Genocide?
The Hamas 1988 charter, Article 7 explicitly calls for the
killing of Jews wherever they are found. Not Israelis. Not Zionists. Jews. Yes
anti-Zionist Jews, it includes you! As a global project. Written down. Never
rescinded in any meaningful way.
Ethnic cleansing?
Every Arab country that hosted a Jewish community expelled
its Jews after 1948 or severely persecuted them. Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya,
Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. Over 850,000 Jews forced from their homes.
Israel absorbed them all. No one talks about them.
Occupation?
Jordan illegally occupied Judea and Samaria from 1948 to
1967. Egypt illegally occupied Gaza. Ethnically cleansed every Jew from the
territory. Destroyed 58 synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. Paved roads
with headstones from the Mount of Olives Jewish cemetery.
And successive terrorist organizations from PLO to
Hezbollah have occupied Southern Lebanon with just one aim of firing rockets
into Israel.
Apartheid?
Every Palestinian Arab document on the future Palestinian
state specifies that no Jew will be permitted to live there. The PA has
repeated this explicitly. Their vision of statehood is a Jew-free state. Their
word for it is Judenrein.
They are not describing us. They are describing themselves.
But it goes deeper than the accusations. They are also
projecting their entire worldview onto us.
Political Islamist movements, the same movements that fund
and run the pro-Palestinian propaganda machine, operate from a specific
cultural frame. And they cannot imagine that anyone operates from a different
one.
Their frame is the glory of death. The Hamas charter cites
the Islamic tradition promising that "the trees and the stones will say:
'O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'" That is Article
7. It is the founding document of their movement.
Their military wing is called the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam
Brigades, named after a jihadi killed while fighting Jews in Mandate Palestine.
Their suicide bombers are recruited with the promise of 72
virgins in paradise, a mainstream hadith cited by every jihadist organization
from Hamas to ISIS. Children are taught this promise in Hamas schools before
they can read.
Their funerals for terrorists are celebrated as weddings.
The mother of a suicide bomber ululates in joy. The community distributes
sweets. The martyr's photograph goes on the wall of the school he attended.
The Palestinian Authority pays lifetime salaries to the
families of terrorists, the more Jews their relative killed, the higher the
payment. "Pay for Slay" is a real, documented, ongoing PA policy.
Now here is the Jewish frame.
U'vacharta ba'chaim. Choose life. It is not a suggestion. It is a Torah commandment.
The Talmud states: "Whoever saves a single life, it is
as if he saved an entire world." One human life is a universe.
Pikuach nefesh,
the preservation of a single human life, overrides almost every commandment in
the Torah. You can break Shabbat to save a life. You can break the fast on Yom
Kippur to save a life. You can eat forbidden food to save a life. You can
violate almost every ritual law to save a life. This is not a loophole. This is
the whole point.
Our mourner's prayer, the Kaddish, does not even mention
death. Not once. It is a
praise of God's greatness. Because in the Jewish frame, even in the presence of
death, we speak of life.
We named our first modern political movement "chibbat
Zion" the love of Zion. Not the death of anyone. The love of a
place. The desire to live there..
Our national anthem is called Hatikvah. The Hope.
Not "The Vengeance." Not "The Conquest." The Hope.
They cannot see this.
They cannot see that when Israel does something, we are
usually doing it because we are trying to keep our children alive. Not because
we want theirs dead.
When Israel drops leaflets before a bombing, when Israel
calls Arab phones to warn them to evacuate, when Israel opens humanitarian
corridors even during active war, this is not weakness. This is Jewish law.
Life is precious. Even the life of the population that houses your enemy is
precious. And often the IDF goes to such extraordinary lengths that it
endangers our own soldiers.
They cannot see this because in their frame, warning your
enemy is stupidity. In their frame, showing mercy is defeat. In their frame,
the goal is death, theirs, ours, everyone's, as long as it advances the
political-religious project.
The Accusations
When they accuse Israel of genocide, they are describing
what they would do to us if the roles were reversed. And we only need to look
to October 7 to know that.
When they accuse us of wanting all the land, they are
describing their own program from the river to the sea.
When they accuse us of killing children, they are
describing the strategy they use, hiding rockets in kindergartens, using
children as human shields, training six-year-olds to stab Jews.
Projection is not just a rhetorical move. It is what
happens when a movement built on death encounters a people built on life and
cannot imagine any other frame exists.
They have accused Israel of every crime in the human
catalog. But they have described only themselves.
Look at what they say we do. Then look at what they
actually do.
And then tell me who has the mentality of
life, and who has the mentality of death.
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