The children in Gaza are not the only ones who matter.
The children in Gaza are not the only ones who matter.
There are children in Israel, too.
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How many times have you heard about “the children in Gaza” — as if they are the only children in the world who matter.
Well, it turns out, there are children in Israel, too.
And, at least by my calculus, Israeli children deserve the same amount security and safety that any other group of children deserves.
In fact, it was not the parents of these Israel children who started the Israel-Hamas war. It is not the parents of these Israeli children who indoctrinate their children (or allow their children to be indoctrinated) to hate the “other” simply because they are the “other.”
And it is not the parents of these Israeli children who have been crying for 76 years about an overblown myth of “stolen land” as proud justification for virulent, antisemitic terrorism not just aimed at the opponent’s army, but at civilians, including their children.
Certainly, they are evil Israeli parents and peaceful Palestinian ones, but on one side the evil parents very much seem to be in the minority and on the other side they appear to be in the majority. For those who just arrived to the party, Israeli parents are mostly peaceful and Palestinian parents mostly not.
And let’s not confuse “peaceful” with the obvious need for self-defense, as in: When they come to kill your children, you stand by ready to defend them at all costs. If that is not your cup of tea, good luck to you and your children.
In Israel, most of us are not gullible enough to think that most Palestinians are “just like us” — a sort of “Western conventional wisdom” that is some combination of naive, ignorant, and unhinged.
I get it, it is easier to sleep at night with the thought that “most people” in the world want “the same things” — but that is just not the case. Go read a history book.
And even if “most people” in the world did want “the same things,” tyranny of the minority is a real thing that has repeatedly yielded terrible consequences. The Jews would know. Asking us to ignore or overlook that, again, is perilous. Thanks, but no thanks. Our kids deserve better.
Whereas schoolchildren in different parts of the world perform cautionary fire and natural disaster drills, schoolchildren in Israel perform rocket attack drills, as in: They need to be shown how to immediately get to the school’s bomb shelter in the event that Palestinians decide to indiscriminately launch rockets at Israel on any given day, at any given hour.
For the especially young schoolchildren, Israeli teachers invented sing-along jingles to keep the kids calm as they are escorted to the bomb shelter. In some Israeli cities, entire classrooms of children only have 15 seconds to go from classroom to bomb shelter, at any moment’s notice. Yes, you read that correctly: seconds.
In the early 1990s, Mordechai Yosepov immigrated to Israel from Uzbekistan. On a summer morning in 2004, Yosepov waited for a cousin who was dropping off his grandson at kindergarten. “I remember seeing him that morning on my way to kindergarten,” recalled one of his grandchildren, Ilanit Yosepov, who was 5 at the time, “and soon afterwards, we heard an explosion that frightened all of the children.”
The impact of a fatal Hamas missile left a pothole the size of a large frying pan in the middle of the asphalt street in front of the Lilach Preschool in a neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings. Metal shards sliced through the bodies of 3-year-old Afik Zahavi, and his mother, Ruthie, as they walked toward the school at about 8 a.m. Afik died on his way to the hospital, while Ruthie survived to tell the story.
Ilanit’s 49-year-old grandfather and the 3-year-old Afik were the first victims of rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. Their deaths prompted the Israeli government to undertake a project that would result in an innovative missile defense system known today as the Iron Dome.
And what about all the hundreds of thousands of children in Israel who have been traumatized by this and past wars? What about the children whose friends were killed by Palestinians on October 7th? What about the children who were kidnapped back to Gaza? What about the children who saw their family members murdered on that horrific day, no less the children whom were murdered themselves?
Sure, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the point of Israel’s response in Gaza is not to “return the favor.” It is to restore deterrence so that more children in Israel do not suffer the same dreadful fate that others already have.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the response to Israel’s actions throughout several mini wars and operations there did not prompt the governing power, Hamas, to build civilian infrastructure for the safekeeping of the Strip’s 2 million residents during wartime. But of course, Hamas is a terrorist organization, so no one with a working brain would expect them to do so. Hamas cares only about Hamas, not about the “Palestinian people.”
