This week, the UN will commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica under the theme “From Words to Violence.“ The lesson is that language is never merely language. The words societies choose shape how they understand people, history, and ultimately what actions become acceptable.
That lesson should not stop with Srebrenica.
Over the past month, another campaign of words has accelerated – not directly aimed at the destruction of lives, but at the erasure of history.
A month ago, I wrote about the battle over Solomon’s Pools. At the time, the concern was that one of Judaism’s great archaeological treasures was being detached from the people who built it.
Today, the campaign has moved far beyond stewardship.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, now repeatedly describes Solomon’s Pools as “Palestinian archaeological and heritage sites,” “Palestinian cultural heritage,” and “an integral part of the Palestinian people’s national identity.” It accuses Israel of attempting to erase the site’s Palestinian identity while announcing plans to seek UNESCO protection for that very narrative.
This is historical revisionism.
For more than two thousand years, Solomon’s Pools have been recognized as part of the ancient water system that supplied Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Yet the new narrative increasingly erases that Jewish history while attempting to replace it with a Palestinian Arab one.
That is how historical erasure begins, with words.
It continues with cultural appropriation – taking another civilization’s achievements and presenting them as one’s own. A site built to sustain Jewish Jerusalem is no longer described as part of Jewish civilization, but as an expression of “Palestinian national identity.”
Solomon’s Pools is not an isolated example.
Over the years, Palestinian rhetoric has increasingly described biblical figures and ancient Jewish sites through a Palestinian national lens.
The Jewish Temples are falsely described as being located in Yemen.
Ancient Jewish heritage sites have increasingly been recast as Palestinian heritage, such as the Jewish Temple Mount being only called the “al Aqsa Complex” and as a purely Islamic site to prevent Jews from praying at their holiest site.
Individually these statements may appear rhetorical. Collectively they reveal a sustained and malicious effort to replace one people’s historical memory with another’s national story.
When a people’s documented history is systematically erased, it reveals a bigotry directed not only against living Jews but against Jewish civilization itself. It reflects national chauvinism, elevating one national identity by absorbing the achievements of another.
And it does this with particular purpose: to strip Jews of their indigeneity in their holy land, to recast them as interlopers and “European settler colonizers” which is deeply infused with a righteous sense of xenophobia.
That is why UNESCO’s role matters.
An organization created to preserve humanity’s cultural heritage should never become an instrument of historical revisionism. If it legitimizes narratives that obscure the well-documented Jewish origins of sites like Solomon’s Pools, it is no longer merely protecting monuments. It is helping redefine what future generations believe those monuments represent.
Turkish media TRT lies to the world that Solomon’s Pools are a 6,000 year-old Canaanite site, as Palestinian Arabs have attempted to recast themselves as ancient Canaanites to pre-date the Jewish forefather Abraham
The danger is larger than a single archaeological site. Words are attempting to erase Jewish history and heritage throughout the Jewish homeland.
The United Nations is correct: words can lead to terrible consequences.
And these words and actions have a particularly dangerous strain of antisemitism. It does not involve attacking Jews physically, which Palestinian Arabs have done repeatedly at scale. It is an insidious attempt to get the world to endorse a narrative that Jews are foreigners in the land to frame a future without the Jewish State. This is the destruction and genocide that emerges from language.
When international institutions lend their authority to that process, they cease to be guardians of history and become participants in its erasure.
How do you comprehend six million murdered Jews? One million murdered children?
The numbers are so large that the human mind struggles to grasp it. Six million becomes a statistic. A statistic becomes an abstraction. And an abstraction risks becoming forgettable.
For decades, Holocaust educators wrestled with that problem. Their answer was simple: stop counting and start remembering.
Programs such as Names, Not Numbers were created in Jewish schools to teach students that every Holocaust victim was an individual human being. Students interviewed survivors, recorded testimonies, learned family histories, and transformed statistics back into people. The goal was not merely to teach history. It was to restore identity to those whom the Nazis sought to erase.
The same idea appeared in the remarkable documentary Paper Clips.
