https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21920/israel-good-guy-bad-guy-confusion
The Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict, still dominating world news, remains volatile. Anti-Israel demonstrations — often devolving into violent riots – have taken place in many countries in the past 23 months.
October 7 did not happen because of the lack of a ‘Palestinian state’, but because of the existence of one: Gaza since 2005 has been fully under Palestinian control, and since 2007, fully under Hamas control. There has been no peace.
Since 2005, more than 20,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey, along with at least 100 suicide bombings. How many rockets, missiles and suicide bombings would France, England, Canada or Australia tolerate?
Proposals to make Israeli citizens defenseless against indiscriminate rocket fire are therefore tantamount to inviting mass murder.
Hamas, on the other hand, has a straightforward policy of targeting Israeli civilians, obliterating Israeli communities and of using its own people as human shields and putting them in harm’s way.
So we seem to have here a serious case of mixing up the “good guy” and the “bad guy”. While in any war there will be mistakes, Israel cannot simply be labeled the “bad guy”. Apart from any country thus attacked having the right to forcefully act in self-defense, nowhere in history has any country gone to such pains as Israel not to harm its adversary’s civilians. Nowhere in history have people under attack brought such amounts of humanitarian aid to the people under a regime trying to destroy them.
The UN has admitted that 90% of what it tried to deliver was intercepted by “armed actors” before reaching its destination. The GHF has been vilified and falsely accused of killing Gazans.
Israel has been accused of “targeting civilians” in Gaza (sadly, civilians were killed, as in any conflict, but Israel never targeted them as such); was “genocidal”… committed “ethnic cleansing”, and so on.
The waves of anti-Jewish hate-mongering, in fact, began even before Israel entered Gaza, and by now have become commonplace. Even large American teachers’ unions, to their shame, have been spouting anti-Semitism. This rampant vilification, already seen at universities such as Harvard and Columbia, has become a serious problem… and urgently needs to be confronted.
Israel is a state well-founded in international law. Its existence cannot seriously be a point of dispute. Israel has always wanted simply to be left alone.
The Abraham Accords, politically stabilizing and economically beneficial both to Israel and several Arab countries, show that real peace can be achieved. It is revealing that no demonstrations criticizing Israel’s campaign against the Iranian regime and its proxies have been seen in Arab countries.
Today, the remaining hostages are being deliberately starved, given — only occasionally — contaminated water, and forced to dig their own graves.
Palestinians, and least of all groups such as Hamas, have not expressed a clear desire to recognize and live in peace with a Jewish state in any borders.
It now turns out, in addition, that the Trump Administration’s “helpful” mediator, Qatar — champion of virtually every Islamic terrorist group – instead of ordering Hamas to release the hostages, has been ordering Hamas not to release them.
That there is no demonstrable will on the Palestinian side yet to accept a Jewish state and live in peace with it is also shown by the still existing “pay-for-slay” “jobs program” of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.
A Palestinian state now would not only be a de facto reward for terrorism, it would also inspire other terror movements to intensify their violence. The lesson the terrorists would take home would certainly be, “Terrorism works, so let’s keep on doing it.”
What the recent public demonstrations in the Netherlands and elsewhere show is mostly “selective outrage,” morally and politically lopsided. There appears to be hardly any interest in reconciliation or efforts at dialogue, and more in condoning or stimulating antipathy against Israel.
The Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict, still dominating world news, remains volatile. Anti-Israel demonstrations — often devolving into violent riots – have taken place in many countries in the past 23 months. Some were even held on, or just days after, the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023 – in support of the massacres. There have been so many events and social media statements that amount to vilifying Israel and the Jewish people — too many “incidents” to ignore. As a Dutch academic, I plead here for less emotion and more dispassionate factual debate on this tragic conflict and about the need for honest solutions for both sides.
