No, we should not feel sorry for 'the children' in Gaza.

The children in Gaza have parents, who have agency. They choose to educate their kids to hate and kill Jews. Naturally, as a Jew, I do not have any empathy for that — or the consequences that follow.

Gazan children train in weapons-use in the Strip during Summer 2021. (photo: Hamas)

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Earlier this week, the notorious United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees posted photos of children in Gaza with the caption: “One child is killed or injured every 10 minutes.”

It was just another one of the countless blatantly calculated lies on which the Palestinian narrative, spanning decades, has been predominantly built.

In fact, there are so many lies that it is nearly impossible to discern fact from fiction across virulent Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim propaganda — all with the goal not of legitimizing their “plight” but of delegitimizing the Jewish state.

And yet, don’t just take it from me, an overly biased Jewish American-Israeli, right?

Here are the recent words of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas’ founders:

“‘Palestine’ is the lie itself. If Palestine was never a country nor a nation, then all the theories built on this lie are invalid. ‘Palestine’ has become the utopia for so many escapists who lack the power to create change in the real world. Driven by misery, they seek revolution, and by revolution they are led back to misery.”¹

Fathi Hammad, a member of the Hamas political bureau and Interior Minister in the Gaza Strip from 2009 to 2014, had this to say: “Half of us Palestinians are Egyptians, the other half are Saudis.” (By “Saudis,” he means that most of the Arabs in the Levant originally arrived from Arabia, which is historically accurate.)

Yet the Palestinians and their “supporters” across the world continue to spew endless lie after lie, blood libel after blood libel, gaslighting ploy after gaslighting ploy — that I have lost all space in my heart and mind to offer genuine empathy and sympathy for the Palestinians, their children notwithstanding.

It is true that people (including children) have unfortunately died during the Israel-Hamas war (a war that the Palestinians in fact started), but there is a stark difference between Israel deliberately killing people, as “pro-Palestinians” recklessly purport, and people dying as a tragic side effect of war.

“War leads to tragedy, so it’s unwise to start them,” wrote one social media user. “The other truth is, Palestinians will never defeat Israel. This political project must die. The delusion has caused so much suffering. It’s time to accept reality.”²

Accepting reality, though, is not always easy, no less for the traditional Arab and Muslim mentality which operates according to an honor/shame paradigm. And don’t even get me started about the Western foreign policy folks who bizarrely think that Western conventional wisdom will solve conflicts in a region (the Middle East) that is as primitive, tribal, authoritarian, suicidally religious, and narrow-minded as you will find.

“A lot of people in foreign policy, they want to feel good, but it doesn’t always do good,” said Einat Wilf, a former Left-leaning Israeli politician. “Sometimes you have to do things that don’t feel good but will actually begin to do good. So, if we want to get out of this conflict … we need to go to the core ideology that sustains it and begin to transform it.”³

Wilf said that she came to this realization after personal conversations with “many highly educated, moderate Palestinians during the last 20 years.” They basically told her things like, “The Jewish People are not a people. You’re only a religion. This idea that you have a connection to this land, you invented it to steal our own.”

She added:

“And I realized from the conversations with them that how they think about the conflict, and how I think about it, don’t even meet. For them, the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state is illegitimate.”

As such, this is ultimately a conflict about the Jews who want (and have) a state in our indigenous homeland, and the Palestinians who want to dismantle this Jewish state.

I constantly hear people talk about how “complicated” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is. Actually, it is not that complicated. It is relatively simple: Again, it is about the Jews who want (and have) a state in our indigenous homeland, and the Palestinians who want to dismantle this Jewish state.

Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant, uneducated on the topic, brainwashed, or simply engaged in gaslighting (psychological manipulation). There is a term for people on this spectrum: It is called “Palestinian.”

If you intellectually analyze the major criticisms of Israel, you will discover that every one of them is based faulty assumptions which reveal not the truth about Israel, but the anti-Jewish biases of the criticizers (some misguided Jews included).

“These criticisms are framed in such a way that the truth is not even considered,” wrote one social media user. “As a result, facts that contradict the antisemitic assumptions are discarded — and only the cherry-picked facts that support the antisemitism are mentioned.”⁴

What’s more, whoever is behind these “pro-Palestinians” knows very well how this game is played: dumbing down convoluted, nuanced topics; ignoring historical context; and hysterical people screaming through megaphones: “Won’t somebody please think of the (Palestinian) children?”

Isn’t it interesting how so many people never seem to really worry about the Israeli children, just those on the Palestinian side? If people are so seriously concerned about “the children” then why are they not displaying similar sympathy for the kinder on all sides?

After all, there are children in Israel too — Jewish children, Muslim children, Christian children, secular children. Are they not deserving of “activism” and “thoughts and prayers” as well?

