Your correspondent (letters, 9 October), asks if there is a single positive benefit from the despicable acts of Hamas. How can there be? By what they did, Hamas deliberately invited the terrible suffering of their own people as well as destroying the very real goodwill between Jews and Palestinians in many Israeli communities.
BBC2 and Channel 4 have recently shown two films about 7 October, using phone videos, CCTV and the dash-cam and body-cam footage of the terrorists themselves. These films are formidable. You may think you cannot bear to do so, but please, please, watch them.
The Channel 4 film One day in October shows the infiltration of Kibbutz Be’eri by scores of Hamas terrorists, on their way to murder over a hundred Israelis and take thirty two more hostage, including a little girl of eight. The community of Kibbutz Be’eri echoed the attitudes of the founders of Israel: secular, socialist-leaning, slightly utopian, where residents advocated for peace with their close neighbours in Gaza.
Hamas’s wickedness has resulted in the people of Kibbutz Be’eri no longer believing in peace. The attack transformed their mindset from giving lifts to Gazan children to get dialysis and chemotherapy to: ‘That’s over….we don’t want to be near you…we don’t want you to be near us anymore.’ Hamas that day destroyed an entire ethos on life - a peaceful, open-minded ethos which furthered the cause of peace.
Surviving October 7 – We will dance again is the BBC2 film, telling the story of Hamas’s attack on the Nova Music Festival. Thanks to the terrorists’ vanity, filming themselves to celebrate their killing spree and proudly show their compatriots the details of the terror they wrought, we get to see the face of evil.
They wanted us all to see what they did and now we do. We watch carefree festival-goers arriving, worshipping life and unaware of their looming fate, though we already know it. We see Hersh Goldberg-Polin and beautiful Shani Louk who will both be murdered, one that very day, the other after losing an arm to a Hamas grenade and suffering months of captivity.
Hamas’s bloodthirsty journey through southern Israel, fuelled by religious fervor, led them to kill Arabs and Jews alike and celebrate death by singing: “Even if 1,000 of us die for Islam, even if 2,000 of us die for Islam, the time of the Jihad nation has arrived.”
Emma Brookbank, Norton
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