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Pro-Palestinian progressive Jews have anointed themselves as the true arbiters of what actions by the Jewish state of Israel supposedly violate Jewish values. Cloaked in their self-righteousness, these self-hating Jews have falsely accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. To the contrary, Israel is conducting a war of survival against the continuing threat of more barbaric atrocities like those committed by the real genocidal barbarians, Hamas and their fellow Palestinian terrorists, against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Hamas and their allies have launched wave after wave of rocket attacks against Israeli civilian population centers from their hiding places in Gaza for years. Their relentless assaults against innocent civilians culminated in the October 7, 2023 massacres, rapes, torture, and abductions inside Israel that triggered the current war in Gaza. Hamas leaders have promised more October 7th-style attacks if given a chance. For obvious reasons, Israel cannot let these genocidal Islamist fanatics succeed.
If groups like Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) had their way, the Jewish state of Israel would no longer exist. Jewish Voices for Peace describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world” and says that it is “accountable to Palestinian-led organizations and coalitions.”
The Palestinian-led organization that has controlled Gaza and has brought nothing but misery to its civilian population is Hamas. JVP makes excuses for Hamas, rationalizing its horrific October 7, 2023 attack as a response to “Israeli apartheid and occupation.”
Some progressive Jewish groups are willing to assign a small portion of the blame for the Gaza war and current humanitarian crisis to Hamas but still hold Israel primarily responsible. They accuse Israel, for example, of causing mass starvation in Gaza when the truth is that Israel has facilitated the transfer of tons of food into Gaza. However, much of this food has been looted by thieves or seized by Hamas terrorists and diverted for their own selfish purposes. The United Nations, which is supposed to be responsible for the distribution of food inside Gaza to those who truly need it, has done a botch job. And the UN refuses to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid relief distribution network set up by Israel and the United States.
University campuses have been hotbeds of hate against Israel and Jews who support Israel. Leftwing Jewish professors have contributed to this climate of hate.
For example, leftwing Colombia University economics professor and self-proclaimed Jew, Jeffrey Sachs, said recently, “Israel does not represent the Jews. Israel is a nation state that is currently engaged in genocide. In my view, Israel currently stands antithetically to Jewish values and to human rights and international law.”
Sachs’ “view” is perverse. His outrage does not extend to Hamas. Only to Israel.
But as the Coalition for Jewish Values stated, “the one and only source of Gaza’s ongoing tragedy is Hamas. To state otherwise is to grant unintended support to antisemitic inversions of this obvious truth.”
The land of Israel is the Jewish people’s historic homeland. The Zionist pioneers turned a desert wasteland into thriving cities, towns, and farmland where Jews could feel safe, free from centuries of persecution. Israel is a pluralistic democracy that embodies core Jewish values such as performing good deeds to help repair the world, charity, and the importance of education.
When the Arab Palestinians were given a chance to have their own independent state in accordance with the 1947 United Nations General Assembly partition plan, they rejected this original two-state solution that the Jews who established Israel accepted. The Palestinians chose instead to join neighboring Arab countries in a losing war against the Jews.
In short, the Palestinians blew an opportunity to have their own state more than seventy-five years ago. The Palestinian leadership has squandered multiple opportunities for an independent Palestinian state ever since because they are obsessed with eliminating the Jewish state of Israel to the exclusion of all else. “From the river to the sea” has been their rallying cry with no room for Jews to live freely and in peace in their ancestral homeland.
As the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid said, “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Israel even unilaterally withdrew all its military forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005 and gave the Palestinians the opportunity to establish and develop a prototype Palestinian state. They missed that opportunity too.
“Instead of investing in schools, hospitals, and infrastructure,” the Coalition for Jewish Values observed, “Hamas…transformed Gaza into a fortress of terror, for one purpose alone: the eradication of Israel and the slaughter of its Jews.”
The blood in Gaza is on Hamas’s hands. Hamas could end the war and suffering in Gaza immediately by releasing all the remaining live hostages and remains of the deceased, by giving up all their weapons, and by ceding their governance powers. If Hamas refuses, the blood will continue to be on their hands.
