When I was a kid, there was this mean teasing game kids played on each other, by simply repeating everything one person said. I haven't seen it in a while, but it was pretty infuriating back in the day, because not only could you not have a normal conversation with someone who's just copying you, but you're being mocked on top of it.
This is, in a way, the premise of what Hamas and their supporters are doing to Israel and Jews in the media division of their war on us. And it's unfortunately working so far.
For anyone who doesn't want to follow the herd of noise, and is willing to examine the sequence of events of the past 7 months, here is an unpopular perspective, based on facts:
Hamas launched an indescribably horrific massacre on 10/07- invading a music peace festival and family homes, sadistically shooting, burning, mutilating, raping, burning, torturing, murdering, and hostage-taking. All of this targeting civilians, not military.
Then, when Israel responds the way any rational, responsible people would: by holding Hamas accountable, trying to rescue the hostages, and to eliminate the terrorists who did this, what was Hamas's response?
"YOU, Israel, have done all this to US (the Palestinians) for the last 75 years."
Which is, of course, patently, flagrantly false, but then factuality is not a part of their program.
They rely on the old trick, popularized by Hitler and the Nazis that if you repeat a lie enough times, with enough conviction, indignation, and aggression, people will start to believe it. And even promote it.
They vacillate between completely denying what they did on 10/07 (despite having provided much of the video footage themselves) and acknowledging/ justifying/ celebrating it. Oh and in some super-creative cases, shockingly trying to accuse the IDF of doing it to their own citizens. (Seriously.)
"We didn't do it, YOU did it."
What?
But the copying game doesn't stop there.
If you read the original Hamas charter, which is readily available online for free, it says, very explicitly, that their goal is to conquer all of Israel and eliminate all Jews, everywhere.
On the other hand, if you read Israeli national literature and sample its culture, you will read about and witness freedom and rights and inclusion and diversity and hope and the deep desire for peace and prosperity everywhere.
So the Hamas charter is a call for a Jewish GENOCIDE: quite literally. It was actually a Jew who coined the word genocide, to describe the deliberate mass murder of 6 million in the Holocaust. (This is not our first persecution rodeo.)
But what Hamas has astonishingly succeeded in doing is calling for and attempting a genocide on Israel and then accusing ISRAEL of genocide when she dares to defend herself in the war, instead of cooperating with being destroyed. The pretense they use is that once they perpetrated their horrific attacks on 10/07, and promised to do more like it, they forced Israel into a war, and now Gazans are dying. In the war they gleefully instigated and daily choose to perpetuate.
Now, most Westerners have no idea how war works. Many have this naive superiority complex borne from the privilege of not being terrorized or living in a war zone, where they can sit on comfy couches and sanctimoniously preach insipid platitudes like: "Violence is not the answer to violence," or "War is evil- people just need to learn to talk out their differences." Which sounds so lovely, simple, and obvious until you're personally shot and tortured and raped repeatedly by an enemy whose goals is to annihilate you. You don't have the luxury to just "use your words to work things out" with a wild animal, and you likewise can't do so with a savage human who's in the middle of trying to annihilate you.
Israel has tried this repeatedly and learned every time that it's impossible to negotiate effectively with terrorists, because they will say whatever they want to, including blatant lies, and then just violate every agreement in the name of their own evil agenda. (Murdering all Jews. And eventually colonizing everyone else. They're not quiet about this agenda.)
Of course moral people don't want war. Israel never wanted or initiated this war, or any others. But if a war is declared and forced on you against your will, by an enemy with no interest in peace, coexistence, or "talking it out," you only have two options: surrender and be destroyed, or fight back in order to survive. Israel has tried repeatedly to negotiate peaceful solutions. That is not what terrorists want.
Once a country is at war, tragically, there will be civilian casualties. Israel doesn't start wars, and tries diligently to minimize civilian casualties- both their own and even their aggressors'. This includes protecting, warning, and evacuating them from combat as much as possible.
Hamas, by contrast, aims to maximize civilian fatality- Israel's and their own. This is not speculation; they say this openly. They praise and promote "martyrdom" (shahid) and Jihad ("holy" wars). They honor and generously compensate terrorists and their families. They "honor-kill" and execute their own who deviate from their draconian rules. They create elaborate videos bragging about their brutality- both that which they perpetrate upon Israel and that which they force upon their own citizens, by trapping them in hospitals, schools, mosques, and densely populated areas which they use to store their ammunition and hide their terrorists.
Worst of all, they brainwash their own children into this cult of violence and destruction, to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish innocent civilians from terrorists in training.
