At more than 100 sites around the world today, sincere but poorly-informed people are holding vigils—not for the innocent Israeli civilians (and foreign nationals) slaughtered in southern Israel three years ago, but for the Palestinian war dead, large numbers of whom were Hamas fighters. This is like using the anniversary of 9/11 to honor the Taliban soldiers killed at the Battle of Tora Bora.
But it’s even more perverse than that. Everyone attending these vigils supports boycotting Israel. And almost everyone there will take photos on their phones. Few know that many of the components of their Samsungs (including the cameras) were designed and developed in Herzlia, near Tel Aviv. Maybe the iPhone is non-kosher? Nope. Apple’s second-largest R & D facility in the world is located in Israel, too.
I’m not holding my breath for the protesters to throw their phones away in “solidarity” or to welcome a more nuanced analysis of the conflict. We’re way past that point now. Nuance is a distant shore.
When I wrote for the old Newsweek in the 20th Century, we sometimes relied on a cliched qualifier: “To be sure….” This was a way to acknowledge that an opposing argument or inconvenient fact had to be very briefly “flicked at,” as we put it, before rapidly pivoting to our main points.
For the last three years, the events of October 7, 2023 have been framed with, “To be sure…” It felt as if every conversation and the entire tone of the global debate was a variation on, “To be sure, October 7 was horrendous, but you have to see it in the context of the broader struggle in the Middle East.” Or: “To be sure, more than 1,000 people died on October 7, but of course the IDF killed 73,000, including thousands of children.”
Today, to commemorate the third anniversary of October 7, allow me to flip the cliché for a moment. To be sure, the IDF has killed far too many civilians, including children. To be sure, the settler violence on the West Bank is horrendous and the ethnic cleansing there must end. To be sure, it is absolutely essential that Netanyahu lose the October 27 election. But….
As Jews might say on Passover, on all other nights we eat the bitter herbs of the abuses that have led Israel to become a pariah state. But can we not reserve just one day to think a little more deeply about the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust?
So here come the “buts” that most people close their ears to if they hear them at all—the “buts” that reflect how sickening it was to see so many people side with a death cult—Hamas—before the 1,200 bodies of the raped and murdered women, the Jewish children, the Holocaust survivors, the peace activists and the concert-goers were even cold.
I’m looking at you, Hassan Piker, and Megan Romer (DSA co-chair) and Rama Duwaji (first lady of New York). You’re all October 8thers. It’s disgusting how many people cheered cold-blooded mass murder at rallies, signed murderous solidarity statements (sponsored by 30 pro-Palestinian organizations at Harvard alone), ripped down hostages posters (including in my New Jersey town), and abandoned Jewish allies on the left who had supported them when their communities were in pain—all before the Israeli counterattack even began.
Please do me the favor of listening to this audio of a Hamas terrorist speaking with great excitement to his family on a cell phone that he had stolen from an Israeli girl he had just killed. He brags about all the Jews he slaughtered. The bloodlust in his voice and that of his proud parents perfectly captures the evil spirit of October 7.
Sure, turn away. It’s hard, I know. But declining to listen to this or to otherwise confront the horror of that day is the equivalent of hard-hearted and oblivious supporters of Israel saying, “I don’t want to look at photos of bombed-out Gaza or hear again about dead Palestinian children.”
Now, if you think this guy on the audio tape was just an especially bloodthirsty terrorist, please listen to the political director of Hamas saying in the days after October 7 that there would be “a thousand” such attacks coming until Israel was annihilated. Juxtapose this with the pipe dream of Mayor Mamdani and Abdul El Sayed and so many others—the nice-sounding idea of one harmonious state stretching from the river to the sea where the Arab majority and Jewish minority live together in peace. Who would win the election to govern that country. Well, the last real Palestinian election was in 2006 in Gaza, and the winner was a party that immediately established a dictatorship. That party was Hamas.
So there are just a few unanswered questions about the Mamdani-El Sayed one-state solution, now even endorsed by many Jews. After all of those future October 7ths that Hamas promises, where are the Israeli survivors to go? Back to Poland? Back to the Arab lands from which half of them escaped? (So much for the fallacy of neo-colonialism).
Of course Israel has nuclear weapons, so it isn’t going anywhere, even as the rest of the world abandons it. Meanwhile, a two-state solution—the only real answer— is slipping further and further away, thanks to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and the Palestinians’ continued lack of interest in it.
Can we take just one day a year to focus on the latter? The sad truth is that most Palestinians have no interest in peace unless it includes the extinction of Israel. That’s the real message that Hamas delivered on October 7, and that Hezbollah delivered when it began shelling northern Israel the next day. This is an old story. In 1948, Palestinians rejected a UN-sanctioned homeland. In 2000, when they rejected it again, Bill Clinton concluded they were actually just interested in “killing Jews.” Today, you hear little talk of a two-state solution.
