Some groups like Amnesty International and countries like South Africa have drummed up the idea that Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ against the people of Gaza, or Palestinian Arabs, or the Arab or Muslim world, depending on how narrow or broad the defaming party chose to go. They have ignored the lowest civilian-to-militant death ratio in any urban war, the declining number of women and children killed as the war moved on to a ground invasion, and many other statistics in Israel’s defensive war in making the accusation.
It is curious that people have also not considered the basic fact that Israel has offered many ceasefires to Hamas since the war started in October 2023. No target of a genocide has ever been offered a ceasefire.
Let alone reject it.
Yet Hamas has rejected one ceasefire after another since the war started.
If an army was intent on slaughtering a group of people, would it offer a ceasefire every month?
If a persecuted population felt like it was desperate for the killing to stop, would it reject offers to stop the fighting?
Jews in the Holocaust were not offered a ceasefire. They were defenseless. They had no army. They had no government advocating on their behalf to stop the slaughter.
The heavy loss of life among Gazans is because of a war they started and refuse to cease. It is the deep-seated antisemitic genocidal intent of Gazans to destroy Israel that has perpetuated the war, not Israel’s desire to eliminate Gazans as declared by know-nothings under heavily tarnished brands.
After fourteen months of refusing ceasefires, it is time for the Arab and Muslim world to force Hamas to admit defeat and surrender so that the killing can stop and the day after can begin.
Many pro-Israel people are outraged by Amnesty International calling Israel’s current actions in Gaza a “genocide,” by highlighting that Israel never wanted the war and would end it immediately if the hostages were released and Hamas surrenders. As there is no “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” as the term is defined in the Genocide Convention, the basic premise falls flat on its face before even getting to the physical nature of the battlefield and fatalities.
But that is exactly the point that anti-Israel people are making in their own narrative. Whether Israel’s current war is defensive or not is irrelevant. Whether the number of civilians-to-militants killed is the lowest ratio of any urban combat is dismissed.
Israeli police officers evacuate a woman and a child from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
The anti-Israel crowd ties colonization to ethnic cleansing to apartheid to genocide. It is one big ball of “European White Supremacy” and “settler imperialism” that has been internalized as gospel by the anti-Israel mob.
Consider that in 2016, sixty different groups in the Black Lives Matter movement penned a manifesto labeling Israel as “an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people,” and that America’s aid to Israel made it complicit “in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.”
Even when there was no war, and the Israeli Arab AND West Bank Arab AND Gazan Arab all had populations which skyrocketed decade after decade – dwarfing the growth of Israeli Jews and of Arab populations of surrounding countries – the BLM movement ignored any physical requirement of a “genocide” and rallied around perceived intent.
Whether the Jewish State is the most liberal country for a thousand miles in any direction was considered misdirection. Pointing out basic pluralistic truths was considered PinkWashing or GreenWashing or a rainbow of other colors meant to serve as red herrings to the core issue.
The anti-Israel community considers the creation of Israel an original sin that can never be righted until it is destroyed. To give Palestinian Arabs dignity requires a genocide of Israeli Jews, and their supporters.
The “axis of resistance” of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and its global supporters is against the Jewish State, which it considers a foreign “cancer” inside the purely Arab Middle East. Today’s war is the same as 1948, to annihilate the Jewish entity in their midst.
A growing number of pro-Palestinian activists are echoing the Hamas narrative, even as the military capabilities of the terrorist Palestinian party dwindle. They have internalized a lie which offers Israel no escape other than dissolution.
The “genocide” claims and cases against Israel now have a veneer of credibility as “human rights” groups accuse the country amidst a difficult defensive war. In truth, they are tools to arm the second wave – of judicial and economic attacks – to destroy the Jewish State, as the axis’ military offensives end in defeat.
Yet no one seems to give a lick about 40,000 women and children who are rotting in camps in Syria, because of their familial ties to ISIS.