However, the United Nations, the International Red Cross, and all the other “humanitarian” organizations that have a significant presence in the Strip and have poured billions of dollars into Gaza during the last many years — what about them? If they care so much about the Palestinians and their children, why have they not done more to ensure they are safe in the event that Hamas launches (another) war against Israel?
Or is there something more cynical at play here? Do these organizations effectively work for Hamas? Or do they secretly want Palestinian children to die and suffer during operations and wars so that they can broadcast these images to the world and implicitly blame Israel (i.e. the Jews) for something that really has nothing to do with the Jewish state?
After all, history shows us time and time again that many people love a good old-fashioned Jewish blood libel. The show must go on, I guess.
It is true that people (including children) have unfortunately died during this Israel-Hamas war (a war that the Palestinians in fact started), but there is a stark difference between Israel deliberately killing children, 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.”1
This, is, of course, a Westerner looking at the situation from a Western point of view. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the other Palestinian terror groups (past and present) do not share this same worldview. To these savages, as long as they are still alive (literally) at the end of a war, they are victorious — even if thousands of Palestinians die in the process.
In fact, the Palestinians celebrate death. Some call it “Palestinian death culture.” They see it as some noble, admirable deed. If this sounds like a cult, that is because “the Palestinians” are in fact one big cult. Their entire narrative and collective identity is built on a house of scrupulous lies, with which they are indoctrinated to generate a vicious cycle of terrorism, death, more terrorism, more death, and so forth.
For Palestinian oligarchs — and there are thousands — they have mastered the art of turning Western gullibility into billions of dollars in fundraising. The process looks something like this: Palestinian terrorists brutally attack Israel to force a significant military response from the Israeli government, which translates into mass misery for the Palestinian civilian population, captured by a news media and “citizen journalists” eager to disseminate this agony far and wide.
In turn, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority use this mass misery to generate new recruits, propaganda, and support — both diplomatic and financial — from allies in the region and across the world.
The West, easily fooled by the news media and social media, encourages their countries and humanitarian organizations to continue funneling billions of dollars to the Palestinian Territories, thereby giving Hamas and the Palestinian Authority a very literal free pass from spending its money on socioeconomic initiatives for the residents of the Territories.
This means more money for terrorism and other illegal activities, and the process repeats itself, taking on a lethal flywheel effect that gets cheered on by many a Palestinian — unfortunately pushing a two-state solution further from any semblance of reality.
So no, the Palestinians are not “just like us.”
And don’t just take it from me. 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.”2
Some people raise their kids to believe in a make-believe world that sounds and feels good, but is ultimately disconnected from reality. Oftentimes these kids grow up and realize that the world their parents painted (even with the best of intentions) is not the world as it is.
In Israel, Israeli parents do not have the luxury of raising their children in a bubble. We have enemies on literally all of our borders who champion death culture and raise their children to proudly wear that badge.
Yet so many people fall for the “poor Palestinian children” fallacy, thus ignoring or forgetting that there are also children in Israel who deserve the same empathy and sympathy.
Brianna Wu on X
Mosab Hassan Yousef on X
Palestinians and their supporters (apologists) don’t just delegitimize Israel as a country. They delegitimize Israelis as a people. Too much of the world doesn’t believe Israelis are worthy of empathy, security & self-determination.
While I personally agree with the content of your article, why write it? You are only "preaching to the converted". Hamas is a terrorist organization. What they did on October 7th and subsequently to the hostages was/is a "crime against humanity" that precipitated war. War is not pretty. " In the last days of World War II, the Allies bombed French towns, bridges, ports, military installations, and rail centers to prevent German reinforcements from interfering with Operation Neptune, the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches. This air offensive resulted in the deaths of over 60,000 French civilians and extensive damage to churches, buildings, towns, and works of art" (From "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" by Stephen Borque"). The hypocrisy of the West, and now especially Norway, which was complicit in the extermination of Jews, Spain which was allied with the Nazis and expelled its Jews in 1492, and Ireland which supported terrorists is especially infuriating.