In Israel, we love children. It is one of the reasons why Israeli women (both Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab) have more children on average (three) than most of their peers across the world. It is also why every Israeli parent sincerely hopes that our country’s security situation will eventually be such that their children will not need to be drafted into the military.

In Gaza, comparatively, Hamas encourages their people to have more children in order “to create a larger army.”⁵ Yasser Arafat, the terrorist who led so-called Palestinian liberation for three-and-a-half decades, described “the womb of the Arab woman” as the Palestinians’ “strongest weapon.”⁶ At schools, mosques, and summer camps in Gaza, children are taught to hate and kill Jews.

Meanwhile, on October 7th, dozens of Israeli children were barbarically murdered and kidnapped by Palestinians. And millions more have been traumatized by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which includes Palestinian terror attacks purposely targeting Israeli civilians. Both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas have “pay for slay” policies; the more horrific the attack, the more money they dish out.

Like children in Israel, those in the Palestinian territories also have parents, and those parents have agency. They are no different than you and I, in that way. Forget the “pro-Palestinian” people across the world for a second. If these Palestinian parents care so much about the suffering of their children, why are we not seeing more of them demanding that the terrorist group Hamas release hostages and surrender?

Why is all the fury is aimed at Israel and none at the party that started the war with an act of mass slaughter and rape, and that keeps it going with hostage-taking and human-shielding?

Might it be because, as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir used to say, some Arabs hate the Jews more than they love their own children?

One social media user had another take on it: “Because they’re full of shit.”⁷

Another one did “a short trip” on social media to see what Palestinians were posting from Gaza. Here are her conclusions:

“So first of all, what do I think there is not happening in Gaza? There is no genocide and no famine. Yes, there is quite a lot of suffering, shortages in some places and lack of decent shelter, et cetera.”

“And there’s a lot of cynical exploitation of it for propaganda purposes. I’m saying it because you can see children are getting paid for it, you can see the absolute control of distribution and you can see how basic needs and the way out is blocked with money — Israel is not taking money for any of it, the West is sending free aid, so the money is demanded by those who want to control the suffering and use it.”

“You should know, that before the war — there was already quite a lot of very poor population in Gaza, but now the economic difficulty has greatly increased for two main reasons: one, the war damaged many sources of livelihood and the second — a major source of livelihood was working in Israel and this option was closed for a long time now, since October 7th, and is now much less operational.”

“So in fact the main source of income is donations and funding from Hamas for control purposes of course. This is how, among other things, Hamas uses the population to ‘work for them,’ and also to smile or cry for the cameras on demand.”

“There are quite a few who refer to Gaza as a ‘prison’ but Gaza is not a prison; Hamas has simply created a situation where it is very expensive to leave it — and thus the poor and the new poor are completely dependent on Hamas and other clans in everything to do with food, shelter, and exit, and they play with them as pawns. If Gaza is a prison — then it’s because Hamas are imprisoning it.”

“Hamas prefers to keep the Palestinians captive so that it can showcase suffering (which they create) and use it as a tool for financial donations, manipulation of the West, and a messianic jihadist war that will never end for them.”

Thus, for those who actually care about “the children” in Gaza, they would so obviously demand that all foreign governments work with Israel to forcefully remove Hamas from governing power in the Strip, just as the Allied Forces eradicated Nazi power in Germany, because the Nazis neither were good for Germany nor its neighbors.

Instead, “pro-ceasefire” folks are supporting the side that continues to refuse a ceasefire; “anti-war activists” are rooting for the group that started the war; “humanitarians” have nothing to say about actual genocides happening in China, Syria, Sudan, and Myanmar; “highly educated” people cite profuse Palestinian propaganda as matter of fact; and “anti-racists” are engaging in flagrant, widespread, and violent antisemitism.

So let’s call a spade a spade: Many of these people’s words and actions suggest that they do not actually care about “the children” — not in Gaza and certainly not in Israel.

Since they are not genuinely devoting similar amounts of time, space, and attention to the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis, then why should we?

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1. Mosab Hassan Yousef on X

2. Brianna Wu on X

3. “Gaza cease-fire alone won’t repair larger enduring rift, political scientist says.” The Harvard Gazette.

4. “Every major ‘criticism of Israel’ is based on antisemitic assumptions. EVERY SINGLE ONE.” Elder of Ziyon.

5. “The reasons why Gaza’s population is so young.” NewScientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25993-the-reasons-why-gazas-population-is-so-young.

6. “In Israel, birth rates are converging between Jews and Muslims.” The Economist. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/08/18/in-israel-birth-rates-are-converging-between-jews-and-muslims.

7. Abe Greenwald on X