Column: Israel has every right to defend itself. What Hamas did is unforgivable

Less than a century after the incineration of 6 million Jews, their right to exist as a people, religion, and state is once again in question. After the pogrom of Oct. 7, the survival of the Jews has suddenly and rapidly emerged as the defining moral challenge of our time. Another Jewish Holocaust now seems possible, and we will all, even if only in our own hearts, be called to account for how we respond to this moral challenge.

Let us take stock once again of what happened on Oct. 7, 2023. Some 1,200 Jews were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists, who crossed into Israel expressly for the purpose of exterminating as many Jews as possible. They did not just kill Jews. They dragged their naked, dismembered, and burned bodies through the streets, and in their celebratory euphoria photographed their deeds for posterity with their iPhones. Thus, there is an indisputable factual record of their brutality.

A recent New York Times investigative report, based on exhaustive interviews of more than 150 eyewitnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors, as well as GPS data from mobile phones, provides even more granular detail regarding the sexual and other forms of violence perpetrated against women. They are too sickening to describe; suffice it to say that the actions taken by Hamas terrorists that day were intended to inflict as much pain as possible and to dehumanize their victims and their bloody, barely recognizable remains.

Naturally, the Israelis have responded to this shocking display of human evil and the existential threat it represents. They are now fighting a war for survival while much of the world watches, censoriously condemning their every action as “disproportionate.”

The number of casualties that have resulted cannot be confidently estimated, despite ludicrous claims by Hamas. Certainly the Israelis have not conducted their response to Hamas with the military precision required to save every life possible. War is war. Mistakes are made, there is chaos in battle, especially when it must be fought in urban settings, among civilian non-combatants who are used by their alleged protectors as human shields and as dispensable tools of international propaganda.

Nevertheless, the Israelis have attempted to warn innocent Palestinians of danger without compromising military advantage. A recent Wall Street Journal article is typical in reporting the balance Israel must continually draw in conducting its military operations. In one attack intended to kill a Hamas battalion commander and Hamas combatants, the Israelis deployed two large bombs, rather than smaller, more targeted munitions, and did not forewarn civilians of their impending airstrikes for fear of warning Hamas as well. Nevertheless, air force commanders attempted to limit collateral damage by aiming bombs between buildings and using fuses that delayed the detonations until munitions had penetrated beneath the surface.

Still, 126 civilians were killed. Why? Because the Israelis did not know that Hamas had tunneled beneath the buildings the Palestinian civilians occupied and could not anticipate that they would collapse as they did.

So who is responsible for those 126 deaths?

This report makes clear why it is irresponsible to simply blame Israel for the tragic death of innocent non-combatants. But two things are evident. First, the Israelis did not ask for this war, Hamas did. Second, the Israelis have, to the extent possible while conducting a war, attempted to protect innocent life that Hamas obscenely and blithely disregards.

But none of this impresses Byron Bangert, whose opinion piece in the Dec. 30 Herald-Times cites unconfirmed and unconfirmable Palestinian casualty numbers, blames them entirely on an “unconscionably disproportionate” response by Israel, and finishes by speculating that Israel’s “right-wing” government may have invited and hoped for the Oct. 7 pogrom for its own political advantage.

Bangert's column: Time for U.S. to change the trajectory of Israel's war with Hamas

For good measure, he tosses in the false accusation that Israel is an illegitimate “apartheid” state. The intellectual and moral recklessness of these accusations speak for themselves. However, as a Christian, I am particularly troubled by Bangert’s self-identification as an expert in “religious ethics.”

One of the oldest and most persistent themes in antisemitism is to blame the Jews for their own victimization. Bangert has predictably renewed the lease on this calumny, and as a Christian I feel compelled to testify that he does not speak for any ethics I ever learned.

Ralph Gaebler is a member of a newly established group called "IU Faculty and Staff for Israel."

Editor's note: The last two paragraphs of Byron Bangert's column were omitted from last week's Sunday print edition. They are included here:

Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war has put Biden in what appears to be a no-win situation. To make support for Israel significantly conditional could be very costly, politically speaking, but to continue that support is patently unethical by any objective standard, and viscerally unpopular with certain segments of the Democratic Party. These segments are not being frivolous or hysterical in calling Israel’s policy in the West Bank apartheid and its war against Hamas in Gaza tantamount to genocide.

Gaza is hell on earth, with no positive end in sight. Yet it could become even worse. It’s way past time to cease what award-winning Russian-American Jewish journalist and writer Masha Gessen has termed the “liquidation” of Gaza.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Column: Blaming Israel for Palestinian war casualties is irresponsible