But despite all this, they know they will win the empathy of gullible, ignorant "progressives" by playing the victim. So while to their own audiences and to Israel they gloat about the "success" of their intifada terror campaigns, to the West they present a narrative of oppression: fictitious, inflated numbers of casualties, and misleading photo and video content, pretending it's all just innocent civilians and children being pummeled by the big bad bullies of the IDF. (You know, the ones who reach out repeatedly trying to help and relocate civilians.)
Hamas and their minions also engage in a concept of "tekkiya" which is the permissibility of lying for the sake of their "religious" agenda. Their propaganda campaign is absurdly successful in the media- mainstream and social, and earns them copious vocal support and donations.
And so while Hamas leaders rake in funds and aid earmarked for Gazan citizens, they steal this for themselves, creating rampant poverty, abusing their own people, and then blame Israel for not gifting them more stuff, and accuse them of blocking aid.
Let's talk about the apartheid copying game.
If you go to Israel, you will see a vibrant, diverse population of race, color, ethnicity, and religions. Many Palestinians even commute into Israel daily for work. You might also see big, foreboding signs, identifying borders to Palestinian areas, boldly warning Israelis that they are not welcome or safe there. And, in fact, other than hostages, you would find zero live Israelis there. But the audacity, the chutzpah, the hypocrisy, to accuse ISRAEL of apartheid, would be comical, if it weren't so surprisingly swallowed hook, line, and sinker, by the global masses.
They call for Jewish genocide then falsely accuse Israel of "genocide."
They segregate their area from Israelis and accuse Israel of "apartheid."
They shower rockets, stabbings, shootings, and perpetrate atrocities upon civilians in Israel, and then falsely accuse Israel of doing what they themselves did, in order to rationalize it.
They attack innocents, then play the victim when Israel joins the war Hamas started, and then accuse Israel of playing the victim about the 10/07 massacre.
They ethnically cleansed Jews out of nearly every Muslim country, and then use that term to describe Israeli defense of Jewish survival against predatory neighbors.
The linguistic appropriation is astonishing and viral.
Sinister, brilliant, and chilling.
Even the propagandist vilification of the word Zionism is part of this strategy. You can't (right now) open hunting season on "Jews" but redefine and label Zionists and you have a perfect euphemism for the next attempted Final Solution.
They kidnapped hostages from Israel- including babies and toddlers and the elderly from their beds, and then rebranded the Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons as "hostages" and terrorist teens as "children" and shockingly fabricated a sick equivalency, in order to force Israel's hand in a nauseating, grossly imbalanced barter for human lives.
Hamas accuses Israel of "stealing land" from them, when in fact, the Gaza strip was ripped away from Israelis who lived there legally in 2005, and given to Palestinians, as a desperate attempt for peace. They then ruined this beautiful area and tanked their own economy, led by corrupt (elected) leadership that invested in violence and terror rather than education and development. They stole and misappropriated billions of donated dollars to create terror tunnels and rockets rather than civic infrastructure and quality of life, and rewrote the story to blame Israel for their own repeated failures as a people.
They glorified hatred of Jews (and all other "infidels"), constantly shot rockets, and sent suicide bombers and stabbers into Israel. They are very dedicated to violence and destruction, at the cost of their own safety and wellbeing.
Israel in turn, created innovative defense strategies and technology, like the Iron Dome and ubiquitous bomb shelters, to protect her people, and fortified borders to allow workers to pass through, but not (as many) terrorists. Nearly every country does this.
This utterly logical, normative reinforcement of security and borders was reframed by the anti-Israel propagandists as making Gaza into an "open air prison." Which essentially means: a territory that has security checkpoints. Like, you know, pretty much all countries and geopolitically defined areas. By that definition, I grew up in the open air prison of the US, and my husband is from the open air prison of England. We met in the open air prison of Israel. We're all "imprisoned" within the borders of where we are, and must pass through security protocols to cross into another country or territory.
But when where you are is governed by a death cult, with self-inflicted misery and poverty, by leaders who turned their usurped seaside paradise into a totalitarian prison, it's handy to blame the neighbors, rather than just try to make things better for yourself (using the plentiful resources you received on a silver platter from said neighbors who were trying to create peace).
It also remains kind of a mystery why with all of Gaza's Muslim neighboring countries, it's only Israel who is being condemned for not rescuing them from their chronic, pathetic self-sabotage. Egypt? Jordan? Lebanon? Syria? The Palestinians have so many Muslim brothers with much bigger countries and populations and wealth, whom they haven't (as) consistently antagonized. Why is no one asking them to help? Or perhaps Iran and Qatar, who seem to be using Gazans as slaves and tribute for their broader agenda of a Sharia Caliphate? (Ie the goal of global domination by radical extremist Islamist terrorists.)
