One of the curses of the world we live in is that so many people no longer have a deep knowledge of the subjects they see discussed on the news. Their knowledge level on many subjects doesn’t go much beyond a meme, what they hear an influencer say, or what they see in a video.
One of the places you can really see this playing out is in the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinians are about as sympathetic as ISIS, the Aztecs, or the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, but many people don’t know why that is, and all they see are destroyed homes, videos of crying children, and wild claims that are often completely detached from reality. Then, they conclude, “Oh, those poor Palestinians,” when there’s no culture on earth today less deserving of sympathy.
To explain why that is, you need a lot more context than you’re going to get on the news or in tweets you see on X. There’s no way to give you every detail since long books have been written on the subject, but it’s worth taking a few hundred words to explain why things have unfolded the way that they have in this conflict. That starts with an extremely brief breakdown of how things unfolded in the region over the last 75 years. As you read this small bit of history, keep in mind that none of this is a controversial take. It’s the very conventional, well-accepted view of the history of the region.
First of all, Jews have been living in Israel since ancient times, but after the British took over in 1920, they allowed more Jewish immigration. Then, after the Holocaust, more Jews moved to the area, the world became more sympathetic to their cause, and the British got tired of dealing with attacks from both sides, so they sent the issue to the United Nations, which offered 56% of the land to the Jews and 43% of the land to Muslims.
The Jews were unhappy with the total amount of land offered, but were willing to accept it, while their Muslim neighbors rejected the deal entirely. After the British left in 1948, Israel’s neighbors launched the first of multiple attempts to wipe them out. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinians launched an attack on Israel that would have ended with every Jew dead had it succeeded. Happily, it did not, and Israel added some territory at the expense of the Palestinians during that war.
In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria moved troops to the border and prepared for another war of annihilation against Israel. The Israelis defeated them decisively in what is now known as the “Six-Day War.”
In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Again, had Israel been overrun, it would have been wiped out completely.
Around this time, Israel’s neighbors started to realize that Israel’s military was too good to be overpowered, so they changed tactics and started funding terrorist groups. This enabled them to kill Israelis while giving Israel’s neighbors a level of plausible deniability about the attacks.
This led to decades of kidnappings, bombings, murders, and terrorist attacks, and left Israel with few good options. Their neighbors were implacable. Their goal was nothing less than the eradication of Israel and all its people, but Israel, despite its military competence, is a small country. They couldn’t launch an invasion every time a bus blew up, or a missile was fired at them. So, they tried a variety of tactics.
Sometimes they did invade militarily, but other times, the Mossad managed to get outstanding intelligence and stop threats before they happened or engaged in targeted killings. Israel certainly tried the diplomatic route as well. The Palestinians had several opportunities to have their own state and have rejected it every time in favor of further conflict with Israel, likely because the Muslim nations funding terrorism there didn’t want that to happen and because their own people rejected it. For example, Bill Clinton has said that Yassir Arafat told him privately he couldn’t agree to a deal that would give the Palestinians a state because his own people would kill him.
In other words, this is the backdrop of the whole conflict. The Israelis are always one defeat away from being wiped out, and there’s no realistic prospect of long-term peace with the Palestinians, who are forever trying to come up with new ways to kill them.
This brings us to the strategies Hamas, which is the government of the Gaza Strip, chooses to conduct warfare, and the attitude of the Palestinian people.
Hamas is quite literally a genocidal terrorist group whose 1988 charter said negotiation with Israel was impossible, tosses off wild conspiracy theories about Jews, and quotes a hadith about murdering Jews, “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Only the Gharqad tree will not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
This group won what was generally perceived to be a fair election in 2006 (although there have been no national elections since then). So, the Palestinian people looked at what you’ve just read and concluded it represented their views. Incidentally, polls have consistently shown that the average Palestinian supports violence, terrorism, and the murder of Israelis. For example, the now infamous rape and murderfest that Hamas organized on Oct 7, 2023, was extremely popular among Palestinians:
Seventy-two percent of respondents said they believed the Hamas decision to launch the cross-border rampage in southern Israel was “correct” given its outcome so far, while 22% said it was “incorrect.” The remainder were undecided or gave no answer.
