Andrew Bolt: Hamas killers don’t care what side you’re on

Hamas does not care who it kills as it slaughters the very people living in a pro-peace kibbutz many free Palestine protesters would align themselves with.

If only some protesters had come with me to learn something. I’ve just walked through a place where terrorists killed the kind of Leftist dreamers who now march through our streets, demanding “freedom” for Palestine.

It’s a place Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to visit during last month’s trip to Israel. It’s like she didn’t want to learn how wrong she is, too.

Before being attacked, Be’eri was so socialist that all the residents shared their wages. Picture: Getty Images

That place is Be’eri, which was so socialist that all the residents shared their wages, so listen well, you Marxist marchers, shouting your right-on slogans about wicked Israel. These are your people I’m talking about.

Be’eri was your socialist heaven on earth, a kibbutz so devoted to peace that even now – after Hamas terrorists from Gaza on October 7 slaughtered 100 of its residents, including a baby – their business manager still tells me they won’t carry guns.

It raised chickens, hired out bicycles and made its own furniture, of the earnest kind.

It was so devoted to higher things that its main business was a printing plant, and the books I found scattered on the floor of one shattered home included Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, asking how we cope with having only one unrepeatable life to lead.

True, a few doors down, 65-year-old Judith Weiss was reading The Lions of Sicily, a melodramatic family saga.

Did Judith ever make it to Sicily? Israeli soldiers instead found her body at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, where her kidnappers were storing it so they could trade one more dead Jew for several live Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails.

Israeli soldiers instead found Judith’s body at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza

Did any Be’eri residents try to say, just before they were shot, that they sympathised with Palestinians, just like Australian protesters?

Did any Be’eri residents try to say, just before they were shot, that they sympathised with Palestinians, just like Australian protesters?

I suspect their Hamas killers weren’t interest in talk, or Kundera or finding friends.

No, the men who stormed Judith’s home were so uninterested in debate that they even shot her computer. I found it in Judith’s little office, with bullets sprayed at the screen as if even thought was their enemy.

So you there, marching with your Socialist Alternative signs and chanting “free Palestine”, don’t you realise you’d be a dead as Judith, too, had you been there that day?

But no protesters were with me last Sunday in Be’eri. Nor was Wong.

Instead there were dozens of Israeli soldiers, quietly walking past the burned and silent buildings of the dead and the kidnapped, reminding themselves of why they were at war.

I drove five minutes more down the road to the site of the Nova music festival.

Another 150 or so soldiers were in that field, among the red wild anemones, looking at the pictures erected on posts of the 364 young music lovers who had been murdered there that same day.

If only Australian protesters had come and seen what I’ve seen.

For decades, recruits to Israel’s armoured corps would climb Masada, a mountain overlooking the Dead Sea, to the ruins of the fortress where Jewish rebels nearly 2000 years ago resisted for months against their Roman besiegers, and then killed themselves rather than be captured.

“Masada shall not fall again,” the recruits would pledge.

Now Israeli soldiers go to Be’eri and Nova and other sites where 1200 Jews and even some Muslim Israelis were slaughtered on October 7, some even beheaded and castrated, and others raped or kidnapped. Never again, they vow.

I thought it important to visit, too, on my holiday, and see even more clearly why every Israeli I’ve met, of the Left and Right, is unswayed by the anti-Israel protests in the West.

Yes, Western politicians like Wong storm and preen, demanding Israel stop fighting.

But they just want an easy life. Wong wants to please Muslim voters, cosy up to Arab nations and get Labor’s hard Left off her back.

Israelis want much more. They want to survive.

Wong also has nothing to lose but voters. But if Israelis don’t win this war, they may lose everything – life and their tiny homeland, so small it could fit into Tasmania three times over.

Again and again, Israelis tell me this is a war Israel must win. Muslim countries around them have already tried to destroy them in wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Yet another war is also looming, with the Hezbollah terrorist army in Lebanon, much stronger than Hamas. Hezbollah shot 60 missiles into Israel the day I was at the border.

If only Australian protesters had come and seen what I’ve seen. Maybe they’d then understand why Israel must fight, and why it’s our fight, too. For civilisation.