Straight up anger and mourning should be a legitimate response to the gruesomely staged "release" of the living hostages and those returning in boxes. The ability to feel anger towards those who promote genocide against the Jewish people is basic self-preservation. If we can't feel rage against the savages who invaded our country, massacred, tortured, raped and kidnapped our people, burnt our yishuvim and our farms, put on sick public spectacles to revel in all these crimes, if we aren't allowed to be angry or can't feel rage, then how do we feel anything at all? How do we internalise the murderous hate directed against us and how do we defend ourselves from it? The anger has a purpose, the recognition of the utter depravity of the enemy has a purpose.

We have been taught that we aren't allowed to be angry at our enemy, we aren't allowed to even mention the enemy. We have entire memorial days where we mourn our losses without even mentioning the enemy once, without naming him, without pointing fingers - so and so was killed in a terror attack, so and so fell in battle, so and so was murdered in their home. But the enemy has no name, no face, no identity in most of these ceremonies. There's just an anonymous, amorphous force that culls our people. We focus on mourning the dead, remembering their lives, not on who took their lives, out of a fear that naming names of the enemy leads down a path to a hatred that gives way to revenge and the loss of our civilised humanity. Yet doesn't losing the ability to be angry at the monsters who did this, who continue to revel in this barbarity, show that we have already lost something of that civilised humanity? Isn't part of being a civilised human feeling rage at those humans who engage in inhuman savagery and brazenly trample on the concept of a civilised society? How do we protect ourselves, defend against an enemy intent on our erradication, if we are not allowed to feel anger at what this enemy has done to us?