last weekend, he writes, is “the inchoate realization of Hamas’ true ambitions.”
Hoffman describes the four main themes of Hamas’ founding documents like this:
The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.
As Hoffman explains, this covenant—largely couched in religious language—makes clear the central reason for the existence of the Islamic Resistance Movement (or Hamas): “the slaughter of Jews.” Here’s what it says: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
In the assertions of Hamas, the territory that includes Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is an “Islamic Waqf” and forbidden to any other peoples or religions. According to their Article 11, this land is:
…consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up…This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.
In other words, as Hoffman notes, there is no compromise, no two-state solution, no option except one: “the annihilation of the Jews.” As Hamas has written, “It is a jihad of victory or martyrdom.”
It has been deeply disturbing, deeply appalling, to see many Americans glossing over or otherwise coming to the defense of Hamas’ atrocities in the name of the Palestinian people. It has taken various forms, including justifying the murderousness because of issues related to the treatment of Palestinians in the deeply impoverished and overcrowded Gaza City. These conditions are legitimate and troubling issues for anyone who believes in freedom, justice and a decent quality of life.
But the response of glorying in Hamas’ pursuit of death and barbaric violence, often by people on the left, is frankly shocking. Go online and you can find proud “I stand with Palestine” posts that show a hang-glider and a Palestinian flag. As one person put it: “Imagine how little you care about Jewish life to take the photo of the terrorists who hang-glided into a music festival to massacre 260 innocent young lives in a mass shooting and try to rebrand the murderers as a symbol for freedom fighting. The lack of empathy for these victims is heartbreaking.”
In my own case, I’ve been surprised by how many responses to my criticism of the barbarism has taken the form of: “Well, what about all the atrocities committed by Americans? Aren’t you aware of the historical realities faced by Native Americans or Black Americans or so many others who’ve faced extreme violence?” As if the history of atrocities—which I care deeply about—lessens the significance of the atrocities committed by Hamas now.
If you haven’t seen the joint statement released Monday from the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the U.S., it’s worth your time to read how they address this reality that is both complex and simple. Here’s an excerpt:
We make clear that the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned. There is never any justification for terrorism. In recent days, the world has watched in horror as Hamas terrorists massacred families in their homes, slaughtered over 200 young people enjoying a music festival, and kidnapped elderly women, children, and entire families, who are now being held as hostages.
Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities. We further emphasize that this is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage.All of us recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But make no mistake: Hamas does not represent those aspirations, and it offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed.
On Tuesday, The New York Times published a story by a correspondent and photographer chronicling a first visit to Kfar Aza, a kibbutz that was formed in 1951, just three years after the founding of Israel. As the writer Isabel Kershner notes, “Like those who live in most other kibbutz communities, the residents are generally left-leaning liberals.”
Here’s how Kershner summarizes what she experienced in painful detail:
After days of stunned national numbness and chaos, the dimensions of the atrocity that took place here were now coming into clear focus. In all, more than 1,000 soldiers and civilians have been killed in Israel. Nobody could say how many of them were lying here, in Kfar Aza, but it is emerging as one of the worst sites of the bloodshed. Soldiers and rescue workers said scores, possibly hundreds, had been slaughtered here, including grandparents, infants and children.
“It’s not a war or a battlefield; it’s a massacre,” said Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv, an Israeli commander on the scene. “It’s something I never saw in my life, something more like a pogrom from our grandparents’ time.”
I leave you with a few questions that are on my mind: How can humans continue to be this barbaric? How can their hatred run this deep? How has civilization failed us this profoundly?
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People are capable of horrific acts, and of ignoring evidence of them, when they privilege their ideas about others above the factual existence of others.
With the rise of social media’s cultural influence, I was horrified to see that memes and tropes, the hallmarks of propaganda, were being normalised online. Translating the complexity of human beings into flat caricatures to make fun of them is an effective way to de-humanise them. A generation has been raised on a diet of sound bites and easy bigotry.
There’s no quick solution. Humans have been like this forever; technology is just an accelerant. The way to fight against it is by real world human interaction. Speaking with clarity and empathy to the facts of world events-as the administration does with its platforms and you with yours-is essential. But a single speech or essay is just one pebble in laying a path forward. We all need to bring our pebbles to make that path to a future better world.
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut from I believe Cat’s Cradle, “given the past 5 million years of man’s inhumanity to man what do we have to hope for? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
But Vonnegut, the ultimate cynic was cynical not because he believed this, but because he knew humanity could do better than it was doing! And should be better than it was doing.
In the face of barbarity and nihilism, anti-science and data mysticism, we must always have hope even in the darkest times. Otherwise, there is no point in living, no point in trying to make the world better. But having hope does not mean forgetting, nor does it mean we not demand justice...we must remember and we must have justice otherwise this cycle will never end.