Two Years of Lies

For the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, a rant.

Seven hundred and thirty-two days ago, the world watched as an attempted antisemitic genocide was livestreamed to the cheers of Islamists, leftists, and enemies of the West everywhere. Hamas, alongside a sizable number of ordinary Gazan civilians, broke through the security perimeter, invaded the Gaza envelope (an area inside of Israel that borders Gaza), and went on a rampage of carnage through southern Israel. They murdered, maimed, raped, tortured, and kidnapped thousands of civilians in a wanton orgy of destruction and Jew hatred. No civilian target was spared. The monsters attacked kibbutzim, parks, highways, bus stops, farms, and, infamously, even a music festival hosted for the purpose of achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The victims were men, women, teens, children, babies, the elderly, Holocaust survivors, and foreigners. The cruelty was abhorrent; people were humiliated before being murdered in front of their families, killing methods were deliberately meant to inflict maximum pain and suffering, and the violence was carried out in an ecstatic celebration of jihadist fervor. Injured Israelis were killed where they lie, corpses were beheaded with rudimentary farm equipment, paragliders brought a searing hail of bullets from the sky on unsuspecting dancers, and hostages were ripped from their homes and paraded through the streets of Gaza. Forty-eight of the two hundred fifty-one men, women, and children stolen from Israel two years ago remain captive today.

All of this is a matter of public record. It was all laid bare before our very eyes the day it happened. Nothing about this pogrom was covert or hidden. Everything was public and publicly celebrated by the perpetrators, the whole of Gazan civil society, and their allies across the Middle East and the world. This came along with the support of a wide variety of Westerners, from Islamic migrants and communist radicals to university professors and all manner of useful idiots. That support has sadly only grown over the past two years, largely due to an aggressive propaganda campaign boosted by international institutions, media organizations, foreign actors, and politicians.

The war that stemmed from this unprovoked surprise attack has lasted far longer than anyone would have believed that day. It is the longest war in Israeli history by more than a factor of two; the Israeli War of Independence against its Arab neighbors lasted a mere 10 months, while the nation’s most famous conflict lasted just six days. The duration of this conflict has nothing to do with Israeli choices, but the steadfast refusal of Hamas to surrender and release the hostages it took. Every single death in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to today is entirely due to that intransigence.

Hamas chooses to co-locate its military infrastructure within civilian areas and buildings. It chooses to steal humanitarian aid and divert it to feed its own fighters and profit on the black market. It chooses to build and utilize a tunnel system running under the entire Gaza Strip to execute attacks, hold hostages, and stockpile materiel and arms. It chooses to operate out of hospitals, hide amongst civilians, recklessly attack aid checkpoints, and don the ubiquitous ‘PRESS’ vest when convenient. And, frankly, many Gazans – shortly after October 7, a clear supermajority of them – agree with the terrorists they voted into power back in 2006. This makes the dynamic even more impossible for Israel to deal with, yet they have done an incredible job at minimizing civilian death and maximizing harm to combatants.

Had the massacre of October 7 never happened, none of the civilian casualties that are so loudly and ostentatiously mourned by the pro-Palestinian activists would have occurred. Until that day, Israel was uninterested in a large-scale war in Gaza. It has no designs on the territory; on the contrary, they forcibly evicted every last Israeli citizen from the Strip in 2005, often at the point of a gun. They simply wished to keep Hamas contained and control the threat it posed to Israeli civilians. They failed terribly at that task, something for which there will be a whole-of-society reckoning after the war’s end, yet would have far preferred to have prevented it and avoid nearly 750 days of unrelenting combat. The immense military successes that Israel has reaped – against not only Hamas, but also Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis, and the sponsor of the whole wicked gang, Iran – have been misrepresented by its rhetorical foes as evidence that Israel desired this war from the start. But just because someone succeeds at something, it does not mean that they desired for it to happen in the first place; the long history of Israel’s successful defensive wars against its neighbors shows this to be true.

And that brings me to what I’m mostly thinking about as we enter the third year of this war and the second anniversary of the evil pogrom that started it. On October 7, 2023, my dominant emotions were shock and horror. Last year, they were sadness and. Now, I have an entirely different emotional response to this day: anger.

Anger at how this war has been effectively propagandized by a whole host of malign actors that seek to destroy Israel and undermine Western civilization. Anger at the utter disrespect that the widespread false narratives of genocide, famine, and war crimes show for actual victims of those horrific atrocities – including Jews who survived the definitional genocide, the Holocaust. Anger at how international institutions, the liberal governments of Western nations, and mainstream media outlets have forwarded this insidious blood libel. Anger at the far-too-common promotion of pro-terror and antisemitic sentiments in the public square across the West, whether on social media or in the streets of our biggest cities. Anger at the left-wing politicians who have embraced these despicable people. Anger at the right-wing influencers who have revived antisemitism as a fashionable way to earn clout and cash in. Anger at the “experts” who lend their credentials to spurious claims of mass death, starvation, and genocide, all out of hatred for Jews and Israel. Anger at the news organizations that boost these lies and routinely bias their coverage against the Jewish state. Anger at the very real antisemitic violence these claims have caused, including assassinations, firebombings, mass shootings, stabbings, bombings, and vehicle attacks. And anger at the people who, despite all of the evidence, believe them.

This year, I’m mad. Mad at the fact that the dominant narrative on this anniversary is not the terrible pogrom, but the supposed suffering of Gaza, which has been exaggerated beyond belief. Politicians, journalists, and activists have marginalized the root cause of this entire conflict and the innocent Jewish victims taken that day – families, villages, peace activists, infants – all to center instead the Gazan sob story. But it’s a fiction. As we have seen, this is an urban war against a non-state terrorist group that deliberately seeks civilian casualties. And yet Israel has killed far fewer civilians and far more combatants than almost any comparable modern force. Their ability to preserve and move the civilian population, in an incredibly densely populated area, has been genuinely astounding, especially given the fact that no Arab nation has offered temporary refugee status to the Gazans. The absurd claims to the contrary are simply false.

There is no widespread murder of Gazan civilians. There is no deliberate starvation of Palestinian babies. There is no famine. There is no systematic destruction of Gazan life. And there is no genocide. Well, scratch that. There was one single, solitary instance of attempted genocide: the massacre of October 7, 2023. The attempted erasure of the Jewish population of the land, resulting in the murder of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians, occurred that day. It was driven by genocidal intent, widely espoused by Hamas and its supporters that carried out the attack, in writing and on video. It was a broader plan to destroy the state of Israel writ large, resulting in the obliteration of Israeli Jews and their replacement by Palestinian Arabs. This is textbook genocide. And since the perpetrators are the world’s favorite perennial victims (largely due to their purported oppressors being Jews), this has been ignored or, even worse, denied.

This is the one of the most clear-cut conflicts in terms of right and wrong that I have ever studied – and I have studied a whole hell of a lot of them. The fact that the dominant narrative is the reverse of the truth is incomprehensible. The only way we rectify that profound moral evil is to be clear-eyed about what we face and profess it widely. We must remember why this war started. We must remember the victims of October 7. We must remember why the destruction of Hamas and the return of the hostages are necessary. Anything less is a moral failure.

I’m doing my part. Are you willing to do yours?