God commanded that every Israeli would die, and Israel would die: Netanyahu’s death on the Gazans wasn’t a deliberate enemy of God

The worst is yet to come in the Middle East because the mutual dehumanization is the most brutal reporting I have ever seen.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is destroying tunnels, ammunition dumps and Hamas fighters, yes. But I’m afraid it’s also helping to pulverize the recognition of shared humanity that in the long run allows people to live beside one another in peace. The poisonous hatred in turn is already spilling over to the United States and other countries worldwide.

I was thinking about this as I drove the other day to meet some Gazans who were temporarily allowed to visit Israel and became stuck in East Jerusalem. My Israeli taxi driver refused to enter the Palestinian neighborhood (“If I go there, I won’t make it out”) and finally abandoned me on the side of the road to get a Palestinian taxi. I spoke with a woman from Gaza, who told me she approved of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians.

That conversation pretty much broke my heart. Hamas propaganda and Israeli bombing of Gaza give rise to such bigotry, as a young woman said that she lost two cousins to Israeli fire and she weeps at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

When the ground operation was announced, the Prime Minister cited biblical allusions to the Amalekites who were the target of a divine genocide. God ordered that men and women, children and infants be put to death. Netanyahu wasn’t advocating that literal policy, but Amalek is a code word that regularly crops up in Israeli politics for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” And this too breaks my heart.

There are of course many other voices that are merciful and sensible, and I’ve highlighted them previously. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

That is the longtime pattern in the Middle East: It was Palestinian suicide bombers who propelled Benjamin Netanyahu into the prime minister’s office, and it has been Israeli hard-liners who fuel extremist Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

She believes that people who reject Zionism are code for hatred of Jews themselves. When a massacre in the world is more barbaric than the world had seen before, people say that Israel deserves that. “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

Simone Zimmerman is a writer and activist who helped create “If Not Now” a movement of American Jews who are critical of the Israeli government.

Three weeks ago, Israel was brutally attacked by people who wanted to destroy her. “If Mexico would have done the same thing to the United States, nobody would have told the U.S. three weeks in ‘restrain yourself.’ Israeli is doing everything it can in an impossible situation.

She demurs only when she is asked if she stands behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of the war. “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said.

In social media videos and in interviews, Ms. Tishby speaks with the ease of a veteran broadcast anchor, the self-certainty of a politician who has honed her talking points and the passion of an activist who is willing to reveal her emotions but not give in to them.

Her objective, she said, is to lift the morale of Jewish people around the world and to try to reach those on the political left who believe the killing of 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of 240 more by Hamas was an act of Palestinian resistance. “The progressive left has been played,” she said.

In an appearance on Fox last week with Sean Hannity, Ms. Tishby noted that Hamas has broken cease-fires in the past, and she emphasized the threat posed by Iran, a supporter of Hamas. If there is no removal of Hamas from power, she said that the human rights in the West will be in tatters. “Israel is fighting the West’s war.”

Tishby talked to the camera in the video that included the footage of the World Trade Center crash. She said that if a group of students were on American campuses they would be supporting the terror attack on 9/11. She added: “That is exactly what is happening on campuses in America right now.”

Ms. Tishby was born in Tel Aviv and raised in a politically active, progressive family. She served in the Israel Defense Forces, in what might be thought of as the Israeli U.S.O. She traveled from “the Golan Heights to Hebron to the Gaza Strip,” she wrote in her book, singing cover tunes and performing sketches for her fellow soldiers.

While still in the army, she was cast in a television drama as Dafna Maor, a designer hired to bring youth and relevance to a fashion company. The show was called “Ramat Aviv Gimmel” and it was a sensation.