In the film, students in a small town in Tennessee learned that six million was too large a number to understand. They discovered that Norwegians had worn paper clips as symbols of resistance to Nazi occupation and decided to collect six million paper clips – one for every murdered Jew.
As the clips accumulated, the students began to understand something profound. It was hard to gather millions of ordinary clips – it required enormous resources and participation of people and organizations far and wide. That millions of people could be exterminated deliberately was terrifying.
The educational programs also sought to do more than humanize the victims and demonstrate the scale of the atrocities.
Nazis literally transformed people into numbers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, many prisoners were stripped of their names and tattooed with identification numbers. It was part of a larger project to erase individuality, dignity, and humanity. The Holocaust was not only a campaign to murder Jews. It was a campaign to reduce them to anonymous units in a machinery of extermination.
Jewish children display tattooed numbers that Nazis put on their arms during the Holocaust
The Holocaust was not simply a story within a war. More than one million Jewish children were murdered not because they were caught in a battlefield, not because they belonged to an opposing army, but because they were Jewish. The Nazi regime actively hunted them for liquidation. Jewish babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren were marked for death from birth.
They were not collateral damage. They were targets.
For decades, educators, museums, survivors, and Jewish communities worked to preserve those names and those stories. The idea that victims should be remembered as human beings rather than statistics became one of the defining themes of Holocaust education around the world.
The slogan echoes language that Holocaust educators spent generations developing. It draws upon a framework created to explain why victims of genocide should be remembered as individuals rather than numbers.
Palestinian Arabs are using a cruel tool in a flimsy attempt to wipe away their own guilt for launching a genocidal war with broad support, and for deliberately banning children from entering the tunnel infrastructure that leadership spent years and billions of dollars constructing. The Palestinian Authority is not merely making the dead children martyrs at someone else’s hands rather than their own, but deliberately lifting the campaign from an actual genocide. They have turned Holocaust remembrance against the Jewish state.
This is a moral perversion.
The Holocaust was a state-directed project of extermination whose goal was the disappearance of the Jewish people. Israel’s war against Hamas is a war against an armed movement that invaded Israel, massacred civilians, took hostages, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state.
Equating those realities with the Holocaust is not simply immoral but antisemitic. Borrowing the language developed to remember murdered Jews is not simply appropriation but sadistic.
Names, Not Numbers was created to ensure that the victims of history’s greatest campaign of anti-Jewish extermination would never be reduced to statistics. To take that language and deploy it as part of a campaign that casts Israel as Nazi Germany not only vilifies Israel unjustly but negates the Holocaust of its meaning and mocks the memory of a million murdered Jewish children.
Six Million Jews were slaughtered in Europe by Nazi Germany and its enablers in the 1930s and 1940s. One-third of European Jewry was wiped from the earth for the sick reason that people detested them and wanted them gone “by any means necessary.” The scale and the barbarity of the genocide was revolting and a permanent stain on humankind.
The Nazi Party did not rise alone. It was carried by a culture that softened language and normalized hatred. The machinery of murder arrived last. The permission came first.
People often comment that the Palestinian Arab massacre of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023 was the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It is true, in terms of scale, a statistical fact. But the underlying reason is not discussed enough: a systemic hatred became embedded in a society that elected a government to carry out a genocide.
October 7 was not a rogue event by a gang. It was a popular movement by a sitting ruling authority that had years of preparation to carry out a genocide of local Jews.
Hamas’ 1988 foundational charter is the single most antisemitic political document ever written. The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) voted Hamas to 56% of parliament with full knowledge of the group’s position and mission. When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the area became a terrorist enclave, building an infrastructure and culture dedicated to the annihilation of Jews.
And when it acted out its plans in full on October 7, the people celebrated.
A “Holocaust Remembrance Day” that confines memory to ceremonies and candles misses the point. Remembrance without recognition of the present is ritual without responsibility. The lesson was never only about what was done. It was about how quickly societies create the conditions that allow it to be done again.
So what does responsibility look like now?
It begins with clarity. A group that openly declares and executes the mass killing of Jews is genocidal. That word should not be negotiated away, let alone flipped onto the victims.
