Attack on Israel was designed to spread fear and inflict pain

The terrorist killing and wounding of thousands of Jews in the homeland of the Jewish people — a day after the holiday Sukkot ended — expressed a darker desire.

Sukkot celebrates how God protected Jews who wandered the desert for 40 years. Yet, not even under the supposed protection of a modern Jewish state, were these people safe. And that was certainly the point.

But it’s a point that has no purpose other than spreading fear and inflicting pain. Mothers and babies were killed, according to witnesses and the Israeli government. In some cases, the babies were killed and then burned.

This wasn’t the killing of soldiers on a battlefield, shot from afar. There was no military or political objective. This was wanton and homicidal. The victims saw their killers. Watched them murder loved ones. Locked eyes with their tormentors before dying themselves.

While massacres are nothing new in the Middle East, how do we, as supposedly civilized human beings, react to this, how do we handle our desire for retribution without letting this powerful emotion overwhelm us? Or is that not possible under these circumstances, as passions run so high.

Remember this: Bombs dropped on Gaza don’t bring back the dead, and killing civilians on either side is wrong.

What makes this so difficult for many is that, as new details emerge, the echoes of the past become harder to ignore: The shock that in the 21st century a modern-day version of the 19th century pogrom — raids on Jewish villages that killed or drove hundreds of thousands of Jews from Russia — could occur yet again.

Those historical killings were carried out with no fear of retribution. There was no government protection of and no penalty for killings of Jewish families. The only desire was to inflict suffering on a hated minority.

The Hamas leadership that controls the Gaza Strip must have known how their attack on Israeli civilians would rekindle those dark memories. The attack was psychological as much as physical.

And it is likely, with that tragic history in mind, that Israel’s leaders now vow to destroy Hamas down to the last man. A terrible sort of progress for Jews in a devolving new-world order.

Even if that declaration comes to pass, it’s my hope that decision-makers on both sides remember something else: That the children of Israel and Gaza, as they grow up, will carry with them for a lifetime the memories of all the horrors they’ve witnessed.

As a 75-year-old retired journalist who lives in the relative safety of the Bay Area — I was born the same year Israel was created — I feel as though my own beliefs have been severely strained. I had long supported a two-state solution. Now?

I still do, even though this killing spree touches a nerve in me that reaches back two centuries, to my own grandparents’ decisions to flee Russia and Austria.