Children gather at the al-Hol camp, which houses families of ISIS members, in Syria’s Hasakeh province in May 2021. (photo: Baderkhan Ahmad / AP file)
Over 40,000 people live in the al-Hol and Roj detention centers in northeast Syria, of which 62% are children. Almost all of the others are women in what is described as “one big prison.” They hail from 60 different countries (mostly Iraq and Syria) but their governments have been slow to repatriate them because of their ties to ISIS, and of how they might be perceived upon returning home.
While ISIS was defeated in Iraq on December 9, 2017, the group continues its attacks, with over 150 in the first half of 2024. As such, the women and children of ISIS fighters continue to find themselves in limbo FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS.
Al Hol Detention camp in northeastern Syria houses roughly 40,000 women and children for several years
The crux of the problem is that many of the women and children share the ideology of their ISIS relatives, as conveyed in the CNN report below. It has made the situation complicated for countries like France to repatriate these women and children for fear that they will foment terrorism back home.
In May 2022, France repatriated 51 women and children. In October 2022 the country brought back another 55 and in April 2023, another 35. It has been an extremely slow process. Upon arrival in France, minors were handed over to child care services while the adults were handed over to the relevant judicial authorities, as joining ISIS is considered a criminal act.
Some countries, like the United Kingdom and Denmark, have revoked the citizenship of people who went to fight with ISIS. Those countries have left people to rot in the detention camps for years.
Beyond the ISIS war, western countries have expelled hundreds of non-citizens for expressing extremist ideology, and stripped citizenship of women and children affiliated with terrorists. All in the name of ensuring the protection and security of their country.
While the UK, France, Denmark and other western countries took such actions, they voted for a UN resolution for Israel to “repatriate” and to “exert efforts toward the implementation of paragraph 11 of General Assembly resolution 194 (III)” which calls for moving millions of Arab descendants of the 1948/9 Arab-Israeli war INTO ISRAEL, even though those Arabs have never lived in nor have citizenship in Israel.
And the western countries did so in the middle of Hamas’s genocidal war to eradicate the Jewish State.
Western countries prioritize national security over the rights of women and children tied to radical jihadists, but simultaneously call for Israel to admit millions of radical jihadists while it is at war against those same people. It is worse than hypocrisy; it is an attempt to sacrifice Jews to the angry jihadi gods to save themselves.
There have been many articles about about the women and children in Gaza who have died in the Iranian proxies- Israel war, which began when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people. The BBC quoted the United Nations which said nearly 70% of the Gazan dead were women and children over the period November 2023 to April 2024 (44% children and 26% women). The report concluded that there was “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare,” sharply criticizing Israel’s war effort.
What the report does not discuss is the demographic situation in Gaza, where the vast majority of people are women and children.
Children under 14 years old make up 38.8% of the population according to the CIA World Factbook, and there are slightly more men than women. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 47% of Gaza is under 18 years old, meaning roughly 8% of the population is between 15 and 18, and half of that figure would be fighting age males.
Taken together, it means that between 26% and 30% of the Gaza population are men of fighting age, and therefore, 70 to 74% would be considered non-combatants, if one were to assume that no women participate in the fighting.
Applying the sub-70% figure cited by the UN over the first six months of the war to the demographic data shows that there were slightly FEWER non-combatants killed than random probability would imagine (44% less than 47% children, and 26% women less than 27% in region).
More recent data published by Al Jazeera as of December 3, 2024, claims that 44,532 Gazans have died in the war of which 17,492 (39.3%) are children. As 47% of Gaza’s population is under 18, the much lower 39% figure would suggest that Israel’s war effort is having fewer bystanders killed as the battles continue. As the 39.3% statistics include the first six months of the war when 44% of the dead were children according to the UN, it would imply that since April 2024, 38.2% of those killed in Gaza were under 18, significantly lower than the 47% of the population.
Beyond the raw statistics are other factors.
Gaza’s military is fighting underground and placed its women and children in the front line of fire. One would therefore assume that a much greater percentage of those killed would be women and children. The fact that the figures are lower than the demographic composition showcases Israel’s effort to minimize harm and target combatants.
