Why it’s not OK to laugh at those who died in the Hezbollah pager attacks

And yet, in some corners of the Jewish diaspora, people allowed themselves to revel not just in the tactical victory, but in the bloodiness of it – the blown-off testicles, the fingerless hands. This was no street party in Tel Aviv, but there were virtual high-fives and memes and a collective exhale as the sheer brilliance of the operation sunk in.

As if a videogame sounded “Ka-ching,” Israel supporters erupted in jubilation across social media, one joke at a time, but the exuberance left a sour taste.

Hezbollah and Hamas – the terrorist arms of the Iranian regime – are violent organisations that celebrate death. That is the central distinction between Israel, its Jewish diaspora, and the enemy it seeks to destroy.

To celebrate in the face of death is a profound misstep; to exult in destruction is to sink to the level of those Israel is fighting. One cannot claim the moral high ground and, in the same breath, cheer the elimination of human life.

Let me be clear: the destruction of Hezbollah’s operational capacity was an enormous achievement. But even necessary military action comes at a heavy cost and to celebrate that cost is to compromise the values we claim to uphold. Even if the fallen are terrorists, even if they were plotting our destruction.

What we saw in the aftermath of this attack was a desperate need for something, anything, that could be seen as a success after almost a year of relentless bad news. People clung to the operation as a symbol of Israel's ingenuity and strength – “Don’t mess with Jews,” the victory seemed to say. “This is what happens when you do.”

And yet, in the darkness of sleepless nights, images of war haunt me. I see families burned alive in their homes, their final embrace in Kibbutz Be’eri; I see mutilated bodies at Nova festival; I see hostages paraded in Gaza, as their captors toy with them in sick cruelty. Which will they kill next?

I see pieces of the 12 children in the Golan Heights.

I also see limp youth pulled from the rubble of Gaza and Palestinian mothers weeping over the bodies of their dead sons. I see starving toddlers queuing for food in the ravaged landscape of urban warfare.

I see men – terrorists – with their innards scattered on a street corner in Beirut.

We cannot ignore the humanity in all these faces and bodies.

In the dead of night, I struggle to hold these images together at the same time, to reconcile the pain, the terror, the destruction on all sides.

This war, like so many before it, is a battle over imagery – but this time they are all over social media. Both sides have weaponised violent imagery in a fight for victimhood, longing to claim the most suffering and sympathy in the world’s eyes. 

This war is existential for Jews. We fight for our survival. But amid these images, and during the fight for existence, have we sacrificed justice? Have we, in our desperation, lost the moral clarity that has been the cornerstone of our ethics?

Some might say our ethics only survived because our ancestors managed to destroy the enemy. As the old saying goes, “they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!”

But in my moments of doubt, I fear that we have become the very people our enemies accuse us of being: stripping the other of their capacity to think and feel, dehumanising them.

And when I finally wake from troubled nights, the thought lingers: If we allow ourselves to be stripped of our humanity, then we have already lost something more precious than our land.