In the first year of Israel’s battle against a death cult, I traveled the country—and saw what it means to choose life.
War heightens every human emotion. It is easier to hate in wartime, obviously. But it is also easier to love. The usual expectation that we will die in our eighth or ninth decade, quietly in our beds, is stripped away—and when you are forced to wonder whether you will live to see tomorrow, everything today is different.
This is one of the things that makes war so fascinating: It reveals the meaning of things.
In the days after the war began, I joined the Israeli pathologists who were working on identifying the bodies in the morgues. Bags were still being brought in, but with less and less in them: Many victims were being identified by bits of the mobile phones or other things on their bodies that had not burned fully. One of the skulls that had been put back together was small. Surely this was a child’s skull, I said. Possibly, replied the expert, but it could also be the head of a young adult that had simply contracted in the fire.
These pathologists went about their task with unbelievable care, but I couldn’t describe the sadness in their eyes. Nor the smell everywhere. If the thing you cannot describe about a war zone is the noise, what cannot be communicated about the aftermath of a massacre is the smell.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Free Press (paywall)
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Douglas Murray is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images