Further, the figures do not distinguish between women and children bystanders from family members of terrorists. It is likely that a great number of the women and children were killed alongside terrorist family members.
The statistics of Gaza’s dead as provided by the terrorist group Hamas may show a significant number of women and children but it also shows that Israel is using efforts to minimize casualties among civilians.
The United Nations marks November 29 of each year as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, a strange choice of dates since it was on that day in 1947 that the UN General Assembly voted to divide the region of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, which the regional Muslims adamantly rejected and launched a war to ethnically cleanse the land of Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The Muslim Arabs lost the 1948/9 war but still sought to destroy the new Jewish State. The various armies assembled again in 1967 in a genocidal effort to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Once again the jihadists failed in their quest and lost even more land to the Jews.
On October 7, 2023, local genocidal jihadists in Gaza came for the Jews again and killed 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages. Other regional actors immediately followed, including from the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. As of this writing, they too have failed, and the Israeli Defense Forces has leveled much of Gaza in seeking justice for the estimated 6,000 Gazans who took part in the October 7 massacre, and to rescue the Israeli hostages.
As member states gathered at the United Nations to mark the November 29 anniversary amidst the bloody backdrop in 2024, the Palestinian Authority made clear that it continues to reject a Jewish State in the region, calling all of Israel an “illegal occupation” and cemented this moment to the major wars of 1948/9 and 1967.
Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer for the State of Palestine read a statement from PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (39:35) where he said that “more than 150,000 casualties – the majority of them being children, women and the elderly – killed and maimed by the Israeli Occupying Forces who are deliberately and systematically targeting civilians in a repetition of what happened in the ‘Nakba’ of 1948 and the tragedy of 1967, aimed at displacing our people and seizing their lands and resources.”
Mansour made clear that Palestinians view all of Israel to be occupied for “76 years”, back to the founding of the modern State of Israel, and that their quest to seize the land will never stop.
This gross inversion of history attempts to make the genocidal jihadists victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity. That noxious libel is being spouted by the more “moderate” Palestinian leadership in public at the United Nations.
At the conclusion of Mansour’s comments, the chair of the committee expressed (52:10) “the committee’s full support to your quest to recover your legitimate rights.”
The United Nations has been consistent in seeking an Arab state since 1947. Local jihadists have been consistent that they oppose a Jewish State on what they consider purely “Arab land.” And the UN has been consistent in not condemning the jihadists in their quest.
And now even blessing it.
Whether Israel will take additional territory in this defensive war just as they did in 1948 and 1967 remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is that the local Arabs are ready, willing and able to launch more ‘Nakbas’ in a gross public display of sadism and masochism.
UNRWA, the United Nations agency that uniquely is for Palestinian refugees (all of the world’s other refugees are handles by UNHCR) and that is uniquely only staffed by members of that group (99% of UNRWA employees are local Palestinians while UNHCR is staffed by UN employees hailing from many countries), decided to suspend its aid delivery activities in Gaza. It blamed the suspension on “criminal activity” and the inability to protect the “humanitarians” who deliver aid.
UNRWA’s European masks for the Gazan group do not call out that the “criminal activity” is from local Palestinian Arab gangs, just as they do not mention that UNRWA Gaza principally consists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, allies and family members. Instead, the “humanitarian” group blames Israel for the suspension of activity.
For over a year, Israel has been stating that much of the flow of goods by UNRWA has gone to Hamas fighters, and now that the terrorist group has lost control of the region, by various armed gangs. Rather than acknowledge that the UN agency was corrupt at the outset and ineffective now, the UN is asking Israel to prop up the corrupt regime. Instead of closing UNRWA in Gaza and handing full control to Israel, the UN is asking Israel to protect the quasi-terrorist agency in its mission of fomenting perpetual Arab hatred of Jews.