It continues with institutions. Universities, media and cultural organizations must stop laundering advocacy for such groups through euphemism. Speech has consequences; platforms are choices.
It requires enforcement. Governments must treat material support, incitement, and coordination for designated terrorist organizations as what they are: threats to public safety, not protected abstractions.
It demands civic courage. Communities, leaders, and peers must refuse the social comfort of silence when celebration of violence surfaces in their midst.
And it insists on moral consistency. If the targeting of civilians is intolerable anywhere, it is intolerable everywhere—without qualifiers, without footnotes.
Democratic Socialist of America believe that violence against Jewish civilians is appropriate
It is important to remember the past: the millions of Jewish victims and the culture that touched Europe from Vienna to Vilna. It is also important to remember the environment that allowed it to happen, and actively confront the antisemitic infrastructure that enables the genocide of Jews.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) openly traffics in antisemitism – and gets reelected
The images out of Gaza arrive stripped of their foundation. Open the The New York Times opinion pages this week and the story feels preassembled: civilians suffer, Israel strikes, outrage follows. It reads cleanly because something essential has been left out. This war does not begin and end on the surface.
Cover page of Sunday TimesTwo-page spread which never mentions Hamas or tunnels
It runs underground.
Beneath Gaza sits one of the most extensive underground military networks in the modern world, built by Hamas over years with money, materials, and time that could have gone elsewhere. The elaborate system of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons depots, communications lines was designed to survive bombardment and keep a war going no matter what happens above.
Call it what it is: a vast network of bomb shelters.
Now say the part that rarely gets said clearly: Those shelters were never meant for civilians. They were never opened to families. They were never opened to children. They were never opened to the elderly. They were reserved—by design—for fighters, for leadership, for the preservation of the war machine itself.
In any other place, that would be unthinkable. Governments build shelters to protect their populations. When sirens sound, people go underground. Here, the system was inverted. Protection went below ground for those prosecuting the war. Exposure remained above ground for those living in it.
So when the bombs fall, the images follow. Families in rubble. Crowded rooms. Children pulled from collapsed buildings. The world reacts to an outcome shaped long before the first strike in this round of fighting. The protection existed. It was built. And Gazans were never allowed to use it.
That is the story that flips the frame.
This is not only a story of what Israel is doing. It is a story of what Hamas chose to build, and who it chose to protect with it. The tunnels are not just military infrastructure. They are a hierarchy set in concrete. Survival below ground for the regime. Exposure above ground for everyone else.
Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee. The destruction remains devastating but it has critical context. It sits alongside a governing strategy that hardened one layer of Gaza while leaving the other to absorb the war.
And that strategy is not finished. It points directly to what comes next. If Hamas remains, Gaza does not rebuild in the way people hope. It continues in the direction it has already taken. More tunnels. More infrastructure embedded beneath dense civilian areas. More resources pulled downward into war instead of upward into life.
The future of Gaza is not being debated. It has already been built.
It just was never built for the people living above it.
And the socialist-jihadi media like The New York Times, will paint a picture of pure fiction, one in which Gazans are the victims of rubble, not tunnels; victims of the Jewish State, not Hamas; victims of “genocide,” not perpetrators of genocide.
And for good measure, it will add a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor protesting about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza, to completely embalm its inversion of genocide.
Hamas built bomb shelters for the exclusive use of its terrorist army while it let women and children get attacked overhead. We are similarly witnessing the socialist-jihadi media build narrative shelters for those same jihadi terrorists, leaving Jews to take the brunt of the antisemitic tidal wave.
To visit Poland is to walk among ghosts. The thriving Jewish civilization that once filled its towns and marketplaces was almost completely erased. Three million Jews were targeted for extermination — a number too vast to grasp by walking through silent cemeteries. The absence alone cannot speak the full horror.
To stand where synagogues were razed, where schools once taught Torah and arithmetic, where playgrounds once rang with Yiddish laughter, is to feel the emptiness press against your chest. It forces the imagination to repopulate the void — to summon the Jewish ghosts who linger, waiting for conscience to remember them.
