This essay, on why Hamas’ barbarism does not justify the collective punishment of Palestine, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 15 October 2023, under the headline “Hamas’s barbarism does not justify the collective punishment of Palestinians”.

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“They too have casualties, they too have captives and they have mothers who weep… Let’s make real peace”. Not a liberal peacenik speaking from the safety of London or Washington but Yaakov Argamani, whose daughter Noa was taken hostage by Hamas at a music festival near Re’im on Israel’s border with Gaza.

I hope I never have to face the torment that now engulfs Yaakov Argamani. But if I do find myself in as dark a place as that, I hope to possess even just a strand of his humanity and moral clarity.

What makes Argamani’s comments so startling is not just the depth of his empathy, especially from a place in which the desire for vengeance would be so understandable, but also the contrast with so much of the commentary over the past week.

Many have celebrated the murderous actions of Hamas gunmen. And many, even if they refrained from rejoicing, have tried to justify those actions. You have to put Hamas’s actions in context, they argue, to view it as part of the Palestinians’ long struggle for their own state, and as the product of the repression they have faced.

Yes, there is a historical context to Palestinian violence, and Palestinians continue to suffer from Israeli repression. There is, though, no context in which the mass murder of more than 260 revellers at a music rave, or a massacre in a kibbutz, comes close to being justified, let alone provides an occasion for rejoicing.

Nor can the barbarousness of the Hamas attacks be understood as the inevitable product of a history of oppression, still less as an aspect of Palestinian resistance. These were the acts of an antisemitic, theocratic organisation detached from the moral and political frameworks that guided traditional liberation movements. As with other jihadi groups, terror has become an end in itself.

To suggest that such butchery represents the Palestinian struggle is to demean the Palestinian people and their battle for freedom and rights, to view them in the same way as do those Israeli politicians and western commentators who talk of “animals” and “savages”. There have been Palestinian leaders, and supporters, who have deplored the depravity of the acts. Hamas represents a betrayal of Palestinian hopes as well as a threat to Jews.

Condemning Hamas, its policies and actions, is not, though, the same as supporting Israeli policies. Israel has cut off power, water, food and medical supplies to Gaza, begun mass, indiscriminate bombings, and a probable ground invasion. If the stories of Hamas killings are reminiscent of the savagery of Islamic State, the images of the bombing of Gaza recall the destruction of Aleppo in Syria or Bakhmut in Ukraine.

Yet, this collective punishment and killing of civilians has won the backing of western leaders, who justify it as Israel’s “right to self-defence” against Hamas. But as Daniel Levy, one-time adviser to the former prime minister Ehud Barak, asked a BBC presenter: “Can someone credibly tell me that when the leadership of a country says ‘We are cutting off food, electricity, water, all supplies, to an entire civilian population’, that they’re targeting militants?”

Israeli leaders themselves leave little doubt. “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Force, acknowledged. “Right now, one goal: Nakba!”, tweeted the Likud MP Ariel Kallner last week. “A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”, refers to the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians after the 1948 Palestine war and the founding of the state of Israel. “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” a security official told an Israeli reporter. “There will be no buildings.”

Such sentiments are not simply responses to the shock of Hamas’s butchery. Earlier this year, when settlers, after a Palestinian gunman had killed two Israelis, rampaged through the town of Huwara, setting houses, businesses and cars alight, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, praised them, demanding that the Israeli state should “erase” the town, rather than leaving the job to ordinary citizens.

Meanwhile, Israel is turning the occupation of the West Bank into annexation. Last year’s coalition deal between prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionist party formally committed the government to “a policy whereby sovereignty is applied to Judea and Samaria”. Likud’s 1999 policy platform already “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state”. Israeli government policy is effectively for a de facto single state, but one in which most Palestinians are denied basic rights.

Part of the irony in Netanyahu’s promise to “eradicate” Hamas is that politicians like him have long helped nurture the organisation in an attempt to undermine the Palestinian struggle.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu reportedly told a meeting of Likud’s Knesset members in 2019.

From the 1970s onwards, Israel aided the development first of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, and subsequently Hamas, created by the Brotherhood during the 1987 intifada. The aim was to undermine the authority of the secular PLO. “Bolstered by this policy”, the Times of Israel observed last week, “Hamas grew stronger”. Those who want to maintain the land of Israel solely for Jews and those who want to eliminate Jews from that land are as much in a mutual embrace as in a death struggle.

Since one of the banes of contemporary public debate is the charge of “false equivalence”, often used to dismiss arguments without bothering to refute them, let me make clear that I am not equating Hamas and Israel. I am pointing rather to the way that both sides use unconscionable policies of the other to justify the unjustifiable.

All this explains the importance of Yaakov Argamani’s argument. Not in his call for peace (everyone calls for peace, even as they slaughter babies or demolish apartment blocks) but in the depth of his understanding of Israel/Palestine as a shared land that can only survive if the rights and dignities of both Jews and Palestinians are recognised.

Whether in a single state with equal rights, or in two states, “self-determination” can only be the self-determination of all the people who live between the river and the sea, Palestinians and Jews, in a shared future. No bomb, no butchery can erase that.