If you want to know what that means in practical terms, listen to this proud son calling his parents to brag about murdering Jews on Oct. 7:
A lot of people like to imagine the Palestinians as being long-suffering, good people, oppressed by a terroristic government. In actuality, what we’re talking about are millions of people who gleefully, openly, support murdering even Israeli women and children. When you start to realize how mainstream and wildly popular this thinking is in Palestinian society, other things start to make sense.
For example, parents are fine with Hamas promoting “martyrdom” to their children, and per ChatGPT, “Credible sources document at least 31 Palestinian schools named after attackers, plus multiple streets/squares (e.g., Dalal Mughrabi Square in al-Bireh; Yahya Ayyash Street in Ramallah; a street for Muhannad Halabi near Ramallah).” We’re not talking about just a “terrorist group” here; we’re talking about an entire culture that has embraced genocide and terrorism from young-to-old and top-to-bottom.
This brings us to the strategy Hamas uses in war. It’s the embodiment of this meme:
The West believes in using its soldiers to safeguard its civilians. The Palestinians use their civilians to safeguard their terrorists. This is why Hamas puts military operations in schools, hospitals, and civilian apartment buildings.
It creates a huge dilemma for Israel. Either they allow Hamas to attack without retaliation, OR Israel retaliates and ends up producing civilian casualties, which other Western nations find abhorrent.
For example, this is why Hamas was mostly getting away with firing THOUSANDS of rockets per year at Israel. They fire a rocket, the Iron Dome HOPEFULLY shoots it down, but if Israel returns fire and kills a handful of members of Hamas and 10 school children, the headline isn’t, “Hamas uses Palestinian children as human shields,” it’s, “Israel kills Palestinian children.” Hamas has played this up during this conflict by putting out completely made-up statistics about people starving or how many children are dying, but the reality is that the Palestinians are willing to knowingly, deliberately put their own children in grave danger to help protect Hamas.
Ultimately, they know Israel is held to the standard of Western nations, while they’re held to no standard at all. If they rape, murder, wear no uniforms, use ambulances to drive terrorists around in, or call themselves “journalists” to try to prevent being attacked, there are no consequences.
This creates a huge double standard where the Israelis are expected to let their own civilians die to protect Palestinian civilians who are willingly being used as human shields for Hamas. Then, when the fighting is over, the Palestinians get welfare to rebuild from the rest of the world, much of which inevitably gets funneled into preparing for the next attack on Israel. It’s a cycle that has already played out multiple times before.
When the Palestinians launched the Oct. 7 attack, that demanded a response. No nation that is capable of responding is just going to let its neighbors kill 1,200 of their citizens, rape their women, and take their citizens hostage without retaliating.
So, what do you do in this situation?
In the old days, you’d simply kill all of the Palestinians. Today, we frown on that kind of thing, even though it’s the one sure way to end the conflict for good.
Alternatively, the Israelis could do the same thing we did with the Indians, which is show up with guns and say, “We’re taking your land. Either you move or we kill you.” Some people claim to have moral problems with those kind of tactics, but seldom does anyone ever seem to have enough of a problem with it to give the land back. This is absolutely what Israel should do, but they haven’t gone this way yet.
Instead, they did something they were reluctant to do for years, which was bite the bullet and systematically destroy the ability of Hamas to make war on them. This required them to destroy most of the Gaza Strip since the Palestinians intentionally interweaved their civilian and military assets at every opportunity.
What else can the Israelis do?
Negotiate? They have tried many times. Give them a state in return for peace? They’ve tried multiple times and it always failed because the Palestinians don’t want peace, they want Israel.
“Oh, just target Hamas?” Well, once again, that isn’t possible. This was not like some Civil War engagement where the “Blues” and the “Greys” met on a battlefield, far away from civilians, and fought it out. If Hamas is using a civilian apartment as a base, that apartment building is probably going to have to go. If Hamas has an extensive tunnel system under a hospital, then the hospital will probably need to be destroyed to take it out without taking excessive casualties. When you look at rubble where the Gaza Strip used to be, that’s because Hamas wanted to make it so Israel had to turn it into rubble to defeat them, because they hoped pressure by Western nations would stop Israel before they went that far. The Palestinians picked the battleground, and they very deliberately chose for that battleground to be amongst civilians.
