My latest: Hamas’ willing co-conspirators

Two sides.

One side hasn’t shot up schools for little kids. It hasn’t firebombed community centers and places of worship. Its clergy haven’t called for a deity to slaughter the other side. It hasn’t yelled death threats at people in shopping malls.

It hasn’t targeted businesses with threats and abuse because the business owner belongs to a particular religion. It hasn’t attacked Santa Claus and tried to shut down Christmas. It hasn’t blocked roads to keep people from getting home.

The other side? It has. It has done all of those things. Everyone knows it, too. Everyone.

But not everyone knows this part.

A few weeks ago, this writer was invited to the Israeli consulate in Toronto to see 42 minutes of raw video footage. It was mostly taken from video recorders dead (and uniformed) Hamas terrorists brought with them on the morning of October 7, 2023.

The uniformed Hamas killers wanted to keep a record of what they did in Israel that morning. They were proud of what they did: on the videos, they said so, over and over.

The footage was unedited and had the feel of a snuff film. Which is what it was. It showed 138 Jews being shot, or decapitated, or blown to pieces by grenades. Men, women, children, babies.

The video showed the aftermath, as well. Israeli women and girls, naked from the waist down, their genitals bloody and mutilated. Parents and children, wired together, then burned alive. A baby’s skull, the brain spilling out onto the ground.

With the permission of the victim’s families, some journalists and legislators have been allowed to see the video. To bear witness, the Israelis told us.

We bore witness to something else, however. Something that hasn’t been written about nearly as much, but is important.

It was easy to spot the Hamas men. As noted, they wore uniforms and looked like soldiers, even though they acted like animals. (Worse than animals, actually.)

But here’s something else we witnessed: people who weren’t in uniforms, at all, flooding into Israel to participate in the barbarity of that dark Saturday.

In the Hamas footage, a Palestinian in civilian clothes uses an oversized green garden hoe to decapitate a foreign agricultural worker who is still alive. There are videos of Palestinian civilians beating hostages – some elderly – with sticks and their fists. And there is footage of corpses of Israelis being desecrated by Palestinians, on the back of a truck.

The Hamas video footage – some now online – also shows non-Hamas Palestinians loot and vandalize the homes and bodies of Jews.

Multiple videos document Palestinian citizens flooding into Israeli, following Hamas. At Kibbutz Be’eri, near the border with Gaza, video footage – mainly taken from home security cameras – shows dozens of Palestinian citizens following ten truckloads of Hamas killers into the kibbutz.

Some Palestinians came by car, and some on foot and on bicycles. Some are armed. Some are children. They can then be seen stealing agricultural equipment, televisions, motorbikes and more.

Not every Palestinian is Hamas. That’s true. But it’s also true that – on that terrible day – many, many Palestinians were supporting Hamas.

Before that day, too. Before, and as everyone has seen by now, Hamas had tunnels snaking seemingly everywhere in Gaza – tunnels with armored doors concealed in Palestinian hospitals, schools and even children’s bedrooms. With, one can only assume, the knowledge and approval of Palestinian citizens.

That’s not all. One of the reasons why Hamas mass murder on October 7 was so effective and efficient was because Palestinian civilians – Palestinians who had been working alongside Israelis in those kibbutzim farms – had told Hamas how to disable the Israeli security and communications systems. They had told them who to kill first, and where victims could be found. Palestinian civilians did that.

Now, it goes without saying that some Israeli citizens are not blameless, either. Innocent Palestinians have been targeted for violence by far-Right Israeli settlers in the West Bank. That is in evidence, too, and it is indisputable. The wrongdoers must be brought to justice.

But Hamas did not act alone on October 7. It did not act alone before or after that date, either. Palestinians – ordinary citizens – aided and abetted Hamas.

The best way to conclude, here, is to quote an extraordinary book written a few years ago by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

“It is a grave error to refuse to believe that people could slaughter whole populations—especially populations that are by any objective evaluation not threatening—out of conviction. Why persist in the belief that ‘ordinary’ people could not possibly sanction, let alone partake in wholesale human slaughter? The historical record, from ancient times to the present, amply testifies to the ease with which people can extinguish the lives of others, and even take joy in their deaths.”

Ordinary German did.

Ordinary Palestinians, too.