One of the longest and most brutal conflicts in European history was the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648. It produced one literary masterpiece, a novel called The Adventures of Simplicissimus. The novel opens with the title character herding sheep.
He is kidnapped by a troop of cavalry, who proceed to loot the farmhouse that is his home, torturing his family and their workers, raping the women, throwing some into ovens and killing others in various gruesome ways. This mirrors the real horrors of the period: the Sack of Magdeburg by an imperial army under Marshall Tilly and the Irish massacres of Protestants by Catholics and Catholics by the troops of Oliver Cromwell are still remembered today. We saw similar brutality in the Congo in the early 1960s, in Vietnam and later the Great Lakes and Balkan Wars of the 1990s, inflamed by ethno-nationalist and religious or racial divisions.
Read more: A Middle East war motivated by destructive politics
The point is this: what Hamas did on 7 October is not in itself unusual. Sadistic brutality is common in conflict. What made it different was partly that the sadism was recorded and then posted online: this was something pioneered by Da’esh, of course, which makes the comparison not ridiculous (as some “experts in Islamism” have claimed) but apt, at least on this one point.
It is also partly that the sadism was not random but designed to make a point: as the Hamas leader, Ghazi Hamdan, subsequently explained on Lebanese TV, Hamas aims to destroy Israel and terrorising Israelis is a good place to start. And it is partly because of the distinctive history of Israel and the wider Jewish community.
If you talk to Israelis - from ordinary people right up to the senior ranks of politics and the IDF -their reaction is shaped by a shared historical memory of savage pogroms across Europe from the early Middle Ages right up to the C20th, carried out by Christian Rhinelanders, the citizens of York or the Cossacks of the Ukrainian steppes – and indeed by largely Muslim mobs in Cairo and Baghdad in the 1940s. It is also shaped – within living memory - by the deliberate humiliations of the Nuremburg Laws of the 1930s and the subsequent attempted genocide of the Holocaust.