When Shechem raped Dinah in Genesis 34, the Torah condemns not only the man who violated her but the entire city that allowed her to remain captive. Dinah was held openly in Shechem’s home, and no one objected. Not one elder confronted the crime. Not one resident demanded her release. Their silence became their guilt.

This is the Torah’s principle: A society that tolerates the humiliation of the innocent becomes responsible for it.

October 7 Made That Principle Contemporary

The political-terrorist group Hamas did not merely murder and rape on October 7, 2023. They dragged 251 human beings—children, women, men, elderly—into Gaza. For months, those hostages were kept in houses, apartments, tunnels beneath family homes, mosques, and clinics. People fed their captors. People guarded entrances. Crowds celebrated the kidnappings. The captivity was not hidden from the population; it was woven into daily life.

And just as in Shechem, no one in Gaza intervened. Not one hostage was smuggled out. Not one family risked itself to free a stranger. Not one community leader demanded their return.

The Torah would not call this ignorance. It would call it complicity.

Dinah’s City and Gaza: A Shared Moral Failure

Shechem’s offense was personal; the city’s offense was communal. The same moral structure applies today: the crime begins with Hamas, but it enlarges to those who shelter, celebrate, or simply accept the captivity of innocents. The vast majority of Gazans supported Hamas’s actions.

Jacob criticized Shimon and Levi for endangering the family, but the Torah never suggests that the men of Shechem were innocent. Their passivity was enough to implicate them. When God protects Jacob’s family afterward, it signals that defending dignity—even forcefully—was morally justified.

The Torah’s Message for Our Generation

The world tries to draw a sharp line between Hamas and “the people of Gaza,” as though collective moral responsibility vanished in modern times, and the celebrated terrorism is not inherently a collective attack on an entire society. Dinah’s story rejects these illusions. It teaches that a society that houses kidnapped people is not neutral, and a population that normalizes and endorses cruelty shares responsibility for it.

Jacob scolded his sons Shimon and Levi for carrying out the revenge attack against Shechem’s people, and said that it would make their family a pariah. That too is repeating today, as many countries condemn and isolate the State of Israel for its actions in Gaza.

Dinah’s captivity was a test of Shechem’s moral fabric, and it failed. The captivity of Israeli hostages – for years – was a test of Gaza’s, and it also failed. The anger over the slaughter of the guilty has also left a deep mark then and today.

The lesson is simple and ancient: When a people accepts atrocity in its midst, the stain becomes communal. But it will not leave leave the actors in the just war untarnished in the days and years ahead.