By franz massard @Adobe Stock
The Banality of Evil
In American Greatness, historian Victor Davis Hanson exposes the most common “untruths” about the 7 October attack on Israel and the following politically charged war. Israeli leaders promise not to be deterred by President Biden’s threat to withhold more arms shipments if the military launched a major assault on densely populated areas of Rafah in southern Gaza.
Progressive Hamas
Evidently, gay and transgender people don’t realize the mortal danger they encounter in Gaza under a “fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas, or its allies, would be arrested and severely punished.”
Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.
Colonists and Settlers
Shallow and clueless joiners scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists.” Other oblivious demonstrators yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”
… the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.
The much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.
Two-State Solution
When student protestors scream “from the river to the sea,” they are not advocating a two-state solution. Rather, it is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens.
The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on October 7.
Occupied Gaza
With the Israeli border closed, as well as the Egyptian border, Gaza was autonomous.
There have been no Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades. … on October 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas cancelled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians.
Israel hosts two million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.
The Problem Is Netanyahu
According to the U.S. and Europe, the conservative government of Benjamin Netanyahu alone is behind the Israeli tough response in Gaza. The EU and the US “are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.”
Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza. There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.
Targeting Citizens
“After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques.”
(Hamas’s) preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.
Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.
Protesters Are Pro-Palestine
Protesters seem not to make a distinction between supporting Palestine and supporting Hamas.
Chants from protesters “often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership. Some protestors wear Hamas logos and wave its flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of October 7.”
Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic
Screaming to Jewish students to “go back to Poland,” or calling for the “Final Solution,” or assaulting them or barring them from campus facilities, pro-Palestine protesters “do not ask whether they are pro-Israeli.”
For protestors, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their anti-Semitic invective and violence.
Genocide
Israel has not “tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’s one-state solution plan for Jews.”
Before 7 October, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.
If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israeli Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the October 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.
According to Hamas, roughly 4% of the Gazan population died during Israel’s response to 7 October. According to various international observers, however, at least one-third to one-half of those deaths were Hamas terrorists.
Disproportionate Response
- Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three.
- Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the IDF responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.
Disproportionate better explains the effectiveness of the 7 October response.
Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel but utterly failed.
… Israel proved to be competent, and Hamas incompetent in (its) similar efforts to use disproportionate force.
“Never again,” President Joe Biden recently told an audience at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony before explaining that for him, “never again” translates to “never forget.” But as editors at NRO note, “never again” requires taking actions today that may be politically difficult in real time.
“Never again,” continues NRO, requires “supporting the world’s only Jewish state in its efforts to destroy the terrorist group that is responsible for that horrific attack so that it can never massacre Jews again.”
