I had a conversation the other day with a woman associated with a very liberal Protestant church who’d been organizing a charitable event for Gaza. The event was a dinner intended to raise money for a well-known medical relief organization. The event was a success, but she told me with chagrin that she had to be careful to advertise it in such a way as to avoid mentioning it to those members of the congregation who might have objected.

She read the room right: it’s certain that some would have objected, and that cumulatively, their objections might have scuttled the event. Presumably, the objection here is that when a Jewish state commits genocide against a non-Jewish population—after decades of apartheid, conquest, and military rule over that population—it’s objectionable to intervene. Its victims should starve, suffer, and die without resistance, in surrender to God’s will for them. The Jewish State must be allowed to finish the work of extermination. Palestine is Amalek, and Amalek must be wiped out.

When Christians recite the Lord’s Prayer, they pray that God’s will is to be done. If God commands apartheid, conquest, military occupation, and genocide, presumably that, too, is to be done. I’m tempted to conclude that a specifically Jewish genocide has now become a Christian sacrament. I only hesitate over the phrase “has now become.” The truth is, it always was one. Jesus came to complete the Law, not to abolish it. And mass murder was an essential part of the Law from the start. Amalek wasn’t invented yesterday.

For fifty years, I’ve heard Jews and Christians (and atheists and a few Hindus) lecture me about the militant fanaticism of Islam, a topic on which I know a thing or two, both from study and from personal experience. But it’s an obvious, easily discoverable truth that no injunction to jihad in the Qur’an even begins to approximate the psychopathic injunctions to mass murder in the Hebrew Bible. And if these injunctions don’t literally find their way into the New Testament, Christians remain their eager apologists and zealous practitioners. People of this sort, so eager to point fingers, tend to forget that the blood of innocents is the sea in which they swim.

I don’t know how the historiography of the future will be written. I only know how I would write it. I would describe “the West,” like Rome, as a self-styled civilization that courted its own destruction and deserved it. If the “barbarians” showed up at our gates, it would be difficult to figure out who would truly deserve that epithet, the people on the outside, or those within. In some cases, maybe not so hard. The barbarians—the Israelis—have now entered, emptied, and destroyed Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. No scare quotes are needed here. I highly doubt that the hospital was any kind of Hamas command center, but I wouldn’t change my tune if it was. It’s only too obvious in Gaza who the barbarians are, and who are their victims.

Westerners need to realize that their depredations will not, in the fullness of time, go unanswered. You can’t do what’s been done to Palestine or Lebanon for over a century, and expect things to work out all right. But this realization should extend beyond the usual threat of “terrorism”—retaliation—from foreigners. What Westerners should know in advance is that there are people in their very midst who patiently await the “barbarian” response, neither inviting it nor facilitating it nor enabling it, but just impassively expecting it, like the inevitability of death itself.

When it happens, expect no outpouring of sympathy, outrage, or condemnation from us. And don’t ask for any. The ensuing response will be an eerie, peculiar, even clinical silence, like a headstone without an epitaph. It will mirror the indifference that the West feels for its own victims right now, and echo the silence we hear all around us. It will come as a shock to some, and appear as callous, depraved indifference to others. But for others, it will simply represent a difference in priorities, even a perverse expression of the Golden Rule: as our deaths and suffering bored you, your deaths and suffering will bore us. And in that silence, however briefly, moral equality will have its day, and justice will reign on Earth.