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What Israelis Are Feeling Now
(Times of Israel) Dr. Micah Goodman interviewed by Amanda Borschel-Dan - Israeli author Dr. Micah Goodman, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, was asked what many Israelis are feeling after the Hamas attack. "I'm in a state of shock, overwhelmed, because what happened in the massacre of Simchat Torah is unthinkable....I'm also filled with sadness and grief because people that I love...have someone that they love in the hands of the monsters in Gaza, and people that they love that were murdered in Be'eri and Nahal Oz, in Kfar Aza, in Sderot, in Ofakim." "I'm also feeling admiration...because we admire the spirit of our people - the amount of stories of absolute bravery of men and women in Be'eri, in Kfar Aza, in Nir Am who fought to kill terrorists, to save lives, to save their families, to save other people's families....We're also experiencing rage like we've never experienced before. Rage directed at the monsters of Hamas. This rage is going to speak very, very loudly in the next few weeks and months to come." "And maybe above anything else in this cocktail of emotions, I feel pride. I've never in my life felt more proud to be an Israeli....There's not one Israeli that's not waking up in the morning every minute of these days and asking one question: how can I help?" "When we speak about our international relationships, there are two emotions we have to be thinking about: love and fear....We want Western civilization to love us....In the Middle East, we don't want to be loved. We want to be feared....But here's the problem....Everything we do that will guarantee that the Middle East is afraid of Israelis, of these crazy, unpredictable Israelis, everything we do in order to build that myth back again is going to make people in the West not like us, not love us." "Hamas is just a front of Iran. It's one large, organic monster. We weren't attacked by a local militia, we were attacked by the Persian Empire. We were attacked by Iran....It's not just Hamas - it's a large, powerful, sophisticated network of military forces that are training and were designed to bring Israel down."