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This is an essay written by Joshua Hoffman and Rabbi Arnie Singer, the founder of IsraelAM, a daily Israel news email.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas had 30,000 armed terrorists.
Today, around five months later, Israel has reportedly killed between 10,000 and 12,000 terrorists. This means Hamas has anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 armed terrorists still active in Gaza. They also have hundreds of miles of tunnels still active, which is where these terrorists are hiding.
Hamas has changed its tactics. At first, at the outset of the war, Hamas attempted to fight Israel in the open, and that is when most of its terrorists were killed, because Hamas does not stand a chance against the most powerful military in the Middle East in open warfare.
Now, Hamas has changed its tactics, and they are not engaging against Israel other than in sporadic terrorist acts, where groups of one, two, or three terrorists will come out of hiding, fire an RPG or some sort of weapon, and then retreat. In many cases, these terrorists are eliminated, but the brunt of the force remains in hiding.
Why is this?
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, has made it very clear. He said that his plan is to wait out Israel and let civilian casualties mount (which they inevitably have to in the midst of this warfare) and let the international community come in and stop Israel.
When that happens, Hamas emerges from its tunnels with at least 15,000 armed terrorists, and it is very easy for them to recruit more terrorists. They claim victory against mighty Israel, and they still have the hostages.
At first glance, it does not seem like Israel has a lot of options other than continuing a very long-term fight and occupying Gaza, while keeping troops there to make sure that these terrorists do not attack again. At some point, they will run out of food. They will have to emerge from their tunnels, and then they can be eliminated. But of course, the international community does not want Israel to occupy Gaza.
So, it looks like Israel is in a tough spot. The only solution is to continue and wear them down, and it could take years.
But there is one other solution that the world used against another terrorist organization, ISIS.
When ISIS conquered large parts of Iraq and Syria, the United States led a coalition along with many other free countries to defeat ISIS. They fought either with their own troops or supported allied Arab troops and Kurdish troops to finally defeat ISIS.
They did not quit until they did so, because everyone understood that ISIS is a threat to freedom. Their tactics were barbaric and inhuman. So, the world said, we have to destroy them.
The same thing should be happening against Hamas. There is no difference between Hamas and ISIS. They are as barbaric, as vicious, and they proved so on October 7th.
What, then, is the difference? Why is the world not forming a coalition to defeat Hamas, even diplomatically, to try to stop Hamas, cut off all their funding, cut off all their supplies, cut off all their support, and bring them to their knees? Why is the world not doing that?
Instead, it seems like the world is supporting Hamas, because they are engaging in negotiations. They are supporting negotiations with them. They are condemning Israel. They are demonstrating against Israel. And they are trying to force Israel to cease fire, to let Hamas continue as a viable terrorist organization that can repeat the attacks of October 7th.
Why is the world doing this?
The only answer I can think of is because, in this case, it is the Jews who are on the other end of this barbarity. And when Jewish lives are at stake, apparently Jewish lives do not matter.
In 2022, renowned and prize-winning novelist Dara Horn tackled this subject in her bestselling book, “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.”
Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture ― and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks ― Dara was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: She was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.
“These stories, I came to understand, were presenting a challenge to the Western idea of the purpose of creativity,” she wrote. “Stories with definitive endings don’t necessarily reflect a belief that the world makes sense, but they do reflect a belief in the power of art to make sense of it. What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.”1
In her aforementioned book, Dara began with a story from the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam. One day, a museum employee wore a kippah (a Jewish head covering) to work and was told to cover it with a baseball cap, since (a spokesperson later explained to the press) the Anne Frank House aimed for “neutrality.”
“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months,” wrote Dara, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”
Dara also delved into the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin (in China), Dara challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
With the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that (far from being disarmed by the mantra “never again”) is on the rise, the subtler dehumanization has been built into a public “devotion” that surrounds the Jewish past ― so much so that benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.
Sure, Israel has been headline news during the past five months, but make no mistake: This is a Jewish problem, not just an Israeli one.
In 2019, for instance, antisemitic terrorists killed three people at a kosher market in New Jersey. It is likely that the murderers, who had an extensive collection of explosives in their car — enough to destroy an area the size of five football fields, the police said — intended to bomb the Jewish school below the market. Yet much of the mainstream media covered this story from a bizarre angle.
“The ‘context’ provided by local news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty,” said Dara. “As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and other news outlets, ‘The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices.’”2
“Like many homeowners,” she added, “I too have been approached by real estate agents asking me if I wanted to sell my house. I recall saying no, although I suppose murdering these people would also have made them go away.”
With this in mind, we need to stand up against this and recognize that the world does not care about Jewish lives. The only ones who are going to care about Jewish lives are us and our State of Israel.
This is why we have to stand strong, support Israel, and stand strong together, united, to protect ourselves wherever we are, whether it is in Israel or the Diaspora, because it is clear that the world is not on our side. In fact, the world is in many ways supporting Hamas.
“Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them,” wrote Dara. “This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.”
Horn, Dara. “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.” W. W. Norton & Company. 2022.
“People Love Dead Jews.” Tablet.
Hi I think you are wrong to say no one else cares a small minority of reasonable intelligent individuals do care and are not fooled by hamas.
Friends we are the the world that excuses, defends, supports, picks sides, holds fear closer than the Teddy Bear and much much much closer than Torah. Barbarism is rooted in fear. Love is not. We will blame one another for being all too human pointing a finger but rarely celebrate acts of loving kindness. The great change in the world has to be love.