In their shoes: If I was born in Gaza, would I have joined Hamas? - opinion

As rockets recently rained down on the South, my mind wandered to footage I’d seen of Hamas fighters firing at Israel from civilian locations in Gaza. As per the Hamas scenario, the terrorists in the video had their faces covered. For some reason I wondered who they were. Were they married? Did they have children? And then my mind asked an unexpected question: Could that have been me?

What if I had been born in Gaza? What if I had been raised to hate Jews and the Jewish state — would my disposition be the opposite of what it is today? Would I want nothing more than to kill innocent people, as those in the rocket footage do?

I’m not the first person to ask this question. In the late 90s, Ehud Barak received a great deal of push back when he stated, “If I was [a Palestinian] at the right age, at some stage I would have entered one of the terror organizations and have fought from there, and later certainly have tried to influence from within the political system.” This is an unimaginable notion.

There’s only one other time in my life I can remember asking myself such a question, and it was when I first learned of Righteous Gentiles. Those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, in my mind, are the definition of courage. They defied everyone around them and did what was right at the risk of their own lives, with no hope for reward. And in the days of my youth, I was certain I would have done the same.

However, now I’m not so sure.

As much as we’d like to compare the two, Gaza is not Nazi Germany — it’s markedly worse. The inculcation and dissemination of Jew-hatred in Gaza is more virulent and has never been addressed. This commitment to bigotry is so widespread and commonplace, I fear I would have known no other reality.

The possibility of defecting

THINK OF Mosab Hassan Yousef, who’s called the “Green Prince.” He is an ex-Hamas militant who defected to Israel and served as a spy for the Shin Bet. Granted, there may be others presently working undercover for Israel, but he is the only person who grew up in that region to publicly defy the terror regime. However, the situation is so dire with our enemies, I fear that when the war ends, there won’t be any stories of Gazan citizens secretly protecting hostages.

As much as I pray it wouldn’t be true, I don’t think I could have been a righteous Gazan if raised in that environment. At best an innocent bystander, but to actively fight the death cult that exists there feels too overwhelming to my mind. Just as much as this notion frightens me, it is simultaneously a comfort. I maintain that we have the tools at our disposal to combat such hatred.

Our tradition teaches that we are human, that we will err and that the only entity devoid of wrong-doing is the Creator Himself. But unlike Christianity, Jews do not believe that man’s evil stems from original sin. Judaism contends that inside all of us, both good and evil tendencies are at constant odds with each other.

However, we are not simply left to our own devices. Just as man was created with this poison, so too we have the antidote. The Torah was given to us so that we could refine ourselves to be the best versions of who we are. This is not by any means an easy task but it is the goal for each person, both Jewish and non-Jewish. We are all meant to improve ourselves to be as Godly as possible and elevate the world through His moral call.

In this conflict, we are not just fighting for the survival of our homeland but also our way of life. Western Judeo-Christian values must triumph in this battle of good versus evil. Humans must be taught and reminded of what is right and wrong because we can convince ourselves of anything. Our timeless religious teachings should be our guides.

The realization that human nature is malleable reminded me that our enemies are not inherently monsters. Those who seek to destroy the Jewish people and Western traditions were not born this way. They were taught to hate from the moment they could speak. And as insurmountable as it seems to reverse this toxic culture, a simple Jewish teaching reminds us that it can and must be done.

The writer is a rabbi, a wedding officiant, and a mohel who performs britot (ritual circumcisions) and conversions in Israel and worldwide. Based in Efrat, he is the founder of Magen HaBrit, an organization protecting the practice of brit milah and the children who undergo it.