Author Roni Gelbfish, one of the people moving away from the left since the massacre on the Gaza Perimeter a month ago, admits that her ideological world has collapsed and that Hamas considers all Jews legitimate targets for death regardless of what they think or where they live.
In an interview for Makor Rishon’s Shabbat section, Gelbfish said: “My worldview is that man is good from youth, but that various circumstances like wars or occupation could corrupt that. My identification with the pain of the Palestinians derived from the worldview that we are all the same, that people are all equal, and that only circumstances change that. In the face of what we saw, I asked myself if there is a culture here which encourages and cultivates cruelty. I wanted to understand if there are cultures whose hate for us is so deep that they completely dehumanize us, and they will continue to treat us like that regardless of circumstances.”
Of the different political camps waking up, she wrote: “Rightwingers write that Netanyahu has to go home alone with the whole leadership, and leftwingers admit they feel like me. There are two deep awakenings here – the first is characteristic of the left and central side of the political map, and this is the understanding that there are people who want to kill us because we are Jews, and nothing we do or say will change that. The second point, which is shared by right and left alike, is the awakening from the protective state. We were abandoned to our fate, and this is a collective experience.”
She said of Hamas’ view of all the Jews: “In one of the clips, Hamas terrorists could be seen waving the captives from the kibbutzim around and declaring ‘we captured settlers.’ Settlers, that’s how they called the people of the Gaza Perimeter. And then I understood that for them, a ‘settler’ is anyone who is in Israeli territory. We are all marked for death equally, and for Hamas, all residents of the State of Israel are settlers.”