The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, insists on the farce. He calls UNRWA “irreplaceable” even though the institution is fundamentally flawed. Now that it is exposed as not only corrupt but incapacitated, the global agency once again dutifully follows its blinders and focuses blame on Israel.
UNRWA teaches its students to hate and kill Jews. Its mission is to destroy the Jewish State and relocate millions of Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) into Israel. It funnels billions of dollars of global charity to terrorists and their enablers. And now that a severely weakened Hamas cannot coordinate with its joint venture partners inside UNRWA, the UN has lashed out at its nemesis, Israel.
As the antisemitic genocidal jihadist group of Hamas disintegrates, unsurprisingly, so does Gazan UNRWA. Amidst the war which Hamas started, its joint venture partner of the United Nations has the vulgar chutzpah to now ask Israel to protect and assist the group.
It is time for the civilized world to demand UNRWA be shut down.
It is alarming to watch mainstream media excuse rampant antisemitism as stemming from the Gaza war. It’s not about Gaza; it’s about a global jihad to purge Jews from Jerusalem.
New York Times article arguing that “Israel’s asymmetric response to Oct 7” has brought out the antisemites who are also making “many Muslims in Europe… feel threatened,” diverting the narrative that the prime attackers against Jews are radical Muslims.
Hamas labeled its war against Israel the “Al Aqsa Flood,” meaning the launch of millions of Muslims into Jerusalem. As Hamas stated in starting the war, “the battle of the beginning of the Liberation of Al-Quds [Jerusalem], our land, our people and our prisoners held in the jails of the Zionist occupation…. Today, the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands, our holy city of Al-Quds, our Al-Aqsa mosque, and the release of our prisoners from the jails of the Zionist occupation.”
They were clear. The genocidal jihadists are waging a war to eradicate the Jewish State and to reclaim Jerusalem, as though we were in the Middle Ages fighting Crusades.
The slightly less genocidal Palestinian Authority headed by Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas has done his best to gather the Muslim world to join in the jihad. Its Wafa media site continues to claim that “fanatic Israeli settlers… broke into the compounds of al-Aqsa… and raided the holy Islamic Mosque” to inflame hatred against Jews around the world. [Note: the “storming” was regular Jews walking around the Jewish Temple Mount during regular visiting hours and never stepping foot into the al Aqsa mosque.]
Others have sought to recruit Christians to the jihad for Jerusalem, most infamously Jordanian King Abdullah II.
Abdullah spoke at the United Nations in September 2022. At 9:13 of the talk, the king took aim at Jews “Undermining Jerusalem’s legal and historical status quo triggers global tensions and deepens religious divides,” meaning Jews wanting to pray at Judaism’s holiest site on the Jewish Temple Mount.
He continued: “As custodians of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian holy sites, we are committed to protecting the historical and legal status quo and to their safety and future. And as a Muslim leader, let me say clearly, that we are committed to defending the rights, the precious heritage, and the historic identity of the Christian people of our region. Nowhere is that more important than in Jerusalem.Today, Christianity in the holy city is fire. The rights of churches in Jerusalem are threatened. This cannot continue. Christianity is vital to the past and present of our region and the holy land. It must remain an integral part of our future.”
For clarity, neither Christianity nor Islam are under threat in Jerusalem. The Jewish State has allowed full access for the two global faiths in the Jewish State. Further, the Jordanian king has no rights or control of Christian sites but only Islamic ones with the permission of Israel. This was a naked and dangerous call for the Christian world to join the Islamic one to combat Jews in Jerusalem.
And the Muslim world is enormous. At roughly 1.9 billion people, it is almost twice the entire population of North, Central and South America combined.
When agitators storm campuses or graffiti synagogues, they write “Free Palestine” because they are part of the global jihad against Jews everywhere to destroy the Jewish State. When university professors from Columbia and Cornell express their “joy” about the mass murder of Israelis, they believe they are seeing the beginning of the “liberation of Palestine.” They are not considering the casualties that will come upon Gaza.