The reality is this: If the Palestinians could live in peace with the Israelis, the Israelis could live in peace with the Palestinians. On the other hand, if the Palestinians were the ones with the powerful military, while the Israelis weren’t capable of stopping them, they would rape and murder the Israelis down to the last man.
The Palestinians are just as clearly the bad guys as the Nazis were in WW2 or al-Qaeda was on 9/11. Do they deserve your sympathy, especially since they very willingly STARTED this whole conflict? No, not at all. It’s always a shame to see human beings suffer because of their own stupidity and evil, but ultimately, that is what happened to the Palestinians. Truthfully? They’re getting off lighter than they deserve and far, far lighter than they would have throughout most of human history.
It is possible to find the IDF's actions conscionable or unconscionable. Even if the latter, however, it is not possible to find Hamas' actions conscionable, and it is not possible for the IDF to not respond.
People who unqualifiedly support Palestine are either uninformed or bad actors.
It’s no secret, nor is it debatable, that the Israeli government and IDF have done quite a few questionable things, and that there are quite a few not very nice people in the Israeli government, IDF, and the general population of Israel at large. One thing that’s not in dispute with this situation is that no one comes to the table with clean hands. But even if you think of the situation in terms of whose hands are less dirty, it’s clear that Israel is not the villain.
The Palestinian “cause” is flawed from Square One. Yassir Arafat and other leaders have taken the lion’s share of Western aid money and put it in Swiss bank accounts all for themselves and also used it to buy weapons and support terror organizations. The Palestinian Authority who governs the West Bank and Hamas who “governs” the Gaza strip, use dirt-smeared children as props to get aid money, while secretly (or not so secretly) using that money for nefarious purposes or just to line their own pockets. Palestinian people are pawns in this game: kept in refugee camps in conditions of privation for decades so as to paint Israel as the villain, when in fact, Palestinians are oppressed by their own leadership. Worse yet, young people are brainwashed into fighting and dying for the Palestinian cause, even though doing so is against their own interests.
The latest situation is once again more of the same old song and dance: Commit an atrocity, goad the IDF into responding, then play the victim. Well-oiled online troll farms in Iran then downplay the attack, while amplifying Israel's response. Rinse, lather, repeat.
The Jewish people remember, all-too-well, what happens when you try to appease or negotiate with people whose bargaining position is “all of you die.” There is simply no compromise to be had with that position—you can’t just give those kind of people what they want when what they want is you gone.
Therefore, Israel knows that it must fight to survive: surrounded on all sides by enemies who have vowed their destruction, even if some of those enemies have softened their position as of late. Continued acts of terrorism and outright warfare over the decades have erased what little sympathy Israel has for Palestinians or Muslims in general. The Palestinians created this problem by fleeing Israel—other Arabs stayed behind and indeed, are today full-fledged Israeli citizens. This whole situation is manufactured, to some extent, and again, nurtured and festered by their leadership to create a perpetual crisis in which ordinary citizens are caught in the middle. You might feel sorry for them, but then again, the folks in Gaza elected Hamas, so as President Obama said, elections have consequences.
Israel has a right to exist—and a right to defend itself. Terrorism has no part in the discussion—acts of terror immediately discredit the side committing them. What Hamas hopes to accomplish with this latest outright act of war and terrorism is unclear: retaliation and condemnation will surely occur and their cause, such as it is, will be set back decades, if not forever.
Whatever questionable things Israel or the IDF have done over the years, they pale in comparison to beheading babies, raping women, murdering old people, and then defiling their corpses. Hamas’ actions have made it all-too-easy for people to think of Palestinians (or Muslims in general) as bloodthirsty animals. Again, what is it that Hamas is trying to do? Or maybe they really are just bloodthirsty animals? That’s for you to decide. All I know is, my life expectancy in Gaza would be measured in minutes, whereas in Israel, it would be measured in years. And if you’re still not convinced, think of how welcome you’d be in Israel vs. Palestine or any other Islamic country: “Queers for Palestine” is like “Cows for Burger King” and “Women for Palestine” is like “Chickens for KFC.”