A Letter to My Hamas-Supporting Neighbors
A Letter to My Hamas-Supporting Neighbors
Again, you are tasked with answering the poignant question: Do you hate us Jews more than you love yourselves?
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free and zero-advertising for all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
To my Hamas-supporting neighbors:
I know right now is a highly charged time for everyone. Israelis do not want war, but we also want peace.
In the last years, Israel has not experienced peace, especially with regard to Gaza. The first scuffle dates back to 2009, indeed, but we know that Hamas is just a more extreme, more obnoxious, more cult-like version of what you might call the pursuit of Palestinian liberation.
I am all for everyone on Earth living a decent and dignified life, but what was done on October 7th is not an act of or desire for liberation. It was a vulgar attempt at ethno-religious revenge and retribution.
If you wail and scream about your land, rights, oppression, and misery, but are willing to excuse murder, rape, sadism, mutilation, kidnapping, and torture, then I don’t have to listen to your calls for liberation. And I won’t.
When the videos, photographs, and stories of October 7th’s carnage come not from “Israeli propaganda” but from Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to think anything other than Palestinians want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Guess what? I do.
Israel’s response has been harsh, widespread, and unabashed. In Israel, we do not deny the destruction taking place across Gaza, the unfortunate civilian casualties, and the living hell that much of the strip has become.
We are fully aware that daily life has gotten exponentially worse for Gaza’s people, and we do not lose sleep knowing that you are undergoing immense suffering, irrespective of who is to blame. What’s more, we are not trying to sugarcoat or circumvent these inconvenient truths. We are very much at peace with the consequences. Why?
Because after seeing the footage of October 7th, our empathy evaporated. And our desire for peace — not to be confused with a fruitless “peace process” — skyrocketed. After all, peace tends to come after war.
In war, people die, and that sucks. But people also died on October 7th, some 1,200 of them, with 250 more kidnapped back to Gaza. Despite what the mainstream media and social media lead people to believe, our deaths are no less significant than yours.
As long as you continue supporting terror against Israel and Jews, I will continue supporting Israeli politicians who ruthlessly defend our country, even when Palestinians, innocent and not, die as a result.
I do not pay taxes to some world government that is supposed to ensure all eight billion people on Earth are kept safe and sound. I pay taxes in Israel, and I expect Israel to defend me and its other tax-paying citizens. That’s how this works.
When terror groups hijack territories like they have done in Gaza, using it as a launchpad for Islamic jihad, pernicious military action is the only way, regardless of the risk to innocents.
Still, since the State of Israel’s founding in 1948, we Israelis have tried to accommodate the Palestinians every which way — territorial concessions, peace agreements, financial aid, work opportunities, and more — but nothing seems to work. If anything, these gestures had the opposite affect: more vile terrorism against mostly innocent Israeli civilians.
So Israel put up checkpoints and walls to better protect its borders, just as any country would reasonably do. Our politicians and security establishments let us down on October 7th, but we know that does not change the very intentions of so many Palestinians: to exact as much hurt and spite on as many Jews as possible.
But you have an opportunity to change this script. Despite all the trauma that the Palestinians have caused Israelis, many of us are still willing to accommodate the Palestinians. It starts with you, though. It starts with speaking out and standing up to the extremist elements in Palestinian society that are only making Palestinian suffering worse.
I know, this is not so easy to do — and it certainly is easier to blame the Jews for all your troubles. As the old Jewish saying goes: The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew pull out his pockets to prove his innocence.
Perhaps what eats at the heart of every Arab Jew-hater is that, even though there are tons of Arab-majority countries, these countries are mostly riddled in poverty, while the Jews have been able to turn their little sliver of land, one of the only places in the Middle East without oil, into an international powerhouse and thriving society.
For those who claim that Israel’s success is a result of the financial aid we get from the United States, think about the billions of dollars that the whole world has poured into Gaza and the West Bank. Honestly, what do you have to show for it?
We Jews are not going anywhere. You would not be the first group of people to try to get rid of us. Our history is older than your religion. Zionism is more storied than Palestinian fairy tales. Again, you are tasked with answering the poignant question: Do you hate us Jews more than you love yourselves?
If you continue to opt for more hate, your lives will remain miserable, while us Jews while find a way to thrive again, just as we have countless times before. The concepts of hard work, dedication, and togetherness are not alien to us. And we Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with you: We have nowhere else to go.
Surely, the habits of hard work, dedication, and togetherness can benefit the Palestinians as well, in spite of all the Palestinian leaders who have historically, and still to this day, oppressed their people. But if the English, the French, the Americans, the Chinese and, yes, even the Israelis were able to do it, you can bring about a revolution too. You can be the generation that rewrote Palestinian history for the better.
Being honest about history is a good place to start. Israel is the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same faith and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.
The more you deny these historical facts, the more you deny your own prosperity, and the more you make us realize that “Palestine” is the only country in the world that never existed before its so-called occupation. Therefore, the Palestinians have the weakest case among all the world’s conflicts — and even then, we are willing to live side-by-side with you.
But we deserve a fair account of history, not a manipulative distortion of it. When distortion is part of a larger effort to justify massacring us, we have a problem: You say we must be dead, we say that we want to be alive. Between life and death, I do not know of any middle ground.
And that is why we are where we are, today.
Sad, but true. This sedate, left-leaning grandmother can say with heartfelt determiniation, “Am Yisrael Chai!"
No one in the diaspora wants to say, “You’re either with us or against us,” but that is the sad reality of wartime.