It is easier to look at the living. Many Poles today are the grandchildren of those who watched as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up — and sometimes finished the work themselves when survivors returned seeking their homes. They became stand-ins for the killers of yesteryear, heirs to silence, envy, and complicity.
Now another people walks amid ruins. In Gaza, millions return to their shattered neighborhoods under a ceasefire, and we are told they have survived a “genocide” at the hands of Jews. Yet the number of Palestinian Arabs has grown, not diminished — a population larger than before the war they themselves began. They tread among the skeletons of broken buildings built atop their army’s tunnels, while ghosts — Israeli civilians burned alive in their kibbutzim and those taken hostage and murdered in Gaza — cry out from the ashes.
I ponder the ghosts of genocide: the murdered and the murderers; the societies that spawned the slaughter; the peaceful towns that became infernos.
Infrastructure shelters ghosts. Societies are haunted by the ones they create, both killer and killed. The unseen dead can no longer showcase their dancing on the one hand, or lust to murder, on the other.
There are scarcely any Jews left in Poland; their ghosts appear only to those who seek them. In Gaza, the ghosts are not gone. They walk the streets, armed and unrepentant — not spirits of victims, but kinsmen of murderers, now turning on one another.
Poland’s haunting is one of silence — an absence so total it chills the air. The ghosts there do not cry out; they wait to be remembered. Gaza’s haunting is the opposite: a cacophony of rage that refuses reflection. Its ghosts are not silent but screaming — not victims unburied, but hatreds unrepented.
Poland’s soil holds the murdered; Gaza’s streets still host the spirit of the murderers. One ghost asks to be mourned; the other demands to be judged.
The haunting does not end with time. It lingers wherever truth is buried, and it deepens each time the living deny the past that shaped them.
Only when a people can face its ghosts — naming both the murdered and the murderers — can it begin to live freely again.
The late comedian George Carlin had a famous routine about “the seven words you can’t say on television.” It was funny because everyone knew the words, and everyone knew the absurdity of pretending they didn’t exist. Then came cable television — HBO, Showtime, and the rest — and suddenly those words were everywhere. What once felt taboo became common, even boring.
So it is with the language used against Israel.
In 1991, after intense U.S. diplomatic pressure, the United Nations revoked its infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. For a moment, it seemed like the libel had been buried. There was hope that the relentless delegitimization campaign against Israel would fade, that the language of hate would finally be retired.
But in 2001, just days before the jihadist terror attacks of September 11, the Durban Conference in South Africa blew the doors wide open again. A coalition of NGOs issued a statement accusing Israel of no fewer than five of the gravest crimes known to humanity:
Apartheid
Genocide
Ethnic cleansing
Racism
Crimes against humanity
This wasn’t fringe rhetoric. It was delivered under the UN umbrella, with global media present. Durban made it “respectable” to say the unsayable — and to say it loudly.
Since then, those accusations have seeped into mainstream discourse. Palestinian “human rights” groups echo the smears repeatedly. They are repeated on college campuses, in international tribunals, in op-eds from major newspapers, and by activists on social media. What was once a shocking smear has become routine — as casual as an f-bomb on late-night cable TV.
Graffiti that Israel is committing “Genocide” in Venice, August 2025
Durban didn’t just make it acceptable to slander Israel — it made it obligatory for the “serious” activist class. To not accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide – and now especially after Israel’s defensive war against Gaza – is to risk being called naive, a sellout, or worse. The same way edgy comics feel compelled to swear to prove they’re authentic, self-styled “human rights defenders” now compete over who can level the most outrageous accusation against the Jewish state.
The world has gone from debating Israel’s policies to cheering on its demonization. The libels have become cultural wallpaper — so constant that people stop noticing they’re lies. Durban didn’t merely open the floodgates. It built a sewer main, hooked it up to the global conversation, and has been pumping raw hate through it ever since — with the United Nations playing plumber, making sure the pipes never run dry.
