If conscienceless violence is a credible measure of evil, then I'm afraid the distinction between Benjamin Netanyahu's regular army and Hamas terrorists is becoming less and less clear. The only difference I still see is the temporal order of cause and effect. Evil does not stop being evil simply because it is reactionary. We cannot canonize horrific evil because it is perpetrated in response to an earlier heinous evil. There are no equities in evil. If we have all established that the women and children of Palestine are not Hamas terrorists; if we have already agreed that the women and children of Palestine are as much victims of Hamas terrorism as are Israeli women and children, then we must also agree that the ongoing campaign of indiscriminate bombings and killings of women and children of Gaza is equally terroristic.
The disturbing images streaming out of Gaza Strip are as shockingly horrifying as they are searingly traumatizing. Our already violated collective innocence is under further daily assault in Gaza. Our television boxes have become box offices of horror, except that this is no movie. This reel is real. The tragedy of TV in times like this is that it makes all of us complicit. TV denies us the luxury of plausible deniability and the defense of ignorance. We cannot claim we didn't see it, because we did. We do.
We are watching deadly violence in real time, not recorded playback. Yes, Hamas shocked and terrorized our conscience with grotesquely abominable evil on Black Saturday. Nobody can deny that. But Israel is revictimizing us in real time. Telegraphing violence before it happens makes us all accomplices because of our failure to stop it and protect innocent victims. When it telegraphs its plan of violence, Israel puts us on notice, extorts our consent, and assumes our permission to evil.
Israel has used TV to conscript the rest of us into this orgy of violence. Without knowing it, we are playing along. Sports events this weekend, from London to LA, began with one-minute silence for Israeli victims of Hamas terrorism. But more than twice Palestinian children have been blown up by Israeli rockets in the week that has followed. When will the world cure itself of this cataract of selective blindness? The blood of every innocent Palestinian child spilled in the kiosks of Gaza is as precious as the blood of every Israeli child shed in the kibbutz of Ashkelon. The only difference is that one child was murdered by an organized terrorist group and the other by an organized army.
Yes, even in our general and generous grief and solidarity for Israel, we must pause to ask difficult and inconvenient questions. What is the endgame? You can't root out Hamas by creating more Hamas. Every mother killed by Israeli bomb while her young boy watches and cries in helplessness is a Hamas recruited. Israel stated that its goal was to kill the last Hamas terrorist in Gaza. So far close to 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and 10,000 wounded. Israel has not told us how many of those numbers are Hamas terrorists. But it is the age of TV. We know, because we see. We see, because we watch TV. And what we watch, see, and know is that lifeless and limbless bodies of 6 months and 6 years could not have been those of Hamas terrorists. This siege of sacrilege must cease.
If revenge and vengeance have driven Israel to counter-evil, enough of that has been exacted already. The world must now help Israel to regain rationality. Any war that rides exclusively on emotion will ultimately end in annihilation and extinction. Israel must heal. The world must assist Israel to heal. But effective healing for Israel cannot come from the collateral graves of innocent Palestinian children and women. Their innocent blood will impose guilt, not healing. It is time to regain our rationality. It is time to ask hard questions and give inconvenient answers.
We must mourn the lives of innocent Israelis, including the 260 innocent young men and women butchered at a music festival by Hamas terrorists. But we cannot turn blind eyes to the sad fact that Israel is committing a genocidal orgy in Gaza and the world is eagerly watching. My fear for Israel is that the human memory has limited storage capacity. It operates on a recency, not primacy, structure. It wipes off older events to save the newest data. The human memory remembers the last vivid atrocity. I'm afraid the last thing the world will remember when it is all over is the cemeterization and golgothaization of Gaza by Israel. Sadly, that is what Hamas terrorists want.
Dr. Vitus Ozoke is a lawyer, a civil and human rights activist, and a public commentator based in the United States.