Is this fair to Palestinian babies and children who are born into this mess? Of course not. Hamas shouldn't have been oppressing its own people in the first place. Is it fair that they are losing homes, stability, and lives in this terrible war? Of course not- it's awful. And that's all on Hamas; not Israel.
Also: when your country is governed by cruel, corrupt terrorists, then one would hope that any morally-minded "innocent Palestinian civilians" would rebel and overthrow them, as happened in similar areas with the Arab Spring, and try to do better for their kids. Maybe some want to.
Hamas apologists like to say that history didn't start on 10/07, which of course, it didn't, although this barbaric massacre and ensuing war absolutely did. But it's true, Jewish history and its ancestral connection to the land of Israel started millennia ago- before Mohammad was born and Islam was even invented.
That's why the mind-numbingly foolish, parroted accusations of "colonizing" and "occupying" are predicated on the speakers' either mistaken or deliberate misuse of these words.
Before 1948, the region had been colonized by Britain, and before that the Ottoman Empire. Both Jews and Muslims had lived there before. There were and still are over 20 Muslim majority countries in the Middle East (from which Jews have been ethnically cleansed to date). There were a total of zero Jewish countries, and so the Jews in Israel, along with those who were driven out of other neighboring countries and from Europe, legally collaborated with the political entities there to create the first modern Jewish free sovereign state, in which people of all faiths and races would be safe and welcome. Many Arab Muslims were grateful for the opportunities from freedom and economic possibility that this new modern state offered. But many others were jealous and bitter, and chose violence. So multiple attempts were made by Israel to say: "If you don't like our state, let's just have two separate ones." Time and again, peace treaties, offers, negotiations were attempted. But the problem was and still is, these Palestinian leaders didn't want peace. They didn't even want land per se. They wanted dead Jews. Sadly, they often got them, and still do.
With the western obsession with decolonization, the argument of indigenousness is often invoked. But it's inherently questionable, as the majority of countries today have changed hands multiple times throughout history. We don't have Native Americans raping their way through US communities to try and terrorize back their land, despite how they were treated. But even if indigenousness were a valid criterion, historically and archaeologically, Jews are likely the most indigenous people to the land known as Judea, Israel. And Israel is the status quo, and has been for 3/4 of a century. As described above, the reestablishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland could be viewed as a magnificent example of decolonization. It could also be viewed as a legitimate development of a swampland into a thriving, free, prosperous society.
"Free Palestine" as a resistance, freedom-fighting movement was phenomenally manipulative branding, relying heavily on western ignorance. Everyone is as free within their own territorial borders as their government allows them to be. Israelis of all religions, races, colors, and denominations are "free" because it's a free country. "Palestinians" are not free because they continuously elect and pander to terrorist leaders, who oppress and radicalize them. When people yell "free Palestine" they mean: kill the Jews, but that doesn't sound as catchy. That is actually what "intifada revolution" means but because college students (and some professors) like to use big words without understanding what they mean, the hate is well concealed.
It's been noted that Israel had the ability to level Gaza in a day or two, but chose not to because they value peace. Conversely, Hamas would have joyfully annihilated Israel, but lacked the ability to do so- so they inflict as much damage as they can.
It is tragic that there is loss of life in Gaza. The ministry completely inflates the numbers, but every civilan death is awful. Which is why war is awful. Hamas could have ended it on October 8th, by releasing the hostages and surrendering their rapist/ murderers. But Hamas doesn't care about life or peace; they want to conquer the world. Not just Israel- they want to subjugate the world militarily to Sharia law. This is not just a threat against Israel. It started there, but it metastasized to Jews everywhere, and is spreading to the west. Those who want to destroy Israel, also want to destroy the US, and the rest of the world. They are indoctrinating universities and poisoning both social media and the mainstream media with propaganda, much the way the Nazi movement did during WWII. History will very likely look back on this movement with similar horror, if there is intellectual and moral integrity.
The woke west has largely divorced G-d, and so these secular-minded youth are unfamiliar with the theological core of this conflict. Israel and Judaism, with their Biblical cornerstones, aspire to moral goodness. Extremist Jihadi Islamism, with its distortion of Quranic ideology, seeks to conquer "by any means necessary," including the most horrific, immoral, and unholy abuse.
Israel is not a perfect country- not the government and not the people. No country is. But her roots, her foundation, her goals, are based on Western values, and the desire to create life, hope, goodness, and opportunity.
I pray the west wakes up and understands this before it's too late. I pray for the salvation of the world, quite literally. Supporting Israel is supporting a bastion of hope, "hatikvah," for the free world.
Beautifully written, great job!