El Sayed drew a thought-provoking comparison last week. He acknowledged that his “hurt people hurt people” comment about the terrorist who in March tried to kill more than 100 Jewish children at a temple in Michigan was insensitive. But he argued that the same idea might help explain why Israel flattened Gaza.
There was, indeed, a kind of moral frenzy unleashed after October 7. This was reflected by the Israeli military officers interviewed in the new film Naza. But if El Sayed is right about emotions, he’s wrong about the “context,” a word he often uses. The Hezbollah killer in Michigan was engaged in terrorism; the Israelis were/are engaged in war.
When Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, it was breaking a ceasefire and launching a major military conflict. Adjusted for size, it was the equivalent of soldiers of the Mexican government determined to reclaim their region of origin crossing the southern border of the U.S. and killing 40,000 innocent Americans—19 times as many as died on 9/11. Obviously, the U.S. would have bombed Mexico until it released its hostages and surrendered, and the American people would have fully supported that war. If Mexico refused to lay down its arms, as Hamas is refusing to do, the war would have resumed.
After October 7, many argued that Israel’s response was “disproportionate.” And it was. By over-reacting, the Israelis have created a new generation of Palestinians committed to its destruction. But let’s not pretend that wars have anything to do with “proportionate response.” At Pearl Harbor, the U.S. lost two battleships and 2,000 men. Over the next four years, we killed more than two million Japanese and dropped two atomic bombs on them.
During World War II, my father flew 31 missions over Nazi Germany in a B-24. He was a bombardier and there was nothing “proportionate” about his payloads. He hated war and knew the bombs he aimed at enemy soldiers and military targets also killed lots of innocent civilians. But it was a war against an enemy that shot critics, repressed homosexuals (as we later learned) and aimed, above all, to kill Jews. Just like Hamas.
My father used something called the Norden Bombsight, a primitive computer that didn’t work well. Collateral damage was much worse in those days but it remains unavoidable. Each of the last four American presidents signed off on dozens of counter-terrorism strikes from the air. They knew these orders would inevitably kill innocent people. The Hebrew word for collateral damage is “naza,” thus the title of the film. Of course collateral damage (accidental killing in war) is by definition at odds with genocidal intent, even when the casualties are much too high. No intent, no genocide.
One of the things that bugs me most about the reaction to October 7 is the sheer ignorance of it. Many of the loudest voices on campus and elsewhere don’t know that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005; don’t know that the Israelis left behind hundreds of greenhouses to help Gazan agriculture that were destroyed by Hamas; don’t know that the gates of this so-called “open-air prison” were locked more by Egypt than Israel (which let thousands of Palestinians into Israel to work); don’t know that Hamas is the first government in the entire history of warfare, ancient or modern, that refused to even try to protect its civilian population from harm; don’t know that unlike Ukrainians in 2022 and Brits in 1940 who took refuge in the subways, no civilians were allowed in the more than 300 miles of tunnels; don’t know that most of killing of civilians could have been prevented had women and children not been sent to die aboveground as PR-handy human shields in the hospitals, mosques, schools and civilian apartments used to protect enemy soldiers and caches of weapons.
More ignorance: The folks who get their information from TikTok propaganda and then shout it out as if they actually understand the history of the conflict don’t know that Hamas prolonged the war for months by refusing to even negotiate over the release of the hostages; don’t know that for all of the IDF’s horribly excessive bombing, it never tried to starve Palestinians (war always impedes food distribution) and in fact shipped in polio vaccines; don’t know (or care) that even the UN found in an internal report released last week that several UNRWA workers on the ground in Gaza “very likely” took part in the October 7 massacre.
The degree of ignorance has been driven home to me by how incomplete the questions are for El Sayed, including those from experienced journalists. El Sayed is against military aid to Israel. So am I. Israel is a rich country and it can buy its own weapons without any help from U.S, taxpayers. But he also supports an arms embargo against Israel. That means that El Sayed, who rejects any distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, would vote against allowing Israel to even buy the Iron Dome system that protects Israeli civilians and hundreds of thousands of American Jews (including thousands from Michigan) living in Israel from the Hezbollah and Iranian missiles raining down on them.
To be sure, this could be a problem for El Sayed with many Jewish voters in Michigan. But (and there’s always one after “To be sure…”) it’s not likely to cost him the election. After all, October 7 is only one day of the year, leaving the other 364 open for telling us again what’s so wrong with Israel.
Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated that at least half of the Palestinian war dead were Hamas fighters, according to Hamas itself. That figure, embraced by a few pro-Israeli military experts, is speculative and unknowable. The Gaza Health Ministry, controlled by Hamas, does not break out the number of fighters killed.