The medieval accusation of Jews poisoning wells has been updated: now the “poison” is alleged genocide, apartheid, and crimes against humanity — and once again, the world is drinking it without question.
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.
Pundits throw around a phrase that one cannot use a military or force to destroy an ideology.
That’s true. But irrelevant.
Hate and evil movements will never disappear from mankind as long as there are more than three people in the world.
There are still Nazis alive today but they don’t control a government, an army or a territory. As such, the grotesque ideology directly impacts few people.
The evil of ISIL was sharply curtailed when their developing “caliphate” was defeated. It was accomplished by several countries coming together to lay waste to their military, not by sitting down and trying to placate their “grievances.”
That’s the goal with Hamas, the evil government that rules the Gaza Strip. Together with various other jihadi militant groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas spends their efforts instilling antisemitism into their schools and building a military infrastructure to destroy Israel. That control must be ended.
There is one way to stop genocide in the near-term: destroy Hamas’s ability to do battle and hold territory.
To reduce the probability of another war in the region in the longer-term, the United Nations and Saudi Arabia must clearly state that there is no right of return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants into Israel. None.
Shortly thereafter, UNRWA should be deconstructed whereby the facilities administered by UNRWA in the West Bank and Gaza are transferred to the Palestinian Authority, those in Jordan are handed to the government of Jordan, and those in Lebanon and Syria are transferred to the global refugee agency, UNHCR.
To stop genocide, the world should work with Israel to move civilians out of harm’s way, and empower the Israeli military to dismantle Hamas’s ability to fight and govern again.
South Africa put forward the charge of ‘genocidal conduct‘ against Israel for its actions in Gaza since October 8, 2023. The reported figure of over 23,000 deaths, over one percent of the population of Gaza, is claimed to show a deliberate intent to wipe out all Arabs in the region. The use of heavy 2,000-pound bombs in civilians neighborhoods is alleged to show a complete disregard for non-combatants as well as a disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.
Lawyers prosecuting Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) quoted members of the Israeli parliament after the October 7 attack in which they said they wanted to flatten Gaza, encourage a ‘voluntary emigration’ of Arabs from the region, and treat them like the biblical ‘Amalek’, a people for which Jews are commanded to wipe out completely. Counsel argued that comments from leaders shows the government’s official policy for the annihilation of the region’s Arabs.
The United Nations’ International Criminal Court has disallowed Israel from bringing any evidence of the Gazans’ October 7 massacre and brutalization of Israelis, mostly civilians. It contends that even if Hamas committed crimes against humanity, Israel must still adhere to basic rules of war.
The Case Against ‘Genocide’
Genocide involves the deliberate mass killing of an ethnic group or particular nation with the goal of annihilation or ethnically cleansing them.
It is bizarre to bring the charge against Israel based on the situation before even considering the prosecution of the war.
Israel’s attack on Gaza was both reactive and defensive. It had a ceasefire agreement with Hamas which rules Gaza, which Hamas broke with its invasion and sadistic slaughter.
Hamas leaders have pledged to commit the October 7 massacre “again and again.” Israel is compelled to not only bring the estimated 3,000 Gazan perpetrators of the October 7 massacre to justice, as well as the leaders who commanded and supported the operation, but to prevent the atrocities from happening again.
Hamas continues to fire at Israel. Hamas and various factions of this Gaza army continue to fire rockets and wage war against Israel. This is not a situation of a military aggressively hunting civilians but an active battlefield.
Hamas fires from civilian neighborhoods. The battlefield is the neighborhoods of Gaza from which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other factions of the Gazan army shoot rockets and attack Israel.
Civilian infrastructure is part of the Gazan war effort. The Gazan army and infrastructure is embedded in civilian homes, hospitals, mosques and schools. Arms are stored and tunnel-openings begin in these locations, and are therefore part-and-parcel of the Gazan war effort.
The core Gazan army infrastructure is beneath civilian neighborhoods. The Gazan army runs the majority of its operations below ground, underneath civilian neighborhoods.
