Palestinians call it 'resistance.' It looks a lot like extortion.
The actual "occupation" is of facts, morals, and logic.
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There are lies. There are damned lies. And then there’s whatever passes for “Palestinian advocacy” in 2025.
Let’s start with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — yes, it’s real. Civilians are suffering. But the cause? The actual cause?
According to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s own memo, it’s not Israeli cruelty or some mythical siege. It’s Hamas. Aid that enters Gaza gets stolen, repurposed, resold, and used to rearm terrorists. And yet, Israel is somehow blamed for not letting unlimited aid through to the very regime that orchestrated the October 7th massacre and continues to hold hostages and launch rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.
Here’s a radical idea: You want aid to Gaza? Release the hostages, surrender, and go into exile.
But no.
Instead of demanding basic human decency from the perpetrators, the world throws a tantrum at Israel. Human rights groups and European governments (who apparently believe maps are optional and history is a suggestion) insist that Israel — “the occupying power,” they say, despite not occupying Gaza — is legally obligated to facilitate unhindered aid.
Unhindered?
In what warzone has aid ever been handed out like Halloween candy? There are always protocols, especially when the recipient is a terror group that proudly uses aid convoys for military logistics and whose fighters were filmed riding atop aid trucks like dystopian parade floats.
And what happens when Israel proposes a mechanism to safely distribute aid without empowering Hamas? Hamas itself rejects it. On Monday, Hamas issued an official statement declaring its “firm opposition to turning humanitarian aid into a tool of political extortion or having it subject to Israeli conditions.”
That’s right, Hamas is rejecting humanitarian aid for their own people because it doesn’t come with strings attached to terror. The Israeli plan, designed to ensure food and medicine actually reach civilians rather than rocket factories, was declared unacceptable. That’s not a government. That’s a hostage-taker throwing away the food until his ransom is met.
To add insult to injury, dozens of NGOs are throwing a moral tantrum about Israel’s new mechanism to safely distribute aid without empowering Hamas, declaring they won’t help because they might be “complicit in war crimes.”
Yes, welcome to the upside-down: refusing to bring food to children is principled, but stopping terrorists from stealing that food makes you the war criminal. The NGOs are no longer neutral actors; they are political players, and deeply immoral ones at that.
Meanwhile, the United Nations — that bastion of moral inversion — has published 367 reports about Gaza since October 7th, and zero investigations into Hamas’ use of human shields. None. Nada. They don’t condemn it. They don’t acknowledge it. They call it an “allegation.” You know, the same way one might call gravity a “rumor.”
And while Islamist terrorists roam free, literary awards are handed to their apologists. Case in point: Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet living in the U.S. who has downplayed the murder of Israeli hostages and defamed survivors like Emily Damari. He just awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Damari said it best: “He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.”
This isn’t about poetry. This is about the West applauding barbarism under the soft glow of self-righteousness.
Oh, and France? The French government, always eager to lecture Israel about “international law,” hosted Syria’s new president, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, just days after condemning Israel for targeting actual terrorists. That’s not diplomacy. That’s hypocrisy with a croissant.
Back on the high seas, a group of 40 anti-Israel “peace activists” sailed toward Gaza on a ship called “Al Awda” (Arabic for “The Return”), hoping to violate Israel’s blockade. Two drones (origin unknown) disabled their generators, and now they float helplessly while Greta Thunberg and company scream about international law violations.
First of all, there was no harm. Second of all, it’s a blockade against a terror entity. It’s legal. And third, what exactly did they expect? A red carpet and a welcome basket from the IDF?
But the real kicker? Half of Gaza’s residents, or some 1.1 million Palestinians, believe that Hamas’ decision to carry out the October 7, 2023, cross-border massacre in Israel was “correct,” according to an opinion poll published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research this week.
The other half say they would apply to Israel for help to emigrate out of Gaza, according to another Ramallah-based poll, funded by Western donors. To put it simply: They’ve had enough of Gaza.
And, yet, Western activists — safe in London, Paris, New York, and Sydney — protest in favor of keeping these people trapped. In the name of “Palestinian rights,” they fight to maintain the very cage that Palestinians themselves are trying to escape.
And then comes one of the most disgraceful developments yet: This week, a U.S. federal judge said there was reason to believe that a U.S.-based nonprofit knowingly employed a man (Abdallah Aljamal) who held Israeli hostages in Gaza and had affiliations with Hamas.
The freed hostages (Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv) were abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 2023 onslaught. According to both the lawsuit and the IDF, Aljamal, a contributor to the Palestine Chronicle, held them in his home.
The Chronicle is operated by the People Media Project, a tax-exempt nonprofit in the United States, and a group now potentially complicit in terrorism and hostage-taking. Let that sink in: A U.S. nonprofit, subsidized by taxpayers, might have harbored a Hamas operative holding Jews in his basement. And yet, the moral outrage from the NGO and media class? Deafening silence.
Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, the eternal president of the Palestinian Authority (currently serving year 19 of his four-year term), refuses to relocate 100,000 Palestinians from decrepit refugee camps into actual homes — even though he controls the territory and has billions in foreign aid.
Why?
Because misery is politically useful. Refugees are PR gold. All the while, Abbas and his sons have reportedly built a $300 million West Bank business empire. The only construction project in “Palestine” that never stalls.
And let’s not forget the Vatican’s newest PR blunder: Pope Leo XIV received Abbas warmly, calling for “Palestinian liberty” while seemingly unaware that Abbas runs a kleptocracy where freedom is a punchline and elections are a distant memory.
This is the reality: The Palestinian cause has become a global theater of absurdity, powered by NGOs that refuse to aid, poets that glorify violence, regimes that thrive on victimhood, and activists who protest freedom of movement — for Palestinians. It’s a movement that demands Israel die while pretending to fight for life.
So yes, just when you thought the Palestinian nonsense couldn’t get worse, it always does.
And Israel?
Israel will keep defending itself, rescuing hostages, feeding the civilians Hamas exploits, and bearing the blame for the sins of others.
Because in the end, that’s what moral clarity looks like.
Incredibly well written and salient. I wish you weren’t right. I’m sure you’re aware the Pulitzer comes straight from that bastion of fairness Columbia University 🤮
Your essays get better and better, Joshua. This one hits the bullseye on every point you made. The world gets more upside down and inside out. I'm tired of moral clarity. Let others feed the Arabs and watch while Hamas confiscates it, keeps much of it for themselves, and gives miniscule handouts to its "people." The conflict is going into its second year. Enough is enough of these board games. Israel needs to finish the job in Gaza, Yemen, Iran. After the latest Houthi attack, compliments of Iran, aimed at Tel Aviv, which was fortunately intercepted, but what if it wasn't? More lives lost, more destruction. It's tme for Israel to show these countries that it's game over. I want to add that Israel doesn't need moral clarity, but the rest of the world does. When will they get it back is up for grabs.