A proportionate response to October 7 isn't about matching body counts - it's about doing whatever it takes to get the hostages home and dismantle Hamas so they can never repeat the atrocities they’ve openly promised to carry out again. Any country on earth would demand the same, and no nation would be expected to accept less.
The usual rules of war barely apply here because this isn't a normal war. On one side you have an army - on the other, a terror group that hides in civilian clothing, uses hospitals and schools as cover, fires from UN shelters, and builds tunnels under kindergartens. Hamas wants civilian deaths, especially among its own people, because that turns global opinion against Israel. The suffering of Palestinians is its currency.
While Israel is expected to feed, medicate, and shelter the children of the very people trying to kill them, Hamas steals aid, hoards fuel, and uses civilians as human shields. They deploy child soldiers, booby-trap civilian homes, and hold hostages as leverage. Two years of war - and not one traditional battle.
Because Hamas doesn’t fight to win battles. It fights to manipulate the world into tying Israel’s hands.
In all this, the global conversation routinely ignores Hamas’ blatant war crimes: the deliberate slaughter of civilians, systematic sexual violence, hostage-taking, and total contempt for international law. Somehow it’s all hand-waved away with the word “Nakba,” as if that justifies every horror.
And even doing that is a stretch that requires the rewriting of history. Everything before 1948 disappears. Centuries of Jewish persecution, subjugation, exile, pogroms, statelessness - erased. Hundreds of years of being second class by law in their own home isn't factored. Jews returning to their ancestral home are painted as colonisers, and any level of hatred and savagery towards them is permissible.
I've watched in real time as people excuse terrorism, deny documented atrocities, glorify groups like Hamas, and even romanticise Bin Laden. One of the most revolting has been the denial of sexual violence - despite autopsies, forensic evidence, eyewitnesses, testimonies from doctors, UN reports, and NGO investigations some people will outright deny it occurred.
But if the facts don’t fit the good-versus-evil script people have written in their heads, they just reject the facts. I can tell you - where i come from not a few miles away from Israel, the majority of people completely deny Jews have any right of presence in the middle east at all.
They literally just re-wrote history to pretend Jews were not in Judah. It's so weird. We once had 75000 Jews that had been there 2000 years and then boom, all of them gone. The nakba no one talks about though, as for some reason the world seems to think the rights and stories that belong to everyone else don't apply to these particular people.
I know some Jews, I met them in my adult life. They are really cool, kind people with good senses of humour and I would imagine most of the people at the nova festival that day probably just wanted to have peace with Palestinians. Utter, atrocious waste of life.