The Gazan army doesn’t wear uniforms. Many Palestinian fighters do not wear uniforms to clearly distinguish themselves from civilians, blurring the battlefield between military and civilians.
Israel unilaterally left Gaza completely in 2005. Israel does not covet the land and wanted the region to be a peaceful neighbor where Arabs would have complete self-determination. Instead, Gaza became a terrorist-ruled strip which has waged repeated wars against Israel targeting civilians.
Israel is attempting to save hundreds of hostages. Hamas and other Gazans took 240 hostages, mostly civilians into Gaza, many of whom are children, elderly and infirm. Saving them requires quick action.
Those are just the basic facts which set the scene for which Israel has to prosecute a difficult war. Even with such impossible backdrop, Israel has attempted to avoid the loss of civilian lives.
Millions of text messages sent to Palestinian Arab civilians to get out of harm’s way
Leaflets dropped over neighborhoods to make sure civilians got the message to leave active battlefields.
‘Safe zones’ and escape corridors created for civilians to flee hot spots.
Israel telegraphed its intentions of where it was prosecuting the battle – starting in northern Gaza – to allow civilians to leave, putting its own Israeli soldiers at risk.
The world begged Israel to not launch a ground invasion of Gaza and so relied on air power to start the retaliation against known military targets. It is those aerial assaults that the world now criticizes.
While the world may appreciate the need to dismantle Hamas and the impossible task facing Israel of fighting an enemy which is deeply embedded with civilians, it doesn’t really care. It has no proposals or gameplans to prosecute the war any better, other than demand Israel do so.
A view of the rubble of buildings hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Gaza City, October 10, 2023. (Fatima Shbair/AP)
In regard to Israeli leaders’ commentary that Gazans are like Amalek, a metaphor is not a call to action. Amalek was called out because they attacked the weakest Jews as they left Egypt, just as Hamas and its horde brutally butchered women, children and elderly in 2023. Other Israeli comments that all Gazans are culpable have been made by Palestinian advocates, such as James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute who told the United Nations on June 27, 2023 that there is “tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture,” as the majority of the people prefer violence.
Most importantly, Israel has said it will end the campaign immediately if Hamas surrenders and returns all of the hostages.
Israel is now going house-to-house to rescue its captives and destroy Hamas’s army and infrastructure amid a population which supports Hamas and terrorism. Hamas has 58% of the seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament from democratic elections held in 2006. The majority of Gazans support killing Jewish civilians in Israel and supported the October 7 massacre. They are family and friends of Hamas fighters, their teachers and students, donors and recipients of Hamas aid. When Israelis go through the Gazan neighborhoods in this tight battlefield, the civilians which surround them are the soft layer of the Hamas military which Hamas exploits, not uninvolved spectators.
It is likely that any other army would have killed five times as many Gazans as Israel at this point of the war. It is impossible to know because this war is like no other.
As to the charge of genocide, Palestinian Arabs are not confined to Gaza. Over half the population lives in the West Bank and Israel has not launched a massive campaign there, as Hamas doesn’t have a strong presence and there are no Israeli hostages in that region. On a macro level, 23,000 Gazans out of 1.8 billion Muslims is a 0.001% figure. By way of comparison, 63% of Europe’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and about 39% of global Jewry, an actual premeditated deliberate genocide of unarmed civilians.
There are therefore only two considerations to possibly judge Israel: the terrible loss of children’s lives, and the massive destruction of Gazan infrastructure.
Children are innocent by definition. They have no say in the war and not responsible for the terrible actions of adults. Close to 50% of Gazans are under the age of 18, so one would imagine indiscriminate bombing would cause close to 50% of the 23,000 dead to be children, or around 11,500 people. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, the number of children killed is about 8,000, or 30% less than expected. While a tragic figure, it defends Israel’s prosecution of the war as being targeted against military targets.
There is no question there is widespread destruction of Gazan infrastructure. Neighborhoods have been leveled all around the Strip. That is a function that those neighborhoods are, and are above, the battlefield. It is actually surprising that a relatively low number of deaths have occurred with so many bombs dropped on the small territory, suggesting a targeted military campaign.
Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel and has ruled Gaza unilaterally since 2007 enabling it to embed itself throughout the region. Despite the hostile neighbor next door, Israel has limited its activities against the strip to a blockade to limit the flow of weapons, and to respond when attacked. It has never targeted the region or its residents for annihilation.
It is a tragedy for Palestinian Arabs, for Israel, and the world that so many children in Gaza have died. But the fault remains with the Arab rulers who teach their children death and martyrdom, while they attack Israel from those children’s homes. Israel is trying to minimize those casualties in an impossible battle, and the figures show that it is doing so.
The smoldering rubble of the Gazan battlefield is shocking but there is no genocide of buildings. However, the overall architecture of Gaza’s war mentality and machinery has been enabled by the United Nations, the entity which now sits as judge of Israel’s actions. It is a morbid farce, and must be confronted and rooted out for there to be a prayer of coexistence.
Genocide is defined in the dictionary as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” Nazi Germany had that aim in the 1930s and 1940s and succeeded in killing one-third of the Jewish population. Jews have still not replaced the loss 75 years later.
Today, the group that best captures the heinous intent of deliberately killing Jews is the popular political-terrorist group Hamas.
Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is a fountain of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and calls to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State. Some lowlights include:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” (Opening)
“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” (Preamble)
“raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their uncleanliness, vileness and evils.” (Article 3)
“raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” (Article 6)
“Moslems fight the Jews(killing the Jews)… there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him” (Article 7)
“Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land” (Article 12)
“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time” (Article 13)
“In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised…. the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.” (Article 15)
Zionist “organizations, hostile to humanity and Islam, will be obliterated.” (Article 17)
The toxicity rambles on from there.
Palestinian Arabs voted Hamas to 58% of parliament with this charter, in its first democratic election for parliament in 2006. It has thus far been the only parliamentary election.
Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, and Egypt and Israel subsequently put a blockade around the terrorist enclave lest it gain deadly weapons to pursue its genocidal goals. Despite the blockade, the group managed to launch numerous attacks and wars against Israel with low-level weaponry.
Palestinian Arabs continue to support this genocidal group, with a majority supporting their leader to be the next president according to Palestinian polls. That should not be surprising as most Gazans support terrorism, specifically killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
June 2023 PCPSR poll Question 70 “Concerning armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel, I….”, with 70% of Gazans supporting terrorism
The United Nations has a definition for genocide which states:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Elements of the crime
The 1988 Hamas Charter showed clear intent to cause a genocide of Jews, and the group’s broad-based support amongst Palestinian Arabs demonstrate a “deformity” in Palestinian culture, as leading Arab American James Zogby said at the United Nations in June 2023.
The actions of October 7, 2023, certify the intent with barbarism.
Not only did Hamas kill over 1,400 people in an unprovoked attack, it butchered people causing severe mental harm and long-term trauma to the entire Jewish State. It made the idea of living anywhere near Gaza virtually impossible. In taking over 240 hostages into Gaza – including young children who may never see their families again – the evil intent is beyond manifest.
Israel is engaged in a just war against this genocidal group. While limiting civilian casualties, it MUST defeat Hamas and ensure it cannot attack Israel again. An aggressive self defense must be broadly supported.
Defense against genocidal maniacs must extend to Jews in the diaspora as well. Countries with large Jewish populations including the United States, France, Canada, United Kingdom and Argentina have over 7 million Jews amongst them. Those countries have seen a large spike in antisemitic incidents on college campuses, in the streets and in governments. Security must be enhanced as Hamas’s Willing Executioners invert perpetrator and victim and spew antisemitic inanity to incite the mob.
The most terrifying evidence of the global depravity was watching America’s Ivy League professors cheering the October 7 pogrom calling it “exhilarating” and “awesome” because they believed that the genocide of Jews had finally moved passed a Palestinian promise to an actual reality.
The world witnessed an antisemitic genocidal group butchering Jews in Israel, and now watches Hamas supporters come for global Jewry as part of the “global intifada”, bizarrely protected under the banner of free speech.
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