Destroy, don’t make peace, with illogical evil

At 6:22 am on Oct. 23, 1983, a member of the Islamic Jihad got into his 19-ton yellow Mercedes Benz truck on an otherwise normal day, and headed for Beirut International airport, where the 24th Marine Amphibious unit was deployed.

The marines were expecting a water truck; instead, they got a truck full of explosives. The jihadist drove his truck into the Marine Barracks, killing 241 American servicemen, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima. Sentries at the gate were under orders to keep their weapons at condition four (no magazine inserted and no rounds in the chamber), which made it difficult to respond quickly to the truck.

Only one sentry, LCpl Eddie DiFranco, was able to load and chamber a round. However, by that time the truck was already crashing into the building’s entryway. The suicide bomber, an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari, detonated his explosives, which were later estimated to be equivalent to approximately 21,000 pounds of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the four-story building into rubble, crushing many inside.

On Feb. 7, 1984, as a result of this terrorist attack, President Reagan ordered the Marines to begin withdrawing from Lebanon; the withdrawal was completed on Feb. 26, 1984.

Following the US lead, the rest of the multinational force the (including British, French and Italian), was withdrawn by the end of February.

We should have seen it coming.

Ten years later, in February 1993, a terrorist detonated another truck bomb below the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring over 1,000. The attack was meant to bring down the North tower. Eight years later, on Sept 11, 2001, they succeeded, bringing down both towers and murdering close to 3,000 civilians.

We should have seen it coming.

On the same day in 1983, Less than ten minutes later, a similar attack occurred against the barracks of the French 3rd Company of Paratroopers, 6 km away in West Beirut. A truck exploded, bringing down the nine-story building and killing 58 French paratroopers. Many of the paratroopers had gathered on their balconies moments earlier to see what was happening at the airport. It was France’s worst military loss since the end of the Algerian War in 1962.

There have been too many more such assaults since, even before Oct. 7, 2023.

This week’s portion, Beshalach, witnesses the destruction of the ancient world’s mightiest empire. After ten plagues, Pharaoh cannot let go, pursuing the Jewish people out of Egypt and driving his army forward into the splitting sea, into what will be their destruction. At last, after 210 years of servitude, the Jewish people are free, and the empire which represented the ultimate evil at the time, which enslaved our people and murdered baby boys by throwing them into the Nile, was destroyed.

And yet, Devarim 23:8 enjoins us not to hate (abhor) an Egyptian, because we were strangers in their land! What is wrong with abhorring the descendants of such an evil people? Perhaps it would be better to be commanded to hate them, and never to forget what they did to us, lest the ugly head of evil rear its head again one day?

We are commanded to remember the day we left Egypt on many occasions, but there seems to be no emphasis on remembering the terrible evil the Egyptians perpetrated against our people.

Contrast this with what happens at the end of the portion (Shemot 17:8) when we are attacked by the Amalekite nation and go to war. There (ibid. 17:14-16) we are told that no less than G-d Himself will destroy and erase even the memory of the Amalekites and we are apparently (ibid. 17:16) commanded to “wage a battle for Hashem” against Amalek forever! Indeed, 40 years later, on the eve of the Jewish people’s entry into the land of Israel, Moshe will remind the Jewish people (Devarim 25:17-19) to remember and not forget what the Amalekites did to us and to blot out their memory from under the heavens.

Why are we told to treat the Egyptian kindly and yet blot out the memory of the Amalekite? After all, the Egyptians enslaved us for over 200 years, whereas Amalek fought one battle, on one day, against us in the desert.

Perhaps, as Rav Sacks (in his Covenant and Conversation 5775) suggests, the difference is in what motivated these evil entities.

• • •

Pharaoh (Shemot 1:9) justifies his initial enslavement of the Jewish people by proclaiming that the “Israelites are becoming numerous and too strong for us.”

In other words, they hated us and wanted to enslave us — for a reason. And what they did made sense; they utilized us for slave labor which, though evil, at least made sense. Even their killing of Jewish male infants was to prevent a supposed Astrological prediction that a Jewish messiah was being born, and hence there was no reason in the Egyptian eyes to murder the baby girls.

But Amalek attacked us for no reason.

By the end of WWII it was clear the Nazis had abandoned any logical pretense for destroying us. In the summer of 1944, when the German’s greatest challenge was supplying their front lines to stand up to the advancing Allied Forces, they were also diverting 80 percent of their rail assets to transport the 400,000 Jews left in Hungary to the death camps in Poland.

It was madness — murdering the 6 million Jews meant destroying or exiling one of Western Europe’s strongest economic-base populations, along with hundreds of thousands of World War I veterans and vast amounts of genius and wealth. The correct decision, to put aside their hatred of us for a higher cause, could only happen if the reasoning for destroying us was outweighed by the reasoning for utilizing us. But that only works if there is a reason for hating us.

• • •

This was the fatal mistake many Jews made in the ghettos; it made no sense to murder such a large compliant labor force in the midst of a war, so they meekly followed orders assuming the best.

They assumed the Nazis were logical and they could not think of a reason that would override the logical conclusion that it made more sense to keep them alive. They were not incorrect from a logical perspective; they were wrong because the Nazis’ hatred of us was not logical — they hated us for who we are. Just like Amalek.

Hitler writes very clearly in Mein Kampf (it’s actually one of the few lucid points in the entire book) that he could never forgive us for introducing G-d into the world, and with it the idea of an objective right and wrong. Hitler’s dream of returning the world to its natural state of ‘might makes right’, and supremacy of the fittest who survive, could never exist side by side with the Jewish world of an objective right and wrong, where every human being is created in the image of G-d, and no one person is ever ‘better’ than another. 

And this will never change; the Jewish people will never abandon its notion of an objective ethic, we will never stop believing in one objective right and wrong. In fact, the Talmud expresses that “Whenever one does not show mercy to the created beings, it can be recognized that he is not from the seed of Abraham our patriarch” (Beitzah 32b).

So all Hitler could do was destroy us, and the only way to end that was to destroy Hitler.  They hated us simply because we exist. You can fight causal hatred and evil by removing its cause; but you cannot fight pure evil, you can only destroy it.

• • •

One of the mistakes we are sometimes guilty of in the West is to assign a rationale to hatred where none truly exists. The terrorist entities of the world: Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and, yes, the Palestinian Authority, do not hate us for any good reason, they hate us because of who we are.

That’s why whenever one reason is proven incorrect they come up with another, and it is the reason why, every time we find a solution for whatever we believe is the causal of their antagonism and hatred, a new one comes to the surface. Sadly, such hatred can never be resolved; it must be destroyed.

But this still leaves us with two possibilities: we can destroy the haters, or we can change the way they are educating their children. No one is born hating, hatred must be taught. Nazism had to (and still needs to) be destroyed, but once Germany was conquered and the next generation of German children was taught tolerance and love, things began to change.

And that is exactly what must be done today. It will not be easy and will not be quick, but we must find a way to educate the next generation of Arab and Muslim children to love and respect those with different perspectives and beliefs; it is the only to create a future that is better and brighter.

And as for Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and all the other promulgators of hatred and violence for the sake of hatred and violence, perhaps it is time to understand what the Torah was sharing with us about Amalek thousands of years ago: there is no compromise with evil; it can only be destroyed.

Food for thought, from Jerusalem.

Rabbi Freedman is rosh yeshiva at Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem. Write: Columnist@The JewishStar.com