The Importance Of Hatred In Dealing With Hamas

One of the most gruesomely fascinating aspects of the Israel-Hamas War is how so many average citizens in Western countries have aligned themselves with Hamas. As if Hamas is the innocent victim and Israel is the evil aggressor.  These are people who have grown to love Hamas and to hate Israelis.  

Before I get any further into a discussion of love and hate with regards to the Israel-Hamas War, I would like to discuss the meanings of love and hate from the point of view of my philosophical model.  Love is the process whereby a person moves into a strong emotional bond with another person or persons.  In romantic love, a person moves into a deep bond, actually a partial emotional merger.  On the other hand, with liking, a person has a shallow bond with another person or persons.  Liking someone offers very little protection against the numbness, the entropic disintegration present in modern technological society.

With hate we are dealing with a process whereby a person is actively moving away from a possible deep emotional bond with another person or persons.  We are not talking about simply floating away in a vacuum, but rather actively pushing oneself away emotionally from another person.  Hatred can consume a hater, can blow a hater apart, if it is not exercised with a certain amount of focus towards the person or persons being hated.  To elaborate, the hater is not simply pushing himself away from the person being hated, but he is actively pushing the person he hates further away from him.  Hate in its most effective form is an organic imprint that the hater preserves on the person that he hates.  It is an organic imprint that the person being hated actively feels.  By the same token, it is an organic imprint that the hater feels within himself as well.

Now in today’s world everyone from psychologists to theologians is very concerned about the harmful effects of hate.  Supposedly, the people who are constantly hating end up inevitably being consumed by it.  According to this way of thinking, it is always a very destructive emotion that ends up hurting the hater as much as the person or persons that are being hated.

But is it automatically true that hate hurts the hater as much as the person being hated?  I think that the desire to preserve organic imprints of hate on the person being hated is the means by which hatred is focused and thus prevented from blowing up the hater.  And as for the notion that a person can just make hatred disappear inside oneself when it is based on a significant reason is just nonsense.  When it is forced to remain inside a person, the only way it can disappear is when a person develops techniques to diminish the strength of the sense of self.  This can be done through yoga, meditation and other Eastern religious techniques.  Which act as the foundation for being able to turn the other cheek, a Christian solution for dealing with hate.  But if a person wants to truly keep his authentic self while dealing with hate, then he has to find a way of expressing it without letting it destroy him.

The Jewish religion offers all kinds of structured punishments for dealing with different levels of wrongs.  Many of them involve payments by the injuring party to the injured.  But what kind of formalized payment could ever suffice to satisfy the desire for revenge on the part of the Jewish people for what was done to them on October 7th of this year.  It was such a unique isolated action of horrific…what words can describe the actual barbarism on that day.  The horror of the Holocaust was the use of robotic reason as the foundation for the extermination of the Jewish people.  October 7th was the opposite.  To say that Hamas acted like animals is to unfairly shame animals.  Now granted there was a certain amount of cognitive reasoning setting up what happened on October 7th.  But then the execution of what happened represented a level of base savagery unprecedented in modern times.  I don’t think it is necessary for me to recount some of the acts perpetrated on that horrible day in order to make my case.

So, I intensely hate Hamas like every Jewish person that I know, at least.  And I am fortunate in that I can write articles to attempt to  articulate my feelings, in order to try and explain my feelings, in order to sort out my feelings, in order to help prevent myself and the people who read my articles from exploding apart.  Other people deal with their hatred by rallying Jews together through group organizing.  I know of people who are financially able to organize flights filled with all kinds of supplies to send to Israel to help the combatants prosecute their war.  And, of course, I know of young Jews from many countries in the diaspora who are going to Israel to volunteer to fight for this incredibly noble righteous cause.  The important thing to realize is that if these people had lost their capacity to hate, they couldn’t survive and they couldn’t help other Jewish people to survive.  Hate is a wonderful and necessary emotion.