October 12, 2023

The difference between man and beast is in the eyes. The glassy stare of a wild deer betrays no malice. It discloses only ignorance. Take three steps toward a deer that’s spied you and the deer dashes away. Should the deer be rabid enough to take three leaps back at you, you bolt. Either reaction is but a reflex.

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Man is different. In his eyes is the warmth of civilization. Thousands of years of mutual kinship make man’s eyes the beginning of every friendship. When your neighbor looks at you and takes three steps forward, you shake hands.

But, consider the feeling in your stomach were it to be that the next time you walked out to your mailbox and caught your neighbor’s gaze, you would be in sheer ignorance as to whether the eyes you meet are of man or of beast — of whether your neighbor will waive or will lunge. That’s the pain Israel feels today as it looks to its neighbors in Gaza.

Man can be driven to beastly acts. Hardship, drunkenness, and even fatigue can cause anger, libidinousness, and violence. But in the civilization Americans enjoy, when we look out in the morning at our neighbor’s homes, coffee in hand, our stomachs are calm.

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Is a Hamas militant an animal? Or, is he more like the down, drunk, and outgoaded at the bar: pressured, oppressed, persecuted, and at his limit?

Though hardly any Americans have ever met a Hamas militant, we can now discern their nature.

How much pressure would make you rouse a family in the early morning, line them up — mother, father, and children — and shoot them all, one by one? Perhaps some great amount, you might think. But surely you’d feel queasy to film your still warm victims as they die. Surely you’d wait until they’ve taken their last breaths before posting to the internet your trophies. Surely in your footage the only screams would be from your victims, in terror — none from you, in glee.

Just how much persecution would drive you to manhandle a terrified girl, blindfolded and soiled, and stuff her into the car of a gun-wielding gang among a hollering crowd? For a civilized man, that recess of his nature is an attic sealed up, a time capsule cemented closed, a basement door bricked over.

The answer to these questions, if you’re really honest, is “I don’t know.” We have the same parts as beasts. We have the same eyes and ears. We have limbs like the rest. Our hearts beat the same way, and they burn with the same passions. But if you don’t know, then you do, for encrusted over your baser selves is enough civilization that the whole of your life has supplied you with not one kernel of evidence — not a single hint, not a solitary whisper — that you’d ever, ever be so savage as Hamas’ militants.

You look out at your neighbors and see men, not beasts. They look out at their neighbors and see beasts, not men.