The West has rewarded Hamas for the torture of Evyatar David

Spectator

a day ago

They're making Jews dig their own graves again. In grim mimicry of their Nazi heroes, who would often force Jews to dig ditches before shooting them into them, Hamas has released a video showing a shockingly emaciated Israeli hostage digging a grave. 'This is the grave where I think I'm going to be buried,' says the bag of bones as he feebly scoops up dirt with a spade. It is one of the most chilling images we have seen in this century.
The man in the video is 24-year-old Evyatar David. He was abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas's pogrom of 7 October 2023. He has been held in the dark, dank tunnels of Gaza's neo-fascists for 666 days. And he has clearly suffered beyond imagination. He is a 'living skeleton, buried alive', said his family when the clips of his ashen, raw-boned body were released.
Then there are the words young Evyatar is forced to say. 'What I'm doing now is digging my own grave,' he says, as his wasted arms and angular frame struggle to manoeuvre the spade. 'Every day my body becomes weaker and weaker,' he says before bending with exhaustion and leaning against the spade for support. All of it captured on camera by some monster propagandist hell-bent on exploiting this deathly Jew for moral gain.
This is more than torture. It is more than psychological cruelty. It is more than a war crime. It is the violent rebirth of the fascist imagination itself. Hamas is expressly paying tribute to the Jew-killers of the past. It is aping the Nazi tactic of jailing Jews for being Jews and gleefully starving and humiliating them. For all the hyperbolic cries about how Israel is executing a 'new holocaust' in Gaza, in truth it is this, this intentionally famished Jew, this videoed spectacle of racist barbarism, that most clearly echoes that darkest moment in human history.
At the same time, Islamic Jihad released a video of the 22-year-old hostage, Rom Braslavski. He has wasted away. He sobs as he says what his Islamofascist captors have told him to say. The camera pans his withered frame as he writhes in agony from starvation. His jailers seem to take glee in his physical and mental anguish. 'Look what we did to this Jew!' they are essentially saying to the world's anti-Semites.
These vile clips, this videoed taunting of half-starved Jews, made me think not only about the wickedness of Hamas and Islamic Jihad but also about the suicidal credulity of many in the West.
Just think about it. When Western media outlets parrot the press releases of Hamas-run institutions in Gaza, this is who they are citing: a movement that takes pleasure in the violent degradation of Jews; a movement that thinks nothing of making a global spectacle of Jewish agony. Next time you hear the BBC reference the 'Hamas-run Ministry of Health', remember who they are quoting – this army of anti-Semites that parades stolen, gaunt Jews before the eyes of the world.
Worse, these are the monsters to whom Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney have promised a state. All three say they will shortly recognise the State of Palestine. Yes, they paid lip service to the importance of disarming Hamas. And yet to offer statehood to a territory that is still part-controlled by these barbarous militants who kidnap, jail, starve and humiliate Jews is unconscionable in the extreme.
Evyatar David's broken, ravenous body should haunt Starmer's every waking moment, for he has essentially rewarded the men who did this to Evyatar. That is certainly how Hamas sees it. They welcomed Starmer's promise of statehood as proof that 'victory and liberation are closer than we expected'. That Starmer and the others gave their imperious nod of approval to nationhood for Palestine even as Jews still languish in its fascistic jails is almost beyond moral comprehension. It will do nothing to speed the release of Evyatar and Rom. Quite the opposite: Hamas is now convinced that Jew-torture wins prizes, and it isn't wrong.
Here's my question: why does Hamas have so little shame over what it has done? Why is it so content to show the world the consequences of its fascistic loathing for the Jewish nation and the Jewish people? The answer, I think, is because it knows even this will be blamed on Israel. It knows the West's activist classes are so thoroughly under the spell of Israelophobia that even these dystopic, Nazi Europe-style images of haggard Jews will not be enough to arouse them back to reason. It knows it enjoys carte blanche among our Israel-hating influencers.
It is a testament to the savagery of Hamas that it has visited such racist atrocities on young Jews. And it is a testament to the ethical disarray of the West that Hamas thinks it can get away with it. For the sake of Evyatar, Rom and the long life of the Jewish State, we urgently need to repair our moral reason.