The difference between man and beast is in the eyes. The glassy stare of a wild deer betrays no malice. It discloses only ignorance. Take three steps toward a deer that’s spied you and the deer dashes away. Should the deer be rabid enough to take three leaps back at you, you bolt. Either reaction is but a reflex.

Man is different. In his eyes is the warmth of civilization. Thousands of years of mutual kinship make man’s eyes the beginning of every friendship. When your neighbor looks at you and takes three steps forward, you shake hands.

But, consider the feeling in your stomach were it to be that the next time you walked out to your mailbox and caught your neighbor’s gaze, you would be in sheer ignorance as to whether the eyes you meet are of man or of beast -- of whether your neighbor will waive or will lunge. That’s the pain Israel feels today as it looks to its neighbors in Gaza.

Man can be driven to beastly acts. Hardship, drunkenness, and even fatigue can cause anger, libidinousness, and violence. But in the civilization Americans enjoy, when we look out in the morning at our neighbor’s homes, coffee in hand, our stomachs are calm.

Is a Hamas militant an animal? Or, is he more like the down, drunk, and outgoaded at the bar: pressured, oppressed, persecuted, and at his limit?

Though hardly any Americans have ever met a Hamas militant, we can now discern their nature.

How much pressure would make you rouse a family in the early morning, line them up -- mother, father, and children -- and shoot them all, one by one? Perhaps some great amount, you might think. But surely you’d feel queasy to film your still warm victims as they die. Surely you’d wait until they’ve taken their last breaths before posting to the internet your trophies. Surely in your footage the only screams would be from your victims, in terror -- none from you, in glee.

Just how much persecution would drive you to manhandle a terrified girl, blindfolded and soiled, and stuff her into the car of a gun-wielding gang among a hollering crowd? For a civilized man, that recess of his nature is an attic sealed up, a time capsule cemented closed, a basement door bricked over.

The answer to these questions, if you’re really honest, is “I don’t know.” We have the same parts as beasts. We have the same eyes and ears. We have limbs like the rest. Our hearts beat the same way, and they burn with the same passions. But if you don’t know, then you do, for encrusted over your baser selves is enough civilization that the whole of your life has supplied you with not one kernel of evidence -- not a single hint, not a solitary whisper -- that you’d ever, ever be so savage as Hamas’ militants.

You look out at your neighbors and see men, not beasts. They look out at their neighbors and see beasts, not men.

Over the coming weeks, Israel will likely seek to depose the Hamas government that attacked it -- and rightly so -- and civilians will die. Israel must ensure that as few as possible do. Each death will be as gruesome as the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Hamas -- for there is no pretty death and there is no pretty war.

Leftists will see in the equivalence of death the equivalence of cause. This will be wrong. The last bomb America dropped on its way out of Afghanistan did nothing but kill ten innocents, seven children among them. This made America incompetent, perhaps even callous, and certainly reckless. But, it did not make it the Taliban.

In the hours following their rampage, Hamas militants took to Telegram to post videos too gruesome to watch. Israel’s soldiers, by contrast, took to X to post instructions in Arabic for civilians in Gaza to move to safe shelter. They are not the same.

There are no enemy civilians. Hamas rejects this truth, but Israel, together with the broader West, endorses it -- and that, far more than its weapons, is the most essential difference between Hamas and Israel. Israel must guard that difference in the days ahead with zeal.

For a modern civilized warrior, “enemy” is the name of a battlefield target. Hamas militants name civilians their enemy, and their evil is greater than a fall from the rank of man to beast. Deer do not torture. Deer do not dance around dead fawns. No matter their trials, deer keep their God-given natures. But for a man to act as a beast is to abandon his nature, and that is an offense against the Almighty. The fall that results is through the floor and into a basement sealed up.

Image: The Israel Project