Six Israeli hostages were found murdered in a Hamas tunnel this week. Among them was 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is now the 43rd American citizen killed by Hamas since Oct 7. Another 24-year-old woman, Eden Yerushalmi, weighed 80 pounds when she was executed. God knows what horrors she, and the others, endured at the hands of the barbarians who held them for nearly a year.
The shaft leading into the tunnel, incidentally, was built under a child’s bedroom adorned with murals of Mickey Mouse and Snow White, which was booby-trapped in case the Israelis ever showed up.
And yet, one of the first things Joe Biden — you remember our doltish husk of a president, right? — did after the massacre was blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to do enough to secure a “ceasefire” deal.
Biden paired his victim-blaming with the usually perfunctory reprimand of Hamas (the DOJ even sent a sternly worded letter this time around). But, at best, Democrats have now normalized a gross moral relativism when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now, the first problem with Biden’s scolding of Netanyahu is that Hamas has never agreed to any ceasefire agreement.
The second thing to remember is that “ceasefire,” in the context of this conflict, means a complete Israeli capitulation.
You will recall numerous “pro-Palestinian” groups were calling for “ceasefires” in the weeks after Oct. 7, before Israel even had time to identify all the bodies of the mutilated or figure out who’d been kidnapped. This would be tantamount to demanding the United States cut a deal with al Qaeda in September of 2001.
Little has changed. According to media reports, one of the “sticking points” in getting a deal done is Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the entirety of Gaza, including the Philadelphi corridor along the Egypt-Gaza border.
One imagines Israel would sacrifice a lot for hostages, as it has on numerous occasions in the past. But any ceasefire that hands Hamas both military and political control of Gaza, including its southern border where more than 150 tunnels have already been discovered, means access to more missiles and weaponry, guaranteeing more death and destruction.
Though Western journalists treat Hamas and Israel as two aggrieved entities trying to hash out a fair agreement, for Palestinians a ceasefire is little more than survival play, giving them time to retrench for the next round of hostility.
It shouldn’t escape anyone’s attention that a ceasefire deal was in place on Oct. 7 when thousands of Hamas terrorists, and Palestinian civilians, invaded Israel, gleefully murdering, raping, torturing, beheading, mutilating, and kidnaping over a thousand innocent people. Ceasefires mean nothing to Hamas.
Indeed, Palestinians have not only rejected every ceasefire proposal since Oct. 7 — they’ve rejected every peace proposal since the early 20th century. They rejected a proposal to have an independent state in 1948, choosing war (Yes, “Nakba” was self-inflicted). Palestinians rejected peace before “occupied territories” were a thing. They rejected peace after the 1967 and 1973 wars. They rejected the Oslo peace process and they rejected the “road map for peace.” Palestinians rejected peace when they were given semiautonomy over most of the “West Bank” and when they were given full autonomy over the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
But forget this self-destructive history for a moment. How can contemporary Israelis negotiate any meaningful ceasefire, or anything else, with people who not only celebrate the murder of Jews but welcome the death of their own people?
On Oct. 7, the Gaza Strip was home to at least 300 miles of tunnels but not a single dedicated bomb shelter for civilians. Since Hamas places military caches under schools and hospitals to ensure higher numbers of casualties, I suppose shelters might be counterproductive. “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar told negotiators in Qatar and Egypt not long after Oct. 7. “These are necessary sacrifices.”
Sinwar is not alone. When Ghazi Hamad says, “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” he is echoing the ideology of Hamas and the “moderate” Palestine Liberation Organization government, which still rewards families of “martyrs,” subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers.
It’s worse still. How many interviews have we seen over the years of Palestinian mothers lauding the martyrdom of their children in the fight against the Jews? We’re supposed to pretend this hatred and nihilism isn’t embedded in Palestinian culture because it grates against our own moral outlook.
The “pro-Palestinian” activist isn’t targeting the college Hillel or the Hasidic man on the New York City subway by accident. The notion that Palestinians are merely yearning to live peacefully next to Jews reminds me of the neocons’ belief that the Islamic world is longing for Western-style “democracy.” Polls consistently find Palestinians, by huge majorities, support Hamas. If the Palestinian Authority ever held elections in the West Bank, Hamas, an ideologically indistinguishable group, would almost certainly take power, either democratically or through civil war. As it stands, any new Palestinian state is going to be a proxy of Iran, which may well have nuclear weapons soon.
Why would Israel help create a three-front terrorist state on its borders? No nation would.
And still, knowing all this, the Left and factions of the far Right are increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish state. I bet not even Hamas could have predicted that only weeks after the bloodiest massacre of Jews since World War II, Israel would be cast as the impediment to peace by most of the progressive Left.
Those Hamas leaders hanging out at five-star Qatari hotels are probably tickled by the sight of thousands of college students donning terrorist garb and marching for their cause in the streets of the U.S. Surely, they appreciate the progressive journalists acting as conduits for their propaganda.
Think of the delight when Hamas leaders hear a U.S. senator demanding Israel create a Palestinian state only weeks after Oct. 7.
More cynically, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and most big-name Democrats not named “John Fetterman,” have engaged in political triangulation, compelled to appease the growing pro-Hamas wing of their party. Not only has the White House both-sided the conflict, but it did everything that was politically feasible to undermine Israel’s efforts to root out Hamas battalions in Rafah and finish the war, publicly warning Netanyahu and then delaying the delivery of weaponry.
Of course, the Left also has a long-standing personal hatred of Netanyahu, whose sin of opposing former President Barack Obama’s capitulation to the Iranian mullahs will never be forgiven. This has induced many “liberals,” self-styled defenders of democracy, to the elected leader of a longtime ally with more disdain than they do terrorists and theocratic dictators. This week, for instance, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg wrote, “If I had a choice between getting rid of Hamas and getting rid of Netanyahu, I’d choose Netanyahu.” This demented outlook won’t sound new to anyone who pays attention to lefty podbros or reads Washington Post columnists.
These are the people Biden is trying to pacify by reprimanding Netanyahu into a suicidal ceasefire.
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Is any of this to say Israelis are chaste and everything they do is ethical or that every Palestinian is innately a warmonger? Of course not. That would be a preposterous assertion. The Jewish state, like any other Western-style democracy, has roiling debates about the proper way to conduct policy and often makes mistakes.
Hamas, though, is an antisemitic death cult. It is the kind of people who execute young women in dark tunnels. And anyone who’s confused by the distinction has a broken moral compass — or worse.