When anti-Israel groups made a mapping project of Jewish institutions in Massachusetts they were zoning in on Zionists. When CAIR called out Jewish groups like Hillel as “enemies,” it was months before the October 7 attack.
The “martyrs” in Gaza are marketing fodder to enlist people in the global jihad. Like an advertisement, the product being sold is not the ad but the item itself, in this case, the annihilation and expulsion of Jews.
The People of The Book know history. They read and analyze their own texts and consider what others write and say. They:
know Muslim Arab Antisemitism. They reviewed the various ADL surveys which showed Muslims are two to five times more antisemitic than Christians in European countries. They now watch Muslim mobs engaged in ‘Jew hunts‘ in those same places.
are seared by the October 7 Palestinian Massacre. EVERYONE in the small country knows someone who was killed, injured or abducted on that horrible day. They’ve watched the videos that Hamas took of themselves slaughtering women, babies and the elderly, and movies reviewing the rapes of Israelis by thousands of Gazans. They listened to the calls of Palestinians bragging to their parents how they killed Jews with their bare hands.
Hamas terrorist shooting civilians in their homes
know about the broad Palestinian support for the heinous crimes against humanity. They watched videos of dozens of Gazans hitting and spitting on a dead Israel woman being hauled into Gaza, who was later found beheaded. They’ve read the polls of overwhelming Palestinian support for the gruesome massacre.
Hamas hauls the body of woman into Gaza where crowds cheer as they beat and spit on her corpse
know Palestinian Arabs want to continue to kill as many Jews as possible. They watched leaders on news programs say they intend to repeat the mass atrocities “again and again.”
know the United Nations supports those Palestinian goals. They have read the global organization’s condemnations of terrorism everywhere else in the world and demands for justice, but never in Israel where it immediately called for “maximum restraint.“
know the need for Justice includes accounting for every Gazan who participated in the October 7 slaughter and for bringing hostages home. They know the only way to live in peace is to be alive, at home, with enemies unable to act upon their evil aims.
know the war in Gaza taking place, intimately. Israel has a citizen army and they or members of their family have either been fighting in Gaza or participating in the war effort. They are consumed with the news from Gaza because they not only get firsthand accounts, but attacks emanating from there have not stopped, and over 100 hostages remain in captivity.
Image released by the Israel Defense Forces on Oct 29, 2023 shows its ground operation in the Gaza Strip
know the anti-Israel media bias. They read how newspapers constantly refer to the Israeli government as “right-wing” yet never label Hamas a “designated terrorist group by the US and many other countries.” They read opinion pieces that refer to Hamas supporters as “decent Palestinians”, “many Muslims” and “human beings,” while vilifying Israelis as cold, heartless and clueless with “heads in the sand” and “lacking sensitivity.”
Article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times stating that Israelis have their heads in the sand about Gaza, arguing that Palestinians are decent human beings with no agency
know the desire to protect certain people – other people – involves inverting actual cause-and-effect. They read absurd claims that Palestinians are “resorting” to violence and that Muslim gangs are “reacting” to the situation in Gaza, while they know basic facts that the SAPs launched their premeditated genocidal jihad.
know the International Criminal Court has wrongly accused them of a “genocide.” They are actively engaged in a defensive war they didn’t start, don’t want, and would end immediately if the hostages were released and the terrorists would surrender. They know the steps they take to minimize civilian casualties as they prosecute a war against an enemy intent on maximizing civilian casualties, with the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in urban warfare.
know they are a beleaguered minority-minority with centuries of ingrained scars at the hands of wide range of attackers. They have Holocaust survivors in their families and truncated branches of the family trees due to the Holocaust and various pogroms.
The People of The Book know history. They are writing new chapters about their attackers and abetters. The testaments will act as a guide for future generations and the testimonies will beg Gd to pass judgment on the wicked and save the Jewish people today.
Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about foreign and domestic affairs from a liberal and Arab point of view, honed by his Harvard and American University in Cairo education, and years at the anti-Israel New York Times.
His antipathy for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish State is only matched by his ignorance.
New York Times opinion by Nicholas Kristof on October 20, 2024
Kristof wrote an opinion in the aftermath of Israel’s killing of Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the savage October 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel. He led with a call for the United States to pressure Netanyahu, and repeated the demand throughout his article.
Kristof said that Hamas will never surrender, so it’s up to the United States to apply significant pressure on Israel to declare victory against the unwavering foe. His ignorant view is not supported by polling data. Since the war started, Gazans have lowered their support for war to 36% from 51% right before October 7, 2023. Gazan support for negotiations has more than doubled from 19% in September 2023 to 40% in September 2024.
Similarly, Gazan support for the October 7 massacre dropped dramatically over the last six months from 71% to 39% as the war they initiated has become a dismal failure.
September 2024 PCPSR poll
Kristof continues with the lie that Israel’s defensive war is creating a new “generational threat” from young Gazans seeing the destruction all around them. Yet the opposite is true, that the United Nations educational system has created the “generational threat” of teaching Palestinian Arabs that their future is inside Israel, while Israel’s decisive defensive war is convincing Arabs that violence is not an answer.
Pressure needs to be applied to the UNITED NATIONS, not on Israel, to declare unambiguously that the future for the UNRWA wards lies in Gaza and the West Bank, not Israel; specifically, that there is no ‘right of return’ to homes where grandparents once lived inside Israel. Similar pressure needs to be made on the media to stop platforming lies, particularly from jaundiced woke jihadists.
ACTION ITEM
Write to Kristof’s assistant spencer.cohen@nytimes.com as well as letters@nytimes.com that Kristof’s views of Israel are disconnected from reality.
Palestinian Arabs believe that the pathway to gaining land is through violence, while Israel believes that land given to Palestinian Arabs becomes a launching pad for terrorism. The cause-and-effect is a bloody mirror: violence-for-land (Palestinians) and land-facilitates-violence (Israelis).
Palestinian Arabs have a “greater confidence in the efficacy of armed struggle” to achieve their goals of a Palestinian State, according to Palestinian polls. They point to the success in getting Israel to hand over Jericho, Bethlehem and major Arab cities because of the First Intifada, and abandoning Gaza because of the Second Intifada. This continued more recently in May 2021, when Hamas’s rocketfire caused Israel to halt the eviction of Arab squatters living in Jewish homes in the Sheikh Jarrah section of Jerusalem.
Many Israelis see handing over Gaza as an enormous mistake as it clearly demonstrated that Arab-controlled land becomes a terrorist safe haven. Rather than turning the beachfront land into a peaceful paradise, the Gazans spent years building a terrorist infrastructure from which to launch a genocidal war to destroy Israel. In the aftermath of Israel leaving Gaza in 2005, Palestinian Arabs voted the US-designated terrorist group Hamas to 58% of parliament with the most antisemitic and genocidal charter ever written.
Palestinians are looking for more land; some want all of Israel to be wiped out in favor of Palestine, while others want personal property inside of Israel. Only a minority seek a two-state future.
Israel is not only attempting to destroy Hamas and rescue its hostages; it is educating the jihadists that violence does not pay.
One of thousands of Gaza terrorists killing civilians inside of Israel
It may be working.
A recent September 2024 Palestinian poll found that “for the first time since October 7, 2023, simultaneously in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, findings show significant drop in the favorability of the October 7 attack and in the expectations that Hamas will win the current war, and a moderate drop in the level of support for Hamas; moreover, findings show a drop in the Gaza Strip in the preference for a continued Hamas control over that area in the day after the war and a rise in the preference for PA control…. . Findings show significant rise in support for the two-state solution in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Support for armed struggle declines and support for negotiations rise.”
Both Israelis and Palestinians believe that land and violence are tethered in the holy land. Perhaps the current war is slowly severing that connection and will enable a pathway towards coexistence.
First One Through 