The hard reality is that the Gaza War has been devastating to Palestinians. Tens of thousands have perished, or been left wounded, homeless and hungry. It’s impossible not to feel empathy for such tragedy.
Many American Jews are feeling that empathy, especially among the younger generation. We cannot ignore them.
However painful, Israel supporters need to confront the Gaza War monster head on.
Ever since the war started, Jews and Israel have been facing a deafening and rising level of vitriol. As Yael Bar Tur writes in City Journal, “Arguments once unthinkable are now aired openly: that the atrocities of October 7 were justified resistance; that Israel should be abolished; that terrorists held in Israeli prisons are morally equivalent with Jewish civilians held hostage in Gaza.”
Like any other country, Israel deserves criticism, but not the kind of hysteria that led a Spanish airline to force Jewish campers off an aircraft and arrest and beat their 21-year-old camp leader. Their crime? They were singing songs that were connected to a “terrorist country.”
In the face of such hysteria, it’s not enough to play defense and argue that Israel is not committing genocide against Palestinians, as some war experts have done. Above all, we can’t allow the tragic situation unfolding in Gaza, and Israel’s failure to get a ceasefire/hostage deal, to blind us from the evil of Hamas, which has driven the tragedy of the war and received too little attention.
In short, we must hold Hamas accountable not just for the war crimes of Oct. 7 against Israel but for war crimes against its own people.
Throughout the war, Hamas has used Palestinians as human shields knowing they were likely to be killed. What is that if not a war crime? And why can’t we name it?
“What is unusual about Gaza is the cynical and criminal way Hamas has chosen to wage war,” Bret Stephens writes in The New York Times. “Hamas hides and feeds and preserves itself in its vast warren of tunnels rather than open them to civilians for protection.” Not protecting civilians in war time is another way of saying you’re putting their lives deliberately in danger.
That is a war crime.
The unspoken tragedy the world has ignored is Hamas’s cruel and depraved strategy to get as many Palestinians killed as possible. As far as Hamas is concerned, that cruel strategy has worked perfectly.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Jew-hating, Israel-hating Hamas operative as he sees the world’s reaction to a war Hamas started. The whole world is coming down on Israel! Antisemitism is at record levels! Israel is accused of genocide and becoming a pariah state! All thanks to us!
Sure, the monster of Hamas has been decimated militarily, but one Hamas victory cannot be denied: They got a world that was already predisposed against Israel to look at Israel as the real monsters, and Jews around the world are now paying the price. That is a Hamas victory.
After the atrocity of Oct. 7, Hamas knew that Israel would have to respond ferociously. With their fighters nestled among civilians in dense urban areas, and thousands of tunnels positioned under schools, homes, mosques and hospitals, Hamas also knew that no army in the world could avoid major collateral damage to civilians.
So the stage was set. While Israel had the clear intent to go after the terrorists who butchered, beheaded, raped and abducted 1400 Israelis on Oct. 7, Hamas had the clear intent to get as many Palestinians killed as possible in order to gain the world’s sympathy.
It’s horrible to imagine that an army can consider its own people dying as a kind of victory, but that is the ugly truth foisted on us by the cynical cowards of Hamas, a truth an Israel-bashing world has conveniently ignored.
Israel is guilty of many things, but targeting Palestinian civilians as an official policy is not one of them. Hamas, on the other hand, has done just that. Deliberately putting its own civilians in the line of fire has been not just its official policy but its war strategy. Stealing food supplies meant for its people so they can sell them on the black market while its people are starving is only a milder version of a war crime.
A world that seeks truth and justice would prosecute Hamas for its war crimes. A terror army that started a war and then put its own civilians in the line of fire are the core criminals of the war. In the court of international justice, Hamas would no longer be able to hide behind the Palestinian people, something that would be good, most of all, for the Palestinian people.
