David's children against Goliath: "Where there is danger, the saving power grows"

Israel continues the terror it began with its attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque with air and land-to-land missile attacks against Gaza. Israel presents this terror to the world as its right to defend itself. But every time it defends itself, it ends up massacring dozens of children.

There has been no attack directed at it so far that has properly struck a single life. Yet after every rocket that comes from Hamas it pours tons of bombs on Gaza's civilian population, killing many civilians and destroying hospitals, mosques and workplaces. It makes life a little harder still for the people of Gaza, who have lived under a total siege for 15 years and whose lives, because of this, have come close to turning into a concentration camp. People are deprived of medicine, food, electricity, gas, communication with the world, transportation and every kind of basic need. Israel's right to defend itself! And the world has turned this sentence, expressed with such hypocrisy and such repulsive shamelessness, into a bigoted creed. Yet the aggressor is Israel. The occupier is Israel. The killer is Israel. It is Israel that displays the villainy of killing children without batting an eye. Wherever the name of Israel is seen, every human being acquires the right to defend himself against Israel. But the reverse is sheer hypocrisy. Those who voice this hypocrisy believing Israel's propaganda sincerely are, in the mildest sense of the word, fools and simpletons. They are fanatics who have shut their eyes to the world so much that they choose to see events through Israel's eyes. But those who voice a significant part of these statements without believing them are creatures whose morals have been shattered by Israel's material or political bribes or its threats.

Seeing the reality of an Israel that attacks mosques, people performing their worship, and civilian settlements, in the face of the images of children's deaths that lie before us, differently is a choice. This choice is the choice of those who have sold their souls to devils. Unfortunately, today's civilized world is the world of those who have sold their souls to devils.

Officials of the US and EU countries can still speak of Israel's right of defense. Those who, despite these images, advise Israel restraint and strongly condemn Hamas's rocket fire have something seriously wrong with their minds, their consciences and their souls.

Indeed, there is a world that emboldens Israel in these reckless attacks and gives it a spoiled confidence. This world itself is under the occupation of Israel, or of the Zionist mindset that put the Israel project into practice. Before the occupation of Jerusalem and Palestine, the US and Europe were occupied. The will of the entire Arab world has been occupied. If Jerusalem is under occupation, the whole world is under occupation. This is also something Israel assumes. It trusts too much in the stage it has reached in this occupation. That is why, thinking that no obstacle remains before it, it continues its occupations, its violations, its genocide.

"But the obstacle will come, and is coming, from a place it never expected, and perhaps we never expected either," we had said. Despite the pessimistic picture we have drawn above, unexpected setbacks and obstacles have begun to appear before Israel from places it never expected. "Where danger grows, the saving power rises too," the German poet Hölderlin had said. In fact the saving power sometimes grows right within that danger, because of that danger, and every calamity comes as a test together with its opportunities and its possibilities. And this is a maxim to which every believer must hold fast: "Indeed, with every hardship there is ease; indeed, with every hardship there is ease."

The threat to Israel, the obstacle, and the great force that will finish it, all arise precisely from its own aggression. The resistance that its aggression has produced among the oppressed Palestinian people is growing in proportion to its aggression. The defense power it had trusted so much until now, that shield it named the "Iron Dome" with all its arrogance and self-confidence, was turned into a sieve with the rockets developed by the people of Gaza, whom it has kept under siege for 15 years, depriving them of their most basic human needs. The children of David are now not the Children of Israel but the Palestinians. Just as the Goliath-ized Children of Israel, with their formidable armor and their deadly weapons, could not withstand the slings of the Palestinian children who stood up before them, they are now beginning to feel on their foreheads, with all its pain, a new stone of David.

The Hamas rockets, which until now disturbed only the regions near Gaza, have proven today that they can reach every point in Israel and strike anyone, and that they can pierce the Iron Dome that protects Israel like Goliath's armor. Can you imagine what this means for the occupying settlers of Israel, gathered from many parts of the US and Europe, who came to live the worldly life promised to them within an affluent society, as though they would never die?

This is where the nightmare begins for Israel, but the worst of the nightmare has not yet been lived. Nightmare upon nightmare awaits Israel. Worse than these is the identity feelings, revived by the latest acts of aggression, of the Palestinian Arabs who make up 20 percent of its population, whom it thought it had assimilated and rendered ineffective through the comfort and advantages of citizenship it offered to its Jewish citizens.

Those Arabs now feel a great apartheid humiliation because of the attacked Jerusalem and because of their kin and co-religionists whose homes are being stolen, and they are rising up. A greater nightmare is this possibility of revolt. This possibility used to be very remote; now it has turned into a reality that disturbs all tranquility. Israel now feels the diaspora, its own diaspora, at the points where it felt safest.