There’s a brilliant memorial piece written by Melanie Phillips on the subject of the third anniversary of the October 7^th Pogrom.

As I said the piece is one I recommend that you read in its entirety but the thing that caught my eye were a couple of lines about how ordinary Gazans treated those who Hamas and other Gazans had held in captivity in Gaza. It is a couple of lines that I believe give us the measure of Gazan society.

Ms Phillips said:

“According to hostages who survived, not one Gazan civilian they encountered treated them kindly. Not one Gazan civilian informed against their Hamas abductors or helped them escape.”

That’s an astonishing fact. You’d think that a society of tens of thousands of people it would produce some who might have sympathy with those carried off into unjust captivity? But it didn’t.

Even in Nazi Germany there were those who risked all to hide Jews or protect dissidents or who spoke out against the Nazis. They did that at a time when people lived in a state that was supremely oppressive towards those who dissented, which was saturated with Nazi propaganda and a society in which there was the ever present and lethal threat of informers or to put it colloquially, filthy grasses.

Nazi Germany produced or had within it citizens who despised the Nazis and who did what they could to counter Nazi ideals. They did this even though the final result, if they were caught or betrayed, would be death.

Gaza has produced no such decent individuals willing to stand up for those oppressed or held in captivity by Hamas. Maybe we’ll hear in a decade or so in the future that there were such people who helped or who went against Hamas, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting.

It’s likely that the description given by Ms Phillips about the moral depravity of the Gazans will turn out to be true and that there were no people in Gaza willing to do the right thing.

Link

Ms Phillips’s piece